Pineview 1-17-20

[MWScott72]

Thanks for the report. I've been wondering about Pineview, but as you stated, it seems most of the perch and crappie are small this year, and I want bigger! Maybe they'll get there if they don't eat themselves out of house and home first.
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[Muskybee]

I fished this evening from 6 to 1030 PM and the bite was slow. I was able to get 2 slab crappie 14" in 32 ft of water. The crappie were all stacked on the bottom of the water column, but they didn't want to bite anything. Chartuse green jig with a milworm caught both.
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[wiperhunter2]

Any perch? At least you got a couple of nice crappie, from the sounds of it, no one else is catching any big crappie, so you did better than most people.
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[Muskybee]

No perch this trip. We got set up to late. We didn't start fishing until 6pm. The perch had already moved out by the time the sun went down. We fished between browning and cemetary point. Their was people showing up all night. My buddies did land a couple small 7 inch crappie as soon as we started fishing. The temp dropped once it got dark. It was 2 degrees when we arrived back to the truck. Best action for active fish was between 9 and 11.
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[brookieguy1]

I don’t fish Pineview any more but I have a question. Why have the tiger musky done zero good in helping to increase perch size? Also crappie average size has decreased since the tiger musky introduction. Do they need to increase stocking of tiger musky or add another predator?
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[Springbuck]

Back when they first introduced the muskies, the crappie EXPLODED in size, actually.

I went from catching a hundred 8-9" skinny-as-heck crappies every trip, to catching 25 or so, all fat and 11" -12" fish in about 2 years time.

But, that was over twenty years ago. Since then, I have heard all kinds of ups and downs, including when they were allowing SOME T-Muskies to be kept, and then couldn't find clean fry to continue stocking them, etc...

In the past 12 years since I started icefishing, we've had...

all perch, zero crappie,

then lots of stunted perch, small crappie

then a perch crash and suddenly growing crappie,

a few years of crappies getting bigger and bigger, and I wasn't even hearing about perch.

Suddenly I couldn't catch a single crappie two years running, but reports said a few guys were catching a lot of big ones.

Two years ago my first trip out, NICE perch 9-1/2" to 11" all over the place, but NOTHING by my 5th trip...

and now we are back to lots of small perch, and a few guys still catching crappies.

I wish I understood it, too.
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[Muskybee]

I think that pineview has plenty of predators. Between the bass and the tiger muskie they keep the populations in check. I think that the number of small perch and an abundance of the smaller crappie has a lot to do with a few years back the perch were spawning in the narrows by the spill way and thousands of perch got sucked down the spill way when they opened it open to let water out. I owned a rental house along the ogden river and theirs were dead perch floating everywhere. So I think that made the crappie take off and re-populate especially with higher spring water levels into summer. So now the perch have been cycling with the same successful high water spawns. So now we're in the middle of a bunch of different age classes from the past couple years. I fish pineview pretty much all year and have caught tons of big fat tiger tiger muskies.
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[Springbuck]

"We fished between browning and cemetery point."

I need to look at the maps. If I walk out from Cemetery Point heading north, I get in to about 40-42' of water before I have gone a hundred yards, and it kind of stays about that depth for as far out as I have ever walked.....which is pretty far.
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[Springbuck]

https://www.standard.net/news/environmen...0282c.html

You'd think so. There are plenty of good bass and the muskies, etc..

Here's a link, though saying the DWR blames a summer die-off in Aug. on simply high populations of the abundant fish species, though.
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[Muskybee]

I'm fishing between 32 and 33 ft. I'm about half way between the 2 sides. If you were to head north from the cemetery point parking area that's were you'll find 32 ft almost all the way to the other side. If you head north west from cemetery the depth gets a lot deeper in the 44 ft range over to the pump house.
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[Springbuck]

That must be it, thanks. I usually wrap around the point aways before setting off north. I don't remember ever catching any crappie that far east, actually.

Last year, in desperation, I worked east until I was only 20 feet deep or so when I couldn't find perch, though. That was a long walk back....
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[dwayneb]

I'm sure you know this already....obviously there are a ton of small perch in Pineview. One thing is perch usually stick to their age class so if your constantly getting those small ones 99% of the time its not gonna change...u have to move to find the older age classes...once u get into the 13" perch they dont school up as much....mostly 2-4 fish at a time.
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[Muskybee]

We moved around a lot and every hole we went had schools of perch and a few crappie. Mostly perch though. To get into the bigger perch we probably needed to switch parts of the lake to find a bigger age class. We were trying to get into the crappie and found them, but eventually the perch would take over the holes.
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