All right, well, I guess let's
start, but take us back to the
beginning.
Sorry, one second. Can you just
straighten out your undershirt?
See, he's taking the place of your
wife and daughter.
Well, hot in the camera guy is my
job. Make our subjects look
good.
Well you guys, your work cut out for
you then.
Alright, take us back to how
did Walleye's for Tomorrow start?
What was the genesis?
Well, back in about
1985 to 89,
Wisconsin had a drought going on,
and Winnebago walleye
population survives on spawning
marsh reproduction up
on the Fox and the Wolf River.
And there wasn't any in those
five years, four or five years.
And some of the guys like myself
that fished Winnebego a lot got
the idea that, well, We need to do
something, if we can.
To be able to ensure that
walleyes have a place to spawn.
So we got together, 12
of us, and decided
we could have a banquet
and raise some money, and we did
that.
And then we went to the DNR in
Oshkosh and asked
what we could do
to help bolster
the walleye population.
And they had all kinds of ideas, all
of which cost plenty.
So we did the Eureka Dam.
Which was to fill in the boil
hole below the Eureka dam.
Gordy Priegel, who'd been a
biologist at Oshkosh,
in the late 60s and early
70s had documented that every
fry of every fish species
that went over that dam died in
the boiler hole below it.
So $154,000
later, we filled
in that boiler hole.
Now these are Eureca Rapids.
And we proceeded from there
to do habitat work on the rivers.
Marshes are normally dry.
They're dry marshes 90% of
the year, but in the springtime when
the river gets up flood stage,
females go in and spawn, but
you have to have adequate water
flow and consistent water flow for
the eggs to have time to incubate
and then the little larvae get
washed out.
So we proceeded to
right the wrongs of many
generations of people.
They built roads across the marshes.
We take out a small 12 inch
culvert and put in three 36 inch
culverts to facilitate more water
flow. So we did a
lot of projects like that,
and both on the fox and
the wolf.
And it's, I
think it's worked well.
I mean, I go on the DNR
trawler every year and
last year,
now the trawlers been running since
1986 and last
years.
They caught the most adult
walleyes, it's not designed to catch
adult walleye, and the
most yearling walleye they've caught
since 1986.
So the fish population on the Bay
goes to them pretty well.
And we like to take credit for it,
right or wrong, but we've
had some fantastic
people be part of this organization
that do great work,
that really care about the resource,
and that's been a big deal.
How do you convince a bunch of
people that they should donate money
or support an organization
so they can fill in a hole in the
river?
Um,
I mean, how do you explain
to them that's where you're
literally throwing your money in a
hole in the river?
Yeah, I never thought about it that
way, but people
understand the value,
like I call them river rats.
The river guys up on the
fox and the wolf, they
understand the values of these
marshes.
And we have been
really blessed on this system with
some of the best DNR biologists
you'll ever want to meet,
going way back.
Dan Foltz and Vern
Hacker, that's back in 7...
I came here permanently in 72
and I met Vern Hacher who was
the rough fish removal coordinator.
And those guys have just
been fantastic in supporting
what we do and telling
the public what the public needs to
know.
And that's what
it takes is to educate
the public so that they understand
and know what is.
Appropriate and necessary.
And we've been really blessed with
those kinds of people.
So, you're doing a lot of
infrastructure type projects,
how did you grow beyond that in
terms of the scope of what you were
doing?
I can't say we ran out
of places to work because there
still are more.
We have not done many projects,
I think only two, on
state-owned land.
Almost all of our projects have been
on private property with
a handshake.
And nice thing about it, like at New
London, Todd Close
was our project manager.
Todd lives on the river and
he knows a lot of people.
We pretty much ran out
of places to do a lot of work.
So now we're paying
for a lot of tagging studies and
research.
And because as
global warming affects the
environment and it is affecting
the environment because the water is
warming up,
we need to know what's
necessary to do if we can do
something.
And that's really important.
So have you shifted more
into, you talk about funding
research because you have to answer
the questions before you can figure
out what to do, right?
Right, yeah, because
right now we don't know what's
coming.
That's the big problem.
We don't have a clue what,
there's anecdotal evidence right now
that
walleyes are cool water species,
trout are cold water, and then the
warm water species are bass,
bluegill.
The warm water species in
a lot of walleye lakes are starting
to supplant the walleye population.
And what can you do, we don't know,
but there are research projects
going on to look at options,
I guess is the best way to put it.
And we've given the UW-Stevens
Point Foundation $300,000
and that's invested in their fund.
And the proceeds from that goes to
a graduate level research project
every year to support, I'll
call them kids, the young people
that are doing these types of
studies.
And they're under the supervision
of Dr. Dan Eisserman at Stevens
Point,
or Greg Sass, Dr. Greg Sasse
at the Escanaba Research Station.
And they are doing some
really interesting studies.
We'll see how it all pans out.
But when you get those
presentations back, they come
and speak to your group, right?
Yes.
So what is the reception in
the room? What's the mood feel like
when people hear that?
They know, hey, I'm paying so I can
learn more.
Are they interested or
they're like, show me a big fish?
No, we're by and large a
bunch of old guys.
We've seen a lot of fish.
So that's not a big deal.
The big thing is they
like to know that there's
results coming from the money that's
being raised.
And that's a really
big thing because we've
given money to some projects and
we never hear the results.
