ALEXANDRIA, Minn. — I caught my first black crappie in the early 1970s from Lake Carlos near this west central Minnesota city, where my family had a lake cabin. It was caught while fishing with my dad, who at the time was probably drinking a Grain Belt and smoking a Muriel Air-Tip while Herb Carneal’s call of the Minnesota Twins game crackled through a tiny blue transistor radio.
I am still chasing those silly fish. Despite being a born-and-bred Minnesotan, I can’t catch a walleye to save my life or yours. So my passion became crappies. The goal long ago went from volume to quality. Tell me a body of water that has 12-inch and longer crappies and you’ll see my Lund on that lake.
I worry, though.
My favorite fish, and others, face a challenging future. Walleyes, muskellunge, whitefish, tulibee, bass. How long will we have sustainable populations in Minnesota lakes?
Technology is coming down the tracks like a freight train, a clear danger to certain species of fish, and I fear we have neither the capacity nor the stomach to deal with the consequences.
The culprit, if that’s a fair word, is forward-facing sonar, a semi-new technology that allows anglers to “see” underwater 100 feet from their boat in a 360-degree circle. Old-school sonar, a big enough advantage, points down underneath the boat. FFS is an entirely different deal, a game-changer.
You don’t really even need to “fish” in the true sense of the word. Just point the technology, see the fish on a screen, cast to them, catch them. Like a video game. Amazing.
I wrote about the conundrum earlier this week after attending the MN-FISH Angler’s Summit in Alexandria.
Forward-facing sonar took up a lot of the oxygen in the room — in addition to other, better, more deadly technology coming down the pike (artificial intelligence, anyone?).
Contributed
Fish like crappies and walleyes used to have places in lakes where anglers didn’t have the knowledge or technology to find them, giving them refuge for at least a few months. Forward-facing sonar has obliterated those “hiding places.” It’s game-on 365 days a year.
The great angler Al Lindner said at the summit the new technology is unlike anything he’s seen. Fish are under more pressure than ever before, he said, and it’s only going to get worse.
Combine that with runoff pollution, invasive species, warming waters because of a changing planet, destruction of habitat … and fish are facing a future filled with obstacles.
The question is: What are we going to do about it?
The manufacturers and sellers of the gadgets aren’t going to stop pushing technology forward.
So who’s going to have the courage to lead? Will we have the guts to severely lower fish limits? To close certain lakes to certain technology? To have many lakes be catch-and-release only? To ban some kinds of technology altogether?
I worry.
And I’m not optimistic.
