On certain winter weekends there may be as many as 200 people fishing through the ice at the narrows of Lesser Slave Lake. They come from all over northern and central Alberta, and why?
“Because they know this is where they can catch their limit,” of walleye, says Fisheries Biologist David DeRosa.
Meanwhile, there are now a couple of hundred fishing shacks on the ice in the west basin and maybe 75 in the east basin. The numbers grow each year.
The number of anglers visiting Lesser Slave Lake in summer has exploded in the past 10 years or so. The Alberta Conservation Association does a survey every five years. A new one is planned for this summer.
“Between ’94 and ’99 angler numbers doubled,” says DeRosa. “We’re expecting something similar for this survey.”
Why is it happening? Over-fishing in southern and eastern Alberta lakes has forced anglers to look north and west. It’s been a boon to the tourist industry, but it also bodes ill for fish stocks if it keeps growing and management strategies don’t adjust accordingly. That’s why Fish & Wildlife raised the question at recent meetings with anglers at High Prairie and Slave Lake.
“We asked, ‘Do you want to protect larger fish?’” DeRosa says. “Ninety-nine per cent said yes.”
Walleye females don’t spawn until they are five or six years old. If too many of the big ones are being taken it has an obvious negative effect on the population. That’s what seems to be happening.
“We don’t seem to be maintaining the mature populations,” DeRosa says. It’s probably strictly related to fishing pressure.”
The dilemma is that coming down too hard hurts tourism. On the other hand, doing too little hurts tourism worse in the long run, which is why campground operators like Grant Gramiak of Norm’s Walleye Camp favours more restrictions on catching big walleye.
“We’re losing our big spawning fish,” says Gramiak. “If we don’t manage it we’re not going to have anything.”
Gramiak says his camp was 90 per cent full last summer, and he’s seen probably a 30 per cent increase in bookings the past four years. Tourism is good for his family and for lots of other businesses in the area and he’d like to see it sustained over the long term. If that means administering short-term pain in the form of stricter walleye limits, so be it, he says.
“Something’s got to be done,” Gramiak says.
Some good news on the walleye front is that the incidental commercial walleye harvest is generally on a downward trend the past eight years. In 1997 it was 130,000 kilograms from Lesser Slave Lake. Last year it was 8,300. Some of that may be due to soft markets for the principal whitefish and pike species, but DeRosa says management strategies aimed at avoiding walleye have also helped.
A recent agreement with the province giving Metis people greater access to fish resources has not resulted in an increase in domestic fishing license applications, DeRosa says, but it could when the weather warms up.
There were 138 domestic licenses issued for Lesser Slave Lake in 2004, down from 175 in 2003.

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