There's no place like homeLargemouth bass are prominent in state lakesby Paul Smith, Outdoors Editor, JSOnline
Posted: Aug. 22, 2009
Somerset — A silver maple leans to the side, its supple limbs melding with a sea of cat-tails.
A bullfrog croaks from somewhere in the marshy tangle. A great-blue heron pokes its head out. Is it walking or wading?
It's hard to tell, amidst the abundance of summer, where the land ends and the water begins.
It's hard to know, too, exactly where we are.
Mike Yurk powers up the electric trolling motor and eases the boat away from shore. Bleached tree stumps protrude above the weed-choked water.
The undeveloped shoreline is obscured in a verdant tug-of-war between grass and forest.
The first fish of the day doesn't exactly provide the zip code, either.
"There's one," says Yurk, steering a lively 12-inch largemouth bass around a deadfall. "The question is how many will follow."
After a minute, he reels the fish to hand, pops out the Texas-rigged plastic worm and releases the fish.
On a muggy, summer evening in a weedy, bass-filled lake, we could be many places in the U.S.
Perhaps Alabama or North Carolina, among the many places Yurk was stationed during a 22-year career in the U.S. Army.
It might surprise some to learn we are on a small lake in northwestern Wisconsin, a region better known for walleye and musky, but with many waters filled - overpopulated, even - with largemouth bass.
"It's been one of the great discoveries of my life," says Yurk, 59, of Hudson.
That and meeting his wife, Becky, whom he affectionately calls The Bass Queen.
Traveling to lakes in St. Croix and Polk counties within an hour of his home, Yurk says he commonly catches 30 to 40 bass in an outing.
"I've fished in a few places," says Yurk, who grew up in Oshkosh and learned to fish for perch and walleye but acquired a love for bass while stationed in Spain. "The action for bass in this part of Wisconsin is something else."
This evening we've trailered his boat to a small, lobed lake known locally as Pine Lake but shown on some maps as Bass Lake.
The character of the lake has no similar ambivalence.
"Bass and bass," says Yurk. "And plenty of them."
It features a series of rounded segments splayed out west-to-east from the public launch. In the droughty conditions of 2009, each section is nearly pinched off from the next by a sand bar.
The barrier to entry certainly limits boat traffic. Yurk brandishes a long pole to muscle the boat over a shallow constriction and into the second "pond."
Yurk likes to divide the year into three sections - Before Fishing Season, Fishing Season and After Fishing Season.
After working for several newspapers in the late 1960s, Yurk enlisted in the Army in 1972 and retired as a major in 1994.
Yurk spends his days fishing, working occasionally at a sporting goods store and working constantly on his next novel.
He has published several books, including one this year called "The Mallalieu Lake Chronicles." The book chronicles a year of fishing, centered around the lake of the same name in Hudson.
Here on Pine Lake, dense weeds grip the water in mid-summer. Lily pads and milfoil clog the near-shore water.
Painted turtles haul out of the warm water and park on horizontal limbs of downed trees.
We work clockwise around the shore, casting soft plastic baits into weedy pockets. Most retrieves are met with at least a peck from a tiny bluegill. Many result in hits from bass.
The fish are mostly in the 10- to 13-inch range. Many test gravity with airborn leaps. Yurk "whoops" often in delight.
By Yurk's calendar, we are firmly in "FS."
For us, that includes releasing the fish, as most are below the minimum length limit of 14 inches. But would we keep a bass under any conditions? Tough to say for ardent practitioners of catch-and-release.
Many lakes in northwestern Wisconsin could benefit from harvest of some largemouth bass, says Larry Damman, Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist based in Spooner.
No two lakes are identical, a fact vividly on display in northern Wisconsin. Some have good productivity and support a wide variety of animals and plants. Others, especially bogs and seepage lakes, are limited in the amount of life they can support.
Records show that some of these waters had no fish at the time of European settlement, says Damman. Loggers stocked them with suckers and bullheads and later netted the fish for food.
Largemouth entered the picture over the last century. Prolific breeders and aggressive predators that eat insects, small mammals and other fish, over time bass often dominate a lake.
In many northwestern Wisconsin lakes, Damman says largemouth are so abundant they die of old age before they reach the legal 14 inch minimum size limit.
“It takes 8, 9 years to reach 14 inches,” says Damman. “The natural mortality rate is high on them and very few are left by the time they reach 10 years of age.”
As a DNR employee since 1975, Damman has seen the change in the span of his career.
Prior to 1989, there was no minimum size limit on bass, says Damman, and anglers harvested a "fair number" of fish in the 10 to 12 inch range.
Today, most waters of the state have a 14-inch minimum size limit on bass. And anglers over the last several decades have evolved a strong ethic of catch-and-release, especially bass, musky and trout.
According to a DNR survey, Wisconsin anglers in 2006 kept only about 5% of the 10 million bass they caught. In contrast, they kept 30% of 7 million walleyes landed that year.
The down side of catch-and-release is it doesn't help manage stunted largemouth populations. But it certainly helps preserve action.
Based on creel surveys, Damman says "our largemouth catch rates are just off the charts, about 100 times higher than most lakes in the state."
To help improve the size structure and growth rates of bass, Damman is working to remove the minimum size limit for largemouth in Burnett and Polk counties.
He cites Wolf Lake near Birchwood in Washburn County and Johnson Lake near Webster in Burnett County, two lakes without a minimum size limit for bass. Both have the biggest bass in the area, according to Damman.
Whereas most lakes in northwestern Wisconsin average less than 10 % of their largemouth above 14 inches, Johnson Lake boasts 48 % over 14 inches, 27 % better than 16 inches and 18 % longer than 18 inches.
Most of the lakes can easily sustain an increase in bass harvest, says Damman. The size limit was removed recently on Big McKenzie Lake near Spooner and anglers harvested about 3,000 bass from the approximately 1,000-acre lake. Subsequent fisheries surveys could hardly tell the difference, according to Damman.
"We don't want to declare war on bass like it's a rough fish," says Damman. "But we want to improve awareness that in some case it can be good for a lake to harvest some bass."
Yurk and I fish through the evening, working three of the lake's lobes. The action gets better closer to nightfall.
The biggest fish of the night come after 8 p.m. Yurk and I both land and release solid 16-inch largemouth; the fish ambushed our rubber baits on the outside edge of a weed bed.
In about three hours of fishing, we catch-and-release over 30 largemouth. Not the best action, says Yurk, but pretty good.
"The Bass Queen tells me I'm getting a little jaded," says Yurk as we slowly motor to the ramp. "These fish aren't monsters, but for action, I've never lived in an area with so many good bass lakes."
Send e-mail to psmith@journalsentinel.com
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