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We had a crew conducting the first shoreline seining today. The high water has prevented seining effort until now. Cedar Bluff is up enough that there is very little open shoreline to seine so we may have to use other methods to sample.
Andy will be reporting back on his Hillsdale findings soon and fish are being taken to the Emporia office for aging. We plan to back date young of the year (YOY) bass to the date of hatch.
Andy's initial comments are encouraging with good numbers of bass in the seine and what he feels are larger bass than those seen in the past at this time of year.
We think the early spawn fish should be around 3 inches long right now compared to wild fish that would still be less than 2 inches. A three inch bass is able to eat the YOY gizzard shad right now, and that's what we were shooting for. Shad are around one inch in length at this point.
It will take some time to determine if the bigger bass he is seeing are the stocked fish and how much they are contributing to the year class, but so far it is looking pretty good. I'll update the post when I get more information from the field. |