We've never been given the results,
partially because we don't ask for
them. Which we probably should, but
we haven't.
But studies that are panning
out positively,
it's a great thing.
We haven't really had any negative
results yet, I guess, which
is an even better thing.
So there's still hope.
At what point along
the journey of this group have
you shifted from some of the
infrastructure to doing our
research?
Did the research go hand in hand
with this understanding that the
lakes are changing and that the
habitat is changing?
The habitat is definitely changing,
mainly because of us.
Lake habitat has changed
dramatically, and it's
called carbon.
The carbon content of
many lakes, all across northern
Wisconsin and the whole northern
part of the United States,
there's a carbon deficit in a lot of
lakes, and you have to have enough
carbon present in the
lake to support the vegetative
growth that's in the lake.
And people yank trees out of the
water as soon as they fall in the
water, those kinds of issues.
The shorelines are developed.
They use pesticides, herbicides,
which may, and salt.
Salt is a huge issue.
Sodium chloride changes
the water chemistry to a point
that's really not even well
understood yet.
I've seen a couple presentations.
They're getting there, and
pretty soon.
I don't know if you can do anything
about it because people don't want
snowy roads.
But the evidence is those
kinds of issues are a real problem.
Like I said with the culverts,
a hundred years ago when a person
wanted to go across the marsh to
access a farm field,
one bunch of culverts we
replaced, they put them in to
facilitate muskrats
back when there was a good market
for furs.
They wanted to hold the water,
but...
So, humans are
not always the
best stewards of the ecology, let's
put it that way.
And maybe part of knowing what to do
is learning, you know, what's
happened and how can we change it to
be what we want.
Yeah, but quite
frankly, we're kind of slow
in accepting the
effects of human decisions.
And I'll go with fishing
regulations.
Walleyes are broadcast spawners.
They just spawn along the shoreline,
whereas bass, bluegill, crappies,
and nosefish, they're nest spawners,
so when a little walleye hatches,
they're on their own.
But when a, a little,
When they hatch,
the male sits there and protects
them until they're ready to
motor away from the spawning area.
And we
DNR and the people of Wisconsin
are accepting regulations that
protect those fish until
they have a chance to spawn
several times, which may
change the population.
It has changed the dynamics
in some lakes.
Slowly but surely,
there are some lakes up in northern
Wisconsin now where the bag limit
is five a day for
largemouth bass and
no size limit.
They're trying to reduce the number
of bass.
And some of those are study lakes.
You know, it takes time to...
Well, how much of that does come
down to the attitude of groups like
yours and educating the people that
do a lot of the fishing of like,
Hey, you may, it may be great and
exciting for you to have these
bigger bag limits or, you know,
to think that the slot limits the
way to go or no limit
size limit on parts of of that, you
know, but this is what the
science...
Yeah, well, there's other
organizations that promote
catching and release of
those kinds of species.
Don't eat them.
Turn every one loose that you catch,
whereas we promoted
a catch, kill, and eat tournament
for bass, for largemouth bass.
They taste fine if you prepare
the flesh properly,
but yeah,
it's a cultural thing and
an economic thing too.
Amen.
Some organizations have a lot
of money invested.
Like us, we have a lotta money
invested in walleyes,
in panfish species.
So, I wouldn't say it's a
competition, but it's, it's
definite,
I don't know, cultural thing.
Well, what has that meant?
I mean, obviously, the large mouth
competition with walleye in some
northern lakes has been in favor
of large mouth, especially with the
warming climate.
And there are a lot of bass
fishermen that just want to go along
the shoreline and cast and catch
bass all day. They don't care if
they get a walleye.
I grew up down south,
I lived down south my entire
life until I came to Wisconsin
in 1972 and
I caught a lot of bass and a lot of
crappies down south.
And I don't have anything against
bass and crappys,
but there is a, like I said,
the regulations have been formulated
that, in our opinion,
favors those species over
walleyes.
And walleyess are slow maturing
fish.
We paid for a study on Lake
Winnebago. Ryan Koenigs looked
at 3,000 dead female walleyes.
There's two big tournaments every
year on Winnebego, the Merck
National and Otter Street.
And what he found
was that 80%
of the five-year-old females
had not spawned once.
80% of the six-year old females
had spawned at least one time.
So female walleys don't.
On this system, that's not the case
in every system because every system
is different. You cannot
rubber stamp walleye
habitat and walleye
species or walleye population
responses to their
habitats.
Dr. Ron Brook, who used to be our
biologist here, he
and his friends have caught 200
walleyes on the Flambeau River.
And in a walleye's
head, there's what's called an
otolith bone, and you can slice
And you can stain it, and you can
actually count growth rate.
You can tell he found
14-inch walleyes on the Flambeau
River that were seven years old.
Out here, a walleye reaches
14 inches in two and a half years.
It's all got to do with forage.
And so you can't, that's
the problem with walleyes
anyway,
is habitat really dictates
how walleyess
exist and how their
success in everything they do.
So when did your group start getting
into creating the hatcheries?
Twenty-five years?
Well, we started in 91,
and then we built the
first hatchery probably in
93 or 94.
Gordy Priegel, who was
the biologist at Oshkosh, he
went from here to Fitchburg, and he
built the hatchery in
a Volkswagen bus.
He was good, just a few hatching
jars, incubation
cylinders, whatever you want to call
them, and he was going to take it
For showing tells at schools, and we
figured, well, if he can do that, we
can do it.
