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Member
Posts: 174
| This update is from Tom Koepp the Chapter Chairman from our Pewaukee chapter and includes a video at the end:
1. Early nets were set for investigative purposes on April 6th…with net crews going full bore after catching some ripe females. Netting for milking operations were completed by Thursday April 16th, with the best day on April 12th, filling 3 Jars with eggs. This year the walleyes seem to come in bursts of the same sex, not giving the operations the right mix to make things go easy. Because Pewaukee was down to 0.4 walleyes per acre, we do not see more than 8 walleyes in a net and that would be an outstanding net. Typically it is more like 3 in one net, 4 in another, 2 in one and one in another with some turning in goose eggs. Other chapters can catch 20-40 in one net!! Just a testament to show how low our walleye numbers actually are! This year was harder than last year so every fish kept fishing makes a difference at this point.
2. We were able net 113 Males and 119 Females total for all “net days”. Had a little bit of bad luck with the ratio of fish in each day as we hope to get 2 males per female. Anyway a total of 232 Walleyes were netted, Milked, fertilized, measured, clipped (checked for clippings from prior year), documented and released safely. No losses for any reason.
3. We believe we obtained approximately 7,060,000 eggs based on 5,000 eggs per oz., that number to me is probably estimating high. I'm going to guess that with the appearance of the jars we will probably have a success rate of around 60%? That rate is based on unfertilized eggs, and any loss for a variety of natural reasons.
4. The eggs are in 12 jars and everything is going really well as far as pumps running, filters being changed, peroxide treatments, etc. Jim Schmitz and Bob Eloranta are the key "egg watchers" in the hatchery and are doing an outstanding job.
5. Temperature units were 167 as of last Friday April 17th. By using the “law of Ratio’s”, we would expect the first jar to hatch on April 25th? Obviously this is all weather dependent. We expect a slow hatch at start with things ramping up the last week of April to coincide with the other jars. Temperature units are reaching 200 in the first jar acquired. Typically when they reach the 300 temperature unit mark fry start to hatch.
6. All nets are out of the water and being stretched, pressure washed and dried before returning them to Ben at the WDNR.
7. The nets were set back out last Thursday in an effort to capture little walleyes but the little walleye did not cooperate, only 1 little walleye was caught and it looked like 1 of the WDNR's due to its size. The effort was to try to re-due a capture a week earlier where they said they had caught about 40 little walleye of various sizes 5.57" to 9". Unfortunately the crew didn't count them or measure the first netting time but they were focused on catching walleyes for the wagon, as they should have been. With the warm weather they moved out. In fact we only caught one bigger walleye in 3 tied off nets…so figleaf good thing the early net guys got it going when they did because it was pretty much done on friday.
8. The first 2 jars are just now showing signs of “eye up”, which will get more prominent in the next few days…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzsGNIrVwUs
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Walleyes for Tomorrow Pewaukee Chapter Update!