Last year everyone was catching dozens and dozens of "Line Bumpers" just under 12" at Sardis during cranking season. Handi already mentioned this, but these fish were throwbacks and I heard many reports of over 100 throwbacks being caught and released. And they were all saying that there weren't any big overs left in the lake, fished out, but we caught a lot of large fish this spring, fish that were way over 12" even during the previous summer, which tells me that a lot of the bigger fish just weren't on the crankbait pattern last year.
If the mortality rate on released crankbait fish was that bad, there wouldn't be anything there to catch this year, and we all know there are plenty there this year, and that they are mostly those same fish that were throwbacks last year. And ironically. most of the fish caught this year are over 12" even though the size limit was reduced.
Removing a hook will help tremendously on the throwback mortality rate, but with the MLL's in place it is literally impossible to fish any of these lakes out, without 3-4 consecutive years of bad spawning conditions at least. Take away the MLL's and that is another story. The main driving force on the fishing year to year on these lakes, as long as the MLL's are there to protect the smaller fish, are the water levels during the spawn.
If they are able to spawn every year there will be large numbers of fish in each age class every year. If there is a bad spawning year, you will see a gap in the age class for that year (3-4 years later), which is what we saw at Sardis last year, the reason no one was catching keepers. There was an absent age class for that age of fish that were supposed to be in the 12" range. Almost everything caught was either obviously short or obviously well over the 12" length limit, nothing in between. They actually attached a statement to that effect at the bottom of the MDWFP fishing reports for the whole year last year, it may still be there, I haven't looked at those in a while :)
This has been hashed out on here dozens of times and the same principle applies to alll of the COE lakes with the 12" (or 11" at Sardis) MLL's in place. Even Butla :):):)