The big deal was getting a buy-on
from the DNR.
You have to have what's called a
collection and reintroduction permit
to catch the fish,
strip the eggs, fertilize the eggs
and put them in your hatchery and
turn them loose, which
is fine, but
again, we were
lucky.
The guys at Oshkosh,
were the ones that needed to give us
those permits, and we
ran our first hatchery on
Little Green Lake over in Green Lake
County.
It was a disaster.
Anyway, it hatched fish,
but what we did, oh, we were
ignorant.
We ran the little fish that were
hatching right off the end of the
pier, and if you walked at the end
the pier there was a whole school of
boogies sitting there getting lunch.
So, it's been an evolution.
The hatcheries we have now are all
alike. As far as
structure and function.
That's been, like I said, an
evolution.
But they work, we
know they work.
Now, on Green Lake two
years ago,
the only way to definitively
tell what comes out
of our hatchery is to do
a genetic fin clip.
We fin clip the female that
we use for the eggs, and we
clip-in-clip the mail that we use
for the...
For the sperm.
And that pairing, we
use a vial of
alcohol and put each fin clip in
a vile.
And that goes to Stevens Point.
We get 100 vials in a
packet.
And they run these
through a very neat machine
about the size of a big microwave.
And the next morning,
they genetically pair
those two fish.
So then in the fall of the year,
when the department goes out and
they do what's called a fall
fingerling survey and shock
looking for fall
fingerlings, generally speaking
they're five to seven inch long
little walleyes, they do a fin
clip.
And they send it a point, and we can
tell if it comes out of our
hatchery.
The Green Lake study, 74%
of the fish that they clipped came
out of out hatchery hold.
So that is the definitive way.
On Pewaukee Lake, when we started
there, I think 10 or 11
years ago now, the department
had determined that there was
one adult walleye.
An adult wall eye, from their
perspective, is any walleye over 15
inches.
The population was 0.17
per acre,
which, you know,
that's one fish every five acres,
maybe six.
One adult.
We've been there ten years, and the
walleye population now is determined
at four per acre.
And the only thing that changed was
we went in and
put more predators in the water.
We flipped the fish
population there.
When we first started working there,
we used bike nets.
They're a tubular net that you
just use to catch fish.
The first day that we were there,
we probably took 500 to 1,000.
Small yellow perch from three to
five inches long out of that net,
and they were sexually mature.
That's another issue.
Perch, little perch,
they're sexually mature at three
years old, and now
they're gone, because we
put enough predators in there to
reduce that population,
and other fish species have
responded. Whatever those little
perch were competing with
pumpkin seed, pumpkin seed or
panfish.
They now have 10-inch pumpkin
seed in Pewaukee Lake.
They had never seen that kind of it,
but the predator-prey relationship
shifted so that there was
more for the pumpkin seed to eat.
So these are the side issues, but
they're the good issues that we,
they're called anecdotal evidence,
but we see it,
and it happens.
Walk me through a little bit of what
we're going to see tonight when you
release the fish and how you know
when to do it, where to do,
it to ensure you give them the best
change.
What we do now is
the incubation jars are in the
hatchery and based
upon what I just learned from
Sean, Ken
Vandeplas up there,
his average water temperature was
50 degrees over the course of
21 days and his
fish hatched, started hatching
21 days after he put them in with
an average temperature of 50
degrees.
That's book perfect.
That's exactly what it says in the
book. The Culture of Walleye
Book, Culture of walleye
and sawger book.
So what we do is we keep the eggs
in the hatchery and as they
hatch we have a collection
trough in the hatchery and it goes
outside and we have six tanks
out there that has
a fry distribution manifold.
We can valve off sections
of this manifold like
what we did earlier this
week. We just put the
little guys in tank one because
there weren't very many hatching.
And then we put the next
bunch in tank two because there
still wasn't very many hatching.
Yesterday they started to really
hatch because of warming water
and we're putting them in
the third and fourth tank and
today I shut those off and
I started putting them in the fifth
and the sixth tank.
We have to hold them.
We don't have to, but
it's more beneficial to hold
then.
When a little walleye exits the
egg is actually considered a
larvae.
They don't have any scales, they
don't have any fins, they don't a
mouth that's open, they have a swim
bladder.
I tell everybody that they've got a
brain, two eyes, and a beating
heart.
That's about all there is to them.
But over the course of
two days, we keep them 48
hours in our holding tanks.
That gives them a chance to absorb
their yolk sac, and they
go from what's called swim up fry,
and you'll see them today, they
kind of swim up and then they sink,
and They scrim up and...
And they're
just absorbing their yolk sack as
they develop parts of their body
so they can actually swim.
And then they become what's called
horizontal swimmers.
And when they become horizontal
swammers, after about four days and
their mouth opens,
they need something to eat.
So we turn them loose after
48 hours because they're horizontal
swivers and they can motor around
and find.
So that's what you'll see today.
We have those that
we caught. Two days ago,
they're in one tank and we
drain the tank down using
a siphon in
a filter so we don't siphons
them onto the ground and
consolidate them.
Then we put them in coolers and
we take them right out in the middle
of the lake.
And we know from
past experience we buy zooplankton
toes.
It's a net that you tow behind the
boat, and you can judge where
the zooplankton is.
