Black Dog Draw down

Doc, that’s my job on this site. I’m not letting Pug have it!

No worries man, still trying to get this In-Depth style humor. Dont know if I ever will….haha

I know this is a year-old thread, but (ironically) it just came to my notice via one Mr. Pug.

I grew up in Faribault, but my dad spent some of his formative years in Bloomington… so I heard stories about Blackdog the whole time I w growing up. And to this day I remember reading about a fishing club that specialized in spring Northerns in the floodplain fishing with ultralights, 2# test line, out of canoes… I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 when I read that story.

So I’ve really always dreamed about fishing Blackdog, but never managed to make it happen… so I am doubly sad.

However, on e flip side, a DNR fisheries guy once schooled me on fish kills… they are kind of like forest fires. They suck, but they are essentially natural and eventually rebuild to a better fishery than before. The cycle seems to go something like this:

Rough/bait fish settle in first. They grow rapidly in the predator free environment, and to huge sizes at first, but as they populate they can start to stunt. Enter the predators… In the face of neary inexhaustible prey they grow like gangbusters until they, too, start to stunt due to the fish biomass starting to overwhelm the resources…

Now we have a lake full of mostly undersized fish with a few (relatively speaking) large, old dish mixed in. This isn’t a situation likely to reverse on its own… Enter the winter kill or lake draw-down…

It’s the reset button that keeps things in check and (in a closed environment like a lake anyway) the fish populations in balance.

How much you want to bet there’s gonna be some huge-@$$ bowfin in there in a while? Some fish eggs, frogs and bowfin had to survive in the mud… that lake will be back MUCH faster than anyone realizes.

So it’s bittersweet. Hats off to you, Blackdog, you old dog you. It sucks… Its sad… And yet you’ve survived worse, you’ll get better.