Pueblo – The message might be perceived as an echo of the sort of documentary precision that comes from 36 years in law enforcement. Or simply the natural reaction of an honest fisherman determined to set the record straight.
Just as David Michaud pointed out, the heinous claim leaped in flashing neon from last week’s hot-spot feature as prepared by the Colorado Division of Wildlife and was repeated on your favorite outdoor page.
“Most of Pueblo’s walleye are above the 18-inch size limit,” the offending report in last Wednesday’s paper maintained.
Not true, asserted Michaud, who witnessed more than his share of falsehood in all those years as a cop, the final six as Denver’s chief of police.
Since his retirement in 1998 and a subsequent move to Pueblo West, Michaud visits the reservoir a couple of times a week, maybe three when the fish are biting – which most assuredly has been the case of late.
He introduced into evidence a personal experience last week during which he landed 37 walleye in about three hours, only one slightly over the magic 18-inch mark at which these tasty predators may be invited home to dinner.
“Virtually every fish you catch is between 16 and 17 1/2 inches,” Michaud said.
Even more convincingly, Michaud offered into testimony one Bill Shumaker, Pueblo Reservoir’s reigning walleye legend and a sort of human fish vacuum.
It is not enough to say Shumaker – who also resides in Pueblo West, just a couple of long casts from the lake – is a three-time Colorado Walleye Association “Angler of the Year,” most recently in 2004. Nor is it sufficient that he already has landed more than 700 of the toothy critters at Pueblo Reservoir this season or that he fully expects to break his personal seasonal best of slightly more than 1,000 before he forsakes the growing southern Colorado heat in favor of some mountain retreat.
Let us dwell only briefly on the fact that Shumaker and a companion netted a staggering 118 walleye Saturday, just five more than the boat’s previous best.
For the purpose of our principal argument, the pertinent numbers are these: Of those 700 fish, just 61 have been keepers. That Saturday haul netted only six nosing past the mark. On another day when he and wife Diane, his tournament partner, landed 85, only one was a legal fish. The best ratio for Shumaker’s boat came when 15 of 113 qualified for a brief swim in the live well.
“The proportion keeps going down,” Shumaker said, presumably because permissible walleye progressively leave the lake and the rest become educated.
Before an impartial outdoor writer could declare a verdict, a bit of personal investigation must be in order. On Monday, he joined Michaud and Shumaker for a monofilament probe of Pueblo’s depths. That the inspection coincided precisely with the lake’s most violent windstorm detracted considerably from the catch, but not the measure.
Shumaker finds most of his success on flats, humps and drops off the main channel, a position that simply couldn’t be maintained against the teeth of a blow that sent tall whitecaps marching down the lake in regimental array.
The tournament veteran favors a Lindy Rig to present half a night crawler – which he purchases in lots of 100 – to concentrations of walleye. He typically holds a rod in each hand and frequently catches two fish at once, as he did Monday before the mounting wind blew him into a more protected cove where concentrations proved much harder to locate.
“We won’t get nearly as many fish as we would without the wind, but we’ll get some,” Shumaker said. “This lake has walleye all over the place.”
Considering the intensity of the recent bite, such a bold assurance didn’t sound the least like bragging. In that magic early June period when water temperature pushes past 60 degrees and before the shad hatch begins in a couple of weeks, Pueblo’s game fish can be dramatically easy to catch.
“If you want to catch trout, this lake is loaded with them,” said Shumaker, who trolls with a Needlefish lure. “I compare these trout to the ones at Elevenmile Reservoir, fat as footballs.”
When millions of bite-sized shad become available, the catch rate for all sport species nose-dives.
Meanwhile, wildlife officials strive to solve a separate walleye riddle that permeates their difficulty in capturing ripe females for the egg-taking operation in March and April. A similar conundrum at Chatfield and Cherry Creek reservoirs caused biologists to consider rule changes at all three impoundments as part of the upcoming five-year regulatory cycle.
As for Monday’s test, the results now can be told. Of about a dozen fish landed, none was larger than 17 1/2 inches.
Case closed.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” radio KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