Zooplankton are microscopic or
macroscopic aquatic
organisms that these
little fish eat.
And so we take them out in the
middle of the lake and turn them
loose.
And they're on their own.
But we try to give them a good place
for their first meal anyway.
And there aren't the predators
out there that's wanting to
eat a little walleye that's less
than a quarter of an inch long.
Nothing we can do about it.
But it works, right?
We tell people,
we don't try to
get people too big of an
expectation, we tell people
if we get
one half of 1% of what
we produce makes it to 15
inches, we're probably doing pretty
good.
Yeah, break some of those numbers
down for me, because you're
talking how many eggs,
fertilized eggs, are you actually
putting in your jars?
Millions.
Sean this year had 11 million.
Green Lake right now has got 7
million.
We had almost 5
million at Big
Cedar.
Pewaukee had 6 million.
And we used 4 million.
4 million used to be our goal.
Everybody likes bigger goals.
But we always used to tell people
if we put four million little fish
in a lake.
What I didn't say is.
We can't move these little fish
around.
Where we take the
eggs from the little fish
you have to go back in that body of
water.
A lot of reasons.
But we used to tell people
if we put 4 million and what
happened 1% of 4 million
is 20,000.
It's just a numbers game.
If we can put enough in to offset
natural mortality and
predation, hopefully
we'll get some kind of a.
And we do in
most cases.
Why, why walleye?
That's a good question.
I never caught a walleye until I
was 22 years old.
So I never even saw one.
But
They're the preferred fish.
Everybody says panfish are the
preferred fish, but really,
I was down on
a little cedar today and there was a
guy at the boat landing.
And I said, you catch anything?
He says, nope, haven't got a
walleye yet.
So there you go.
I mean, there's whatever
there is in little cedars that he
might catch, but the first thing he
said was, I haven't caught a wall
eye yet.
When did that take place
where Walleye became like
the definitive ideal fish in the
sky?
Tournaments.
Yeah, the first Walleye weekend
tournament was at Oshkosh.
About 1980,
and now it's,
well, they just
had their 50th here in
Fond du Lac, so it must have been
in 82.
And tournament fishing really,
and you know, the boat manufacturers
and the motor manufacturers, they
push.
Selling their products, and a good
way to do it is have people come to
tournaments and have people come
in and it's an event.
I'm 70,000 people will go to Walleye
Weekend here on a weekend.
And it's not only Walleyes anymore.
I mean, when they first started
the festival part,
now it's called Fun Like Festivals.
The festival part wasn't near what
it is now, but
tournament fishing, yeah,
that really made a difference in
Walleye fishing.
The history of walleye,
there was Friday Night
Perch Fish Fry when they were
commercially caught in Lake
Michigan, but the walleye was still,
for a lot of people that was the
definitive Friday Night Fish Fry.
Yeah, there's—yeah.
They taste good, that's one thing.
Fish taste is totally dependent
upon fat.
Fish fat has an
objectionable flavor to most people.
That a lot of people call it the mud
line on the side of a fish.
That's brown fat, it's not a mud
line. And it has
a fish taste and a
sometimes very strong fish taste.
Perch and walleye have a very, very
low inter-muscular fat
content, so they taste good.
Most people probably don't even
think of it that way.
No, yeah,
so.
Well, you know, people, shoot.
I mean, people left Chicago
back in the
20s to drive to
Boulder Junction.
Take them three days to get there
to go walleye fishing in Wisconsin.
So it's always been a little lure,
you now.
People liked fish.
And there would be a
significant loss if there weren't
walleye available to be
caught.
Well, walleye and all other
species, walleyes
for tomorrow must
be almost close to
20 years ago we funded
a
fishing economic value
study on Lake Winnebago.
Matt, can't think of Matt's
last name, he's an economist
at UW-Whitewater and Dr.
John at UW-Green Bay.
They looked at the value of fishing,
just fishing alone on Winnebago to
the four counties around the lake.
Like I said, that's probably close
to 20 years ago.
It was $143 million, and
it supported 4,500 people's
employment.
Fishing is big business.
In Wisconsin, it's just well over
a billion dollar a year industry.
And so.
We like to be part of it, I guess.
Not for that reason, but.
But i mean that is part of it
every aspect
Oh yeah, well tourism in Wisconsin
is a huge industry, and hunting
and fishing are
huge parts of it.
I mean people like to go camping,
people like the boat,
but as
we were talking about earlier,
you guys were at a tournament
yesterday, the value of
fishing equipment has
exponentially increased when
we fished
the second walleye weekend
here.
In Winnebago,
people were fishing with wooden
boats and canoes
and bass boats and
every kind of craft you can imagine.
And now when they leave
the harbor, if
there's a boat valued at less than
$55,000 or $60,000,
he's on the low end of the totem
pole. I mean, there's boats out
there that are over $100,000 easy.
Wishing is big business.
How do people I mean, I'm sure
there's some of your members own
those boats. Oh, yeah, they're in
those things Do you ever ask them?
It's like do you is
that just purely enjoyment?
And is that how they justified or?
Because that's That's more than a
vehicle and some people as
private they bought their homes for
back in the day
Yeah.
I always used to say it's expendable
income, but that's
not true. I mean, I know some young
people that really go deep
in debt to buy a
nice big boat.
It's a status symbol.
With the group they hang out with,
a big boat's what counts.
