The strong NW wind finally let up overnite.  It would be my guess that by this evening the entire open lake will be locked up, but it is far from being in a condition to start venturing out on.  The bays have decent ice, but I won’t be going out on the ice in front to check thickness until after this weekend.  By the end of the day today I will have the access ready thru the slush ice piles that were formed .

From what I can see we have a couple rough stretches of ice to get thru, but most of it doesn’t look too bad.  Some areas in close that we go to probably are going to have slush under the ice from it freezing while it was windy the last couple days, but we’ve lived thru that before also.

Last evening we had a MLFAC meeting and discussed the “charter” for the group with the DNR Commissioner. After and hour and a half of discussion, things stayed about the same, and now the Commissioner’s office has to respond to our recommendations within two weeks. Where as before many recommendations were just put on the “backburner” so to speak. We in turn to keep with “transparency” need to finalize and publicly vote on our recommendations at the meetings.  Which works for me.  We can still email and discuss proposals outside of the meetings, get general consensuses and not waste all the meeting time to pick apart everything before deciding.  A good committee does most of it’s footwork before the meeting, and we will continue to do that.  I will be the first to admit I’ve just about had it some of the “political” management of this lake at some times and have really thought about throwing in the towel.  And after almost 40 years of working to improve and protect the fishery and see it get ripped apart by two different forms of “management”  is disheartening to the say the least. But maybe some good things will start happening this next year……

Keep a Tight Line!

Eddy