Thread: Grand Lake today

Monday wasn't too rough.....it was the day before on Sunday that was the rough one. The wind hit gusts to 25 mph that day and it was whitecapping real bad all over the lake. If you've never fished Grand in the wind you have to try it. That shallow lake gets rough pretty quick! We tried dragging an anchor in the middle of the lake where we were catching most of the fish and the swells kept coming over the transom. We had to fish closer to the East bank in the 9 ft water where the water was a little calmer but there were not as many fish on that side. We caught 11 on Sunday and missed about 15 more before the wind beat us.....but we had a heck of a good time. Look for Grand Lake to be hot in about two weeks!

Luvpt,

Congrats on those fish!! It looks like the large year class of crappie is finally dominating the population at Grand. We expected it to happen this year and there is some proof. I believe I have interviewed you at Lake Monticello for the creel study going on there.

SEARKfisherman,

I don’t want to sound harsh but please refrain from comments like that until you really know the person. Diana works hard and is a great person. Grand Lake is owned by the State of Ark and is managed by the AGFC. This means that the AGFC doesn't have the rights to say who can and can’t pump from the lake. The NRCS has control over that. You should contact them about that problem. As for getting shallow, I could write a book about reservoir limnology on here but to save time, I will keep it short. Reservoirs are sediment traps and over time they are going to fill-in. All reservoirs will go through this process and eventually become swamps and then dry land (Not in our life time). With the amount of agricultural occurring around the lake, Grand Lake receives a lot of sediments causing it to be come shallow. The beaver dams, we are working on. We dynamited the corn field chute and now looking at how to take care of the Myers chute one. As for trapnetting crappie and moving other places, YES, we did trap-net 1000 crappie from Grand Lake in Dec 2006. Did we want to do that, NO. But sometimes you have to do what you are told to. These fish were broad stock fish for the hatchery and did not go to Lake Chicot. The broadstock fish for the Lake Chicot Nursery Pond are collected out of Connerly Bayou. We did stock crappie back into Grand the following year. There is no length limit on the lake because of the unusually high density of crappie in the lake. If we did put a 10 in. length limit on the lake, there could be a chance for stunting and you would actually have smaller fish due to the high productivity of the lake (Another area that I could go on and on about).

As for the water level, we finally got it back to normal and hope it stay there but realize there is some seepage of water to the Mississippi River. We also have a water level meter on the bridge that collects daily reading so we can monitor the water level.

Finally, feel free to come to the Public meeting on Thursday Feb 26 at 7pm at the Lake Village Fire department and we can talk about Grand Lake after we talk about Lake Chicot. Also feel free to contact me at the Monticello Regional Office.

All,

Please feel free to contact your local biologists. A lot of us are very avid fishermen and are willing to answers people questions.

Sorry for a long post. Please don’t take this post the wrong way, I like coming on crappie.com to see fishing report for SEArk and around the state and see the opinions of the anglers in the state. We need more outreach on why we do some of the things we do and this is one way, we can do it by reaching out to you the angler.

Thanks

Jeremy