I run a 20-foot
warrior that's 20
years old.
Still floats, and I can still catch
fish out of it.
We were in a boat and they were
flipping through tackle boxes and
they said each lure is $11.
Now they are.
And just.
It's nuts.
Hundreds of them.
Yeah, the cost of fishing equipment
has gone up
exponentially as well.
People will pay it.
But there's still access for people
who don't have that kind of money,
right?
I mean, it's not just for wealthy,
upper middle class.
Leeching a night crawler on the end
of a hook was a slip bobber, we'll
catch walleyes.
I mean you don't have to drive
around too much with people hanging
out at bridges and shorelines.
Go right out here.
One of the things that we haven't
taught.
We, when we started
Wallace for tomorrow, we were
talking to a.
No, come on, that's my
wife.
She heard what you were wearing.
I told her I wouldn't be home until
6 30. I don't know what she wants
now, but anyway
When we started walleyes for
tomorrow We were talking to a
professor UW Stevens point and
we talked about all the things we
want to do on the Winnebago system
And he said you know if
you guys are really good at what you
do you may be forage for tomorrow
Because if you produce all these
walleyed they need something
to eat So one
of the things that we did besides
the spawning habitat is
on Winnebago, we started putting
rocks in the water, building rock
piles.
Not for spawning, walleyes don't
spawn. I don't say not.
We don't think they spawn out in
that deeper water on those rock
piles, but everything
else lives on them.
Snails and crayfish and aquatic
insects and other fish,
which walley's need for forage.
And we have a hundred
and fifty rock piles.
Around the shoreline of Winnebago
from up by Wince all
the way around to Stockbridge.
And that's one of the things that
we—and
that was an event.
At that time, we were hauling the
rocks out on the ice, and we had the
East Shore crew and the Fond du Lac
crew and the West Shore crew each
doing their own thing, cutting holes
in the ice so the trucks could come
and drop the rocks through the ice.
Brian Noble, I don't know if you
remember, he was a Packers,
sure, but when he retired he
became an outdoor person
for one of the TV stations in
Green Bay. He came down and
videoed us dumping rock, I mean,
what's so exciting about dumping
rock through the ice?
But it was,
and that's part of the reason why we
are what we are.
We did things and
unlike, I mean like if
you're part of DU.
You never do anything for DU.
You go to a DU banquet and
assume they spend money.
We don't do that.
Every one of our, we have nine
hatcheries running this year and
every one of hatcheries is
run by a dedicated bunch of people
at each of the sites where the
hatcheries are located and that's
huge.
You get the local people
that can come, they
can come and look at what's going on
in the hatchery, but they can also
be part of it.
And local support is
huge when it comes to
local activities.
Just at the Big Cedar one, like
you saw the kids there.
What does it mean to you when you
see a couple of young girls just
as excited as the guys to be netting
those fish?
I'm prejudiced.
I have a wife and two daughters
and a granddaughter.
So yeah, I love
having young girls come and
help.
Everybody thinks fishing is a guy's
sport, but my granddaughter,
she was a wicked perch
fisherman.
Pay attention to other things.
But anyway,
yeah, I've always
thought that was the best part of
what we do. We used to be at
Big Cedar one year and Pike Lake the
next year. We did that back and
forth for six years.
And on Pike Lake especially,
I mean, there'd be 20 kids there
watching us do our thing.
And from me to you, across the
table, I'd be stripping the eggs and
the kids would be right there.
It can't get any better.
And
At Pewaukee, I know two
of the kids that were real active
at Pewaukee went to Pointe
and studied.
I'm not sure exactly what they
studied. One became a biologist, I
think the other became, had
something to do with water.
But anyway, direct relationship to
having worked with our hatchery.
It's a good thing from the
standpoint that you can get,
it doesn't, there's no
challenge to it and there's
not necessity for
them to do anything other than come
watch.
And they can actually see these
little fish swimming around.
Better story I have to tell about
that is at Pike Lake I was
stripping eggs one day and there was
a lady and I'm old
now but this is
a lot of years ago.
I was probably 40 at that time.
She had to have been 80.
She stood across the table and
watched me for at least a half an
hour. Never said a word.
And then once we started putting the
eggs in the hatchery, she went in
the hatchery and she watched the
eggs roll for about a half hour,
never said a work, walked away,
and she never came back.
But I told some of the guys over
here, I said, you know, that's what
we're all about.
That lady is 80 years old
and she'd never had the opportunity
to see something like that ever
before.
It's right in her backyard.
She walked home and
can't get any better.
When you think of the title,
Wall Ice for Tomorrow, who's that
tomorrow? Who represents the
tomorrow in your title?
Yeah, all the kids,
well, all of the young people that
come.
I call you a kid now,
but anyway, all the young that
come to
help us. And we are lucky.
And kids listen.
They do what you tell them to do,
sometimes adults, they
just don't listen.
And no matter how many times
you tell him, but most kids,
you only have to tell them once and
they get it
and they'll do
what you asked them to and
yeah,
I love having kids come.
Well, the name
itself is interesting because,
you know, tomorrow is tomorrow,
but you're talking years before
someone might catch one of
these fish.
Well, we stole the name, kind of.
There's a group here called Sturgeon
for Tomorrow, and they're really for
tomorrow, you know, because the
sturgeon doesn't get sexually mature
till they're 20, they're males till
they are 20 years old.
