Members of Manitoba Water Stewardship travelled throughout the province on their annual spring release of walleye fish fry earlier this month – stopping in at Ninette as one of their regular stops.

Pelican Lake’s Healthy Lake Committee Chair, Trevor Maguire, says this year’s stock consisted of 2.3 million 1-day old walleye fry.

“We spread them out all over the lake,” explains Maguire. “Half of us went down on the south end, half of us did the north end. It went well, Conservation and Fisheries Branch pretty much doubled our normal allotment. Part of that is because it was a good year for pickerel fry in Manitoba. Some years they just don’t do as well, but the other side of it is, with the aeration running in Pelican Lake and not having seen a [fish] die-off now coming up on 15 years Conservation is willing to start leaning a little harder on the lake to see what it can do.”

Killarney Lake also received more than their usual portion. Typically they receive between 100,000-200,000 1-day old walleye fry. This past week Thursday they received 5 bags of fry, each holding 100,000 tiny fry.

Maguire says the survival rate of 1-day fry is hard to determine. “They estimate somewhere from 1%-5%. It’s really hard to say how well they do because there is no effective way to track it and at this point when you’re catching a fish, we don’t know if it was a fish that was stocked or a fish that happened to grow naturally in Pelican Lake.”

The aeration fields continue to draw attention from other lake communities who are trying to solve their algal-bloom problem much like Pelican Lake and Killarney Lake struggled with. Seeking out community members involved in the planning and installation of the aeration fields is something more and more Manitoba committees are doing, and these two lake committees are all too willing to help out where they can.

Most recently Maguire met with lake committee members from Sandy Lake who are also considering an aeration field in their area. “One of the fellows commented that ten years ago when someone would suggest to go fishing at Pelican Lake they would laugh at them, and now its like yah! We come fishing here! It has changed it.”

“I know some of the fishermen are frustrated because they can see the fish on the fish finders but they just can’t quite catch them but that’s from the amount of food stock and the overall biosphere in Pelican Lake right now, it’s really good.”

Both the Pelican Lake committee and the Killarney Lake committee are keeping their eyes on what this year will hold regarding the algal blooms. Many things factor into what the water quality will be like, and every summer is different. One factor could be the lower water levels in most every waterway in the Province.