A New Year!

Moon Phase:

Fishing Time: 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Weather: mid 30's, sunny, no wind

I hope this new year doesn't continue like the first trip of 2008. I started it off by forgetting my camera! Then I finished it off by only catching 4 fish! Dave and JJ each caught 2, and Ed threw up another skunk! I know with no pictures the posts can be pretty boring but I had to talk a little about how popular ice fishing is becoming! We have been hammered with snow this winter and there is about a foot and a half of snow on top of a half foot of slush on Strawberry Reservoir. This does not make for easy traveling across the lake. Most are very limited to where they can fish unless you have a snowmobile. This being the case it has shown how many people ice fish! We went to Chicken Creek East and the parking lot was full! people had to park along the road and walk down! 5 years ago if you got to the lake at 7:30 in the morning you might see 2 or 3 cars in the whole parking lot! When I first started ice fishing in 1999 I thought it was the neatest thing ever because you could show up to a lake on a Saturday and be the only ones on the lake! Things sure have changed, but like everything else in life you have to adapt! A lot of it has to do with the size of fish that Strawberry continues to produce, due to the slot limit rule. The slot limit rule means you can keep 2 fish under 15 inches and 1 over 22 inches but everything in between must be immediately released. This rule only applies to Cutthroat while all rainbows and Kokanee Salmon can be kept up to the 4 fish bag limit. The idea behind the rule is to allow Cutthroats to reach a large enough size to maintain their steady diet of small chubs in which Strawberry continues to be plagued. This in return, helps in minimizing the chub population and ending the boom and bust cycle that Strawberry has dealt with for years. This law has been in place since 2003 and has had a drastic effect on the fish size and catch rate! It is very average to catch over 20 fish in one day while having the average size of fish at over 21 inches! The only problem is that the large Cutthroats make it hard for smaller salmon and rainbows to survive making Strawberry primarily a cutthroat fishery only! It has become known as the greatest trout fishery in the United States, and while it is awesome to have a lake like this only a little over an hour away, the fishing pressure it receives makes it less relaxing to fish than many of the other lakes with less people! With all this said, you might see me fish some different lakes this ice fishing season. Even though the size of fish on average at other lakes might not be as big as Strawberry, its time for some variety in species and scenery! Plus there are plenty of big fish in other waters also! That's my rant!!!