So they're out of Brother Town.
And when we started thinking about a
name, we kind of stole their
name.
We can have a Wally's for tomorrow
too, you now.
But, no, and that's.
You can talk all you want.
When you do something that people
can actually see and
understand that you're doing
something positive, that's
what counts.
I mean, politicians sit
wherever and talk and talk, and
talk.
But it's only the politicians that
really get involved and do,
have activities that really
affect the public in a positive way
that count.
And that's, We're all about.
We're trying to do something that
counts, and
we'll be there for...
My mom.
A walleye may live 20 years.
The oldest walleye they've ever
caught on Winnebago is 20 years old.
And they know that.
But there's a population of walleye
in Quebec that they don't get
sexually mature until they're 15.
Different living conditions, you
know.
So, yeah, it's for tomorrow.
Tomo politicians and obviously
this doesn't
super political but at the same time
like governor Walker had his wall I
should you know did that
did that do anything there was he
trying to capitalize on the goodwill
the people had towards wall I
They have not released the
results of the WALL-A
initiative because it's been a
disastrous failure.
Pond-raised walleyes
don't contribute to
any substantial degree to
the betterment of the walleye
populations.
We've seen a lot of things with what
we do with walleyess.
And now,
just this year, Ken Vandepas
up at Shawano had three
hatching jars that
didn't Do well.
As an afterthought he said,
you know, he said I think a lot of
those females that we used
during that period of time
were some fin-clip females,
and the fin- clip females are ones
that's a DNR stock.
So next year he's going to segregate
and try to keep
track, but I've
been to two presentations now where
Early results for
the stocking initiative is they
only get five to fifteen percent
survival.
If you're stocking a fish that costs
you two dollars to
raise and turn loose,
when you start running the numbers
from a pure economic standpoint,
it makes no sense whatsoever.
These fish are...
People don't understand how
absolutely complicated
a fish is.
We don't have a clue.
We don't live underwater.
We don't live in their environment.
I even had a guy,
we were talking and he said, what do
you think fish think?
And I said, I don't have a clue,
because they don''t think like us.
They live in a totally different
environment.
But fish are really,
really complicated.
I mean, the little bit we do,
the little bit that we have done,
we've learned so much about what you
should and shouldn't do to fish.
Otherwise, you kill them.
But just water pH.
When we're stocking the
little guys, people use well water.
PH seven is neutral,
.2 is not just two tenths
more acid or basic,
it's 2,000 times more
acid or base.
It's an exponential figure.
You can kill little fish just
by not using right water that
you dump them into.
We use ambient conditions.
We don't heat the water, we don't do
anything to the water. It comes in,
goes through our atrium, goes right
back out.
People have tried heating water.
People have try using wells and
they get too much iron in their
water from the wells,
had disastrous results.
So fish are, they're
tougher nails, but they're really
pretty sensitive in a lot of
ways.
So if you, would
you, even if you had the money and
the option to try and raise
these eggs to fingerlings in a pond
and introduce them, you'd still
probably do it the way you do it
now?
Sure it's more fun.
No, no, we
did raise some fish in a pond.
Over at Green Lake, the
hatchery is on a very, very,
old fish hatchery that was a DNR
hatchery.
It's got a two-tenth of an acre
pond, so one year we're going
to raise some fish.
So we, it's
a process. You have to drain the
pond, you plant rye in the
You let the rye get up and you flood
the pond so it kills the ryes.
So the bacteria starts working on
the decaying vegetation and you
throw a peanut meal
or a cottonseed meal in to help
the zooplankton grow even more.
Then you put the little guys in
there and they eat zooplanking.
But first you go to the sewage
treatment plant and you get a bucket
of their
mix that
takes care of the nutrients in
sewage. You put that in there and
that's what these little walleyes
eat. And
But then, I tell people
they like to go from the salad bar
to the meat menu,
and you have to feed them.
We were feeding them a 96-quart
cooler full of pinhead minnows
that are only a half-inch long every
three days.
And luckily we got them for free.
If you had to buy them, the cost
would be horrific.
So we raised them in that pond
until, I think they took
them out in June, late June.
Many thousand little one inch,
one and a half inch walleyes.
And then didn't get them all out, so
then we threw 20 pounds of fathead
minnows in the pond and
took them out I think in September
and got like 2,500 five
inch walleye.
But let me tell you, it's work.
It's a job.
What we do now is work,
that's Ken Bandiplast last
year, guesstimated he
had 840 man hours
tied up in running his hatchery.
And that was with a 19 jar hatchery,
this year he's got a 32 jar
hatcherie.
He's nuts. I don't know why he does
it.
Well, what does he say about
you?
How many hours do you spend every
day? Do you even get to
go fishing in the spring?
This is seven days a week,
yeah. This time of year I'm,
I used to say it was my advocation,
now it's my vocation.
I just do it.
I love working with fish.
I mean, fish are really interesting
creatures.
And what I love more is when people
come up and I can tell them what
we're doing and show them what
were producing.
This morning I had a guy down at Big
Cedar, I don't
know who he was, just a guy he drove
up in a truck and wanted
to see what we were doing.
I went through my whole spiel,
got it memorized kind of.
And, but people really appreciate
what you do.
And like I said before,
you'll never be remembered for what
you say, but you'll be remembered
what you'll do.
I guess that's my basic philosophy.
