Originally Posted by
lugbolt
AGFC has a few things up it's sleeve, that are being "studied". Many of us have gotten surveys and we've filled them out.
couple notes I want to touch on here. Guide licenses. The number of guides has indeed exploded, but I don't believe it's due solely to livescope. I guide for trout, and no other game fish-and all of the other guides that are trout fishing don't use livescope. None of us even have electronics on the boat other than a phone. Crappie guides, yes--they all have good electronics. Kinda have to if they want clients to find/catch fish, and that is the end goal of guides is to make sure that clients have a good time which is almost always catching fish. I do things a little differently but whatever. We're all different.
I hired a guide a couple years back to take myself and my FIL fishing on Greers, he wanted to catch some slabs & cook em up. It was the most boring trip on the water that I've ever had. Troll around pulling a jig, while the guide was watching his TV screen looking for, something. We caught our limit but it took 5 hours of just slow trolling. When we go trout fishing, we cover a lot of water, but we typically have a 5 fish limit in 10-20 minutes. CPR only, unless someone wants to keep a few to eat. Have one or two a year who want a trophy.
AGFC proposed making a guide license $200 a year and require all guides to carry a hundred grand of GL insurance. The issue I see with that is that it's already kind of expensive for most guides. Boat costs, maintenance, fuel, travel to/from the water, everything costs. For example, say if I am at $300 for a half day which is dirt cheap, but I make about $50 after it's all said and done-and that's before travel to/from the water. Many times I lose money with the hope that maybe the client will leave a tip. Again my situation is different. By raising the cost of insurance + licensing, the cost of a guided trip will also increase. I'm figuring that most are going to be $600 or so. For $600 I will go offshore and catch more fish, bigger fish, better eating fish than a crappie or trout, and have more fun doing it. FTR, I'm not charging $300. Again my situation is different than everyone elses, and is why Im booked up every weekend until well into September of 2025.
livescope is/was a game changer but it's not the end-all. You gotta know how to use it. What I often see if I'm on crappie water is guys trolling around with or without a bait in the water, watching a tv screen, looking for fish. I see it ALL the time in the places that I fish for crappie. While these cats are trolling around looking, I'm sitting in a spot that is loaded up, oftentimes culling a limit. Was at a place a while back and got my 30 fish limit in 70 minutes, before sunrise, guys (and guides) trolling past the entire time looking for fish. I asked the one guide "Seeing anything"--as he trolled past my boat not 5 foot away. "Nope". LOL. Cooler had 27 in it already off the same spot and they were still eating good. Either he didn't see anything, or they didn't show up, or he didn't know how to use his electronics. I do have basic electronics but I use it solely for GPS and nothing else, and generally pull it out when I am trout fishing (gets in the way).
I think AGFC should be on the water talking to anglers rather than making decisions solely on what they "think" or have studied in shock studies. Lake conway shockings were great for the last few years, but then they went in and said "we're gonna drain it because it's got problems". I can attest to the fact that fishing in most areas of that lake for crappie, the numbers and sizes were way down from 10 years ago. WAY down! It needed a revamp, and it's getting it-slowly. There's a lot of mad people, but I certainly hope that it comes back better than ever before. And if AGFC is right about their study and their work, it will.
I think some of the major crappie lakes may benefit from a reduction in limits so long as angler numbers are increasing. When I say that, I am basing it on AGFC study of the trout waters, where they are saying that stocking a million fish a year is too many, because there are fewer trout anglers. I don't know if I agree with there being fewer, based on the fact that you can walk across the river about every weekend in the spring and summer months, across all the boats. I can't speak for crappie angler numbers as I don't target them as much as some of y'all do. 30 to, 20 maybe? Creel limit? Maybe keep only 10 fish over 10"? I don't generally keep that many fish anyway. 5 is enough for a good meal and with that said, we don't eat a lot of fish anyway. I'd just as soon bring back a mess of snapper, grouper, and mahi-mahi filets after an offshore trip and grill them. Better eatin'. Way better! And a whole lot more fun to catch them. I'm gonna step on some toes here but I often wonder if some folks are a little too crazy about these small (by comparison) crappie. Ain't bad to eat, as long as they're spiced up right, but for freshwater/local fish, in my freezer if there's 2 bags of crappie filets and a bag of flathead filets, I'll cook up the flathead every time. Better eatin'. I like to catch crappie but they're not the most fun or best eating fish. Maybe the easiest to catch, maybe that's why people target them so much? Then we have to look at the balance, are we harvesting too many and leaving the waters with too few fish? How does that affect the reproduction rates of them? Or are we leaving too many, resulting in an overpopulation of fish? I know we aren't talking about LM bass here but I think more folks outta be harvesting them rather than throwin em back in the water. Every time I go crappie fishing in certain areas, you can't keep the bass off the hooks...seems like overpopulation might be an issue.
I just never understood why so many people go so crazy over these fish but the same could be said about trout too I reckon. The ONE thing I like about trout fishing that crappie fishin doesn't always have is that when the water's "right" on the river, early in the morning before everyone else shows up, it's SUPER relaxing. Fish or not, I'm always glad to be on the water when the conditions are like that.
