Craig \ All,

This is half report half question.

Went to Old Sedan Lake with my wife and daughter last week to fish for crappie. Got there about 5pm, by 7pm we hit the century mark, we slowed down a little and went searching for bigger fish, but ended up with 125 crappie for the evening. The only problem is we only had a couple that measured 10+in, the rest were ~9in and some even smaller. So I only kept a couple fish to clean, didn’t want to stay up till 2am cleaning fish then try to make it to work the next day. Went bass fishing for the last hour of the day, and caught two ~15in bass while my wife continued to pull up crappie behind the boat in 3-4ft of water. Great day catching and also a good competition between my wife and I.

My question is: How can the average size of fish be increased in the lake? This isn’t the first time I’ve been there and caught a ton of small fish to one decent sized fish. Should I of kept all the fish I caught or my legal limit, cleaned what I wanted and disposed of the rest, in order to “thin the herd”, or would taking a hundred fish out of the lake even put a dent in the crappie population. The two bass I caught were not rail thin but were on the skinny side, I would expect them to be chomping down on the young crappie and look like footballs. I know this is the case in Butler SFL where they have a ton of 4in crappie but that what makes it a great bass lake. Talked to the biologist over Sedan in the past and the hope is to stock saugeye in the lakes with a crappie over abundance, supposedly there is some saugeye in Sedan, and every year he puts in a order of saugeye but getting them is hard. I understand crappie population is hard to regulate in small bodies of water, they over populate easily and have relatively short life spans. Is there anything the average fishermen can do to help the lake to produce larger crappie?

Thanks,
Tim.