Well, for you, the walleyes for
tomorrow is women.
What are you going to do tomorrow?
Well, I'll start with the walleys.
Yep, I'll be back down there in the
morning.
So is there an off time?
Like once they're all out in the
lake, do you get a break then?
Oh yeah, I'm going trout fishing.
Not, not well, like...
Nope, nope, I love to
trout fish and I've
been trout fishing the same
trout stream by red granite
for 40 years and
that's my solitude
time, just wading
in trout streams.
So why isn't this Trump's firm?
You're already a TU,
and a good friend of mine is
really in the TU.
I mean, that's what he does, is TU,
and many other things, but anyway.
No, you know,
my mother-in-law never fished, ever.
And back when I was working, I would
fish Thursday afternoon,
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and go
back to work on Monday.
Why do you do that?
And I said, because when
I'm fishing, the only thing that's
important to me is whether that
bobber is on top of the water or
under the water. Otherwise, I don't
have a care in the world.
That's why people, although that's
why a lot of people do it.
I mean, the tournament guys, that's
the whole, I did
that. It's work.
I enjoyed it, but
I enjoy this more.
So when it comes to relationships
and walleye fishing,
I mean, how many of these guys are
married to the
lake?
A bunch.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, you met one
of them, Tom Walters.
I mean, not only to the lake, he's
married to that boat.
Tom, hell of a nice
guy.
And he
fishes a lot.
And, and he's not unique.
I mean there's guys that fish five
days a week if they can get out
there.
Weather, weather is about the only
thing that really puts a
crimp in their activities.
I mean, have you known people that
got divorced over the
amount of fishing they've done?
Yeah, I don't think so.
Not that I know of.
Not that they've admitted.
Yeah, I'm
really lucky.
The person I married,
she is
totally supportive of what I do,
even though my to-do
list gets longer and longer and
long.
She never grumbles.
I called her today and I
plan to go to Big Cedar this
morning early, do what I need to
do, come home.
And I called and said, hey, I've got
to do an interview with
Wisconsin Public Radio.
And I gotta go back to Big Cedar and
be there at 5 o'clock.
I've only be home till 6.30.
She's used to it.
Which is fine.
I mean, we get along great.
She's a very nice person.
I'm sure others don't have it quite
as lucky.
That's a fact.
I tell everybody,
when I got my marriage
license, I got my fishing license to
go along with it.
Because down south, I didn't hunt
that much.
It's a different culture down south
as far as hunting goes.
Think what they can think about
Wisconsin. I live in Wisconsin
because it's Wisconsin.
My dad was in the Air Force.
I lived in seven different states
before I was 20 years old.
I lived In Maine.
I lives in Puerto Rico.
I was in Oklahoma.
I've lived in lots of places.
But when I came to Wisconsin
in 1967...
Wisconsin's a good place to be.
That's why I'm here.
My mom, I was born
in North Carolina, and when my
dad retired from the Air
Force, they went back to North
Carolina and my mom always says,
when you come back to God's country,
and I said, mom,
I'm not leaving.
I can go 40 miles
and fix Lake Michigan, I can 40
miles in trout fish, I can five
miles in walleye fish.
Wisconsin's a good state, no
matter how you cut it.
So when when
people think about walleye
fishing they probably are thinking
very narrow in terms of where they
get to fish and their next
opportunity but do
you think people realize all the
ways that walleye it
can go through every little aspect
of the state every corner of the
state whether it's through real
estate and homes up north
or a river property or
you know the or the bait shops,
or the guys who get the bait to give
to the bait shop.
You know, the amount of tourism
money and then this research that
all funnels back into it and then
the volunteer hours and just...
It seems like the more you look at
it, the more it just spreads
everywhere.
Unfortunately, politicians sure
don't see it that way because they
haven't chosen to
support fishing in the
state of Wisconsin like it
should have been supported for many
years. It's a huge industry.
I mean, like I said, fishing alone
is a billion and a half dollar
industry in Wisconsin.
I'm gonna turn this damn thing off.
This is my life.
I get a whole bunch of phone calls
every day.
But, yeah, no,
it, fishing is a,
I don't know, politically...
We were told, okay, the guy
that I said is part of
heavy duty in the Tarlin Limited,
he was trying to talk to
a legislator once about the
necessity for a license fee
increase.
And that legislator says,
there's more of them than there is
you.
That's why we don't worry about you.
He was talking about the people that
were lobbying for
better funding
for the resource.
And it's really unfortunate.
There are states that have been much
more progressive.
State of Minnesota and Missouri
are two big ones.
Minnesota has a one eighth of
1% of
their sales tax goes to support
conservation efforts in the state of
Minnesota.
And it,
well, Minnesota is a fantastic
place to fish.
And Missouri is the same way.
In Wisconsin, the legislature
considers.
They have whore taxes.
And I could go into that a long way,
but it's ridiculous.
I mean, people will pay, I was just
a big seater, 10 bucks to launch
your boat there, but they don't
consider that a tax, that's a fee.
It's the same money,
just what you consider it,
and it's ridiculous.
Of course, they have their
priorities.
We have ours.
What would be the most
beneficial thing that politicians
could do if they
actually started this?
Listen.
They don't listen.
They do listen, but they listen
to the wrong people.
They listen to lobbyists.
Sell one opinion or
one type of opinion based
upon who wants to pay them the most
money.
