"There's not too many places where you get a catch rate of 50 or 100 fish a day," said Gary Barnard, the region's DNR fisheries supervisor.
In the late 1990s, after years of excessive harvesting threatened to wipe out Red Lake's walleye population, the DNR and Red Lake Nation joined forces to shut down the fishery for seven years. In that period, three large-scale stocking events added millions of walleye fry to the lake. Now the stocking program has been shelved while the DNR and Red Lake Band oversee a joint harvest plan that governs annual walleye poundage taken from the lake.
"Right now, every fish is a result of natural reproduction," Drewes said.
The DNR's latest walleye gill net effort captured an average of 34.7 per gill net. Classes of fish born in 2009 and 2011 continue to dominate the population, most of those fish measuring between 14 and 17 inches. But there are other relevant classes of fish born in other years.
"Everything should be stable there for a while," Barnard said.
Sixty percent of oval-shaped Upper Red Lake belongs to the area's Chippewa. East of the lake's dividing line, Minnesota's jurisdiction covers 48,000 acres of water no deeper than 16 feet. There's a shallow, underwater lip all around the shore, and Red Lake veterans such as Kenny Neu of Monticello were finding walleyes last weekend in 3 feet of water next to bulrushes.