They need to listen to the public,
and they don't.
Like I said, that one guy
told Bob,
there's more of them than there is
you. I don't have to listen, because
all they want to do is get
reelected, and
that's the big issue.
We were lucky.
Our chapter chairman in Berlin
personally knows the state senator.
She was a state representative,
and now she's a state senator, Joan
Baldwin.
We needed to redo the
Princeton Dam.
It didn't have a fishway around it.
It's the last dam on
the Fox river that didn't
have a fishway to get around it,
for fish to get around the dam.
And she was on the Joint Finance
Committee.
So George and I went to a Joint
Finance committee meeting.
Gave him our spiel, and it cost
$1.2 million to renew
the dam there.
And then we went down to
talk to Joan in Madison,
and...
It got funded, let's
just put it that way, which is a
good thing.
It seems that you have to.
Hand-pick your supporters,
which is unfortunate, because
everybody, not everybody,
they sell 1.2 million fishing
licenses every year in the state of
Wisconsin.
There's only five million people in
the State, and half of
them, not half, but a proportion
of them aren't old enough to buy
licenses to begin with,
and so fishing is a big deal,
and they choose to have other.
I don't know, other topics
that they'd rather discuss rather
than that.
If the legislature was more
active and supportive, would groups
like yours still exist?
Or are you filling a
vacuum created by...
And we're lucky because
the public supports us.
You know, you have the Turkey
Federation, White Tails,
you have DU, you've got Wallace,
you've Got Sturgeon for Tomorrow,
you got Wings over Wisconsin,
you got WWA,
Wisconsin Waterfowl Association.
The people understand that
it takes money to support
what they enjoy doing.
I don't understand why the
legislature doesn't understand that
because, but they can
abscond from doing anything and
it just keeps right on sliding by
and not
well because we're
we're hurting right now, big time
for a lot of reasons,
but the
problem with legislators, they're
not us.
They're not outdoor people.
Some of them may be.
I can't speak for all of them, but
they're really not us.
You don't hear of any legislators
that are ardent fishermen or
ardent hunters.
Because those guys are all too busy
fishing, they couldn't imagine door
knocking all summer.
But, and
I don't get that because
outdoor people vote and
a good way to,
like Sportsman Walker.
I could never figure that out.
Scott Walker was not a sportsman.
And I don't
understand why that
even popped up other than it was
a good spiel.
I mean, he didn't do us any favors.
So why vote for a politician
that doesn't do you any favors?
Of course, everybody's got their own
favors.
So I think we've covered
quite a bit of ground here.
Is there anything else that we
should know?
Basically,
yeah, if something isn't done for
funding in
the state of Wisconsin to support
the natural resources in the State
of Wisconsin by virtue of
money, it takes money to manage
the resource.
I won't say we're going to turn into
a third rate place
for people to come to,
but we always
talk about
the
tourist industry doesn't
want our license fee
increased because they feel what's
going on.
Tourism in the state of Wisconsin,
but you know, if you
don't have fish, people aren't gonna
come.
People don't go up north just
to see the trees.
They go up North to fish to
a good degree.
I mean, you go up I-39 on
the weekend and there's boats going
North all the time and a lot of them
are from Illinois.
I don't understand why it should be
a divisive issue.
It just doesn't seem right.
We should each be able to afford an
extra ten bucks for a license,
right?
Got that right.
I tell, you saw it.
I tell everybody, the guy
that hooked his $70,000
truck up to his $100,000
boat, and you fish
with one of them, and goes to
Erie for a week.
They have no bitch for
a $10 license fee.
$100,000 boat
fishing Winnebago for a
weekend just spent,
just burned $200 worth of gas,
easy.
So what's 10 bucks?
It's been more than we have in gas
tacks.
That's right.
That's another issue.
We get screwed.
Boating gas tax is based on
a boat that, a boat is
based upon the number of boats.
There's a rebate, you know, because
it's not, it's no highway tax, it's
used on the water.
So there's a re-bait to the
natural resources account from
gas tax money.
But it's based upon a
boat using 50 gallons of gas a
year. Some of those boats burn 50
gallons in a day.
So we're getting screwed when
it comes to taxes, the tax
rebate, big time.
Yeah, because some of them fill up
at a tank in town and some of the
fill up at a harbor or
whatever place on the lake.
Wherever, I mean, most people
go to Fleet Farm,
four flints off on a gallon.
And usually they're the cheapest
place in town.
Not most of the time.
But anyway,
and all those big boats all burn
premium now.
You can't, you don't want
to burn regular gas.
So you're paying 389
a gallon, and
I don't know how much tax is on one
of those, but nevertheless.
Every, my boat's got
a 35 gallon gas tank in
it, so I'm
blowing that 50 gallons a year
issue away every two trips I
make.
It should be changed big time.
And you don't even get to fish in
this.
Yeah, right.
Oh, I could go fishing if
I wanted to, but I have
things to do.
Crappies aren't spawning yet.
Yeah, you gotta get pipes for your
next...
Yeah, crappies aren't spotty yet.
Alright. I think we're good here.
Thank you for giving us time.
We appreciate it.
Let's just do like 30 seconds
of room time.
Sure. So we're just gonna listen
to the sound of the room for a
half minute or so.
It's an old editing trick.
So we'll just sit here awkwardly in
silence.
See if your phone goes off.
All right, perfect.