A Day on the Trawler

The Winnebago Waterways were invited on the WDNR trawler for their last sampling day of the year. We were joined by another volunteer from Shadows on the Wolf out of Fremont to help the WDNR Fisheries staff conduct monitoring.

Historically the trawler was used to harvest drum from the lake. We learned that about every acre of Lake Winnebago is home to 500+ drum. In the 80s, it was decided that solely harvesting drum was not making the impact on the fish population they had hoped and the trawler was repurposed as a field boat to do fish surveys on the system.

Each year, the trawler heads out three weeks – once in August, once in September, and once in October – to sample 30+ locations arounds Lake Winnebago. These locations are sampled the exact same way each trip to ensure the results are comparable. The trawler drops its net and then drags it across the bottom of the lake for approximately 1 acre. From there, the net is pulled in, the fish are dumped on a table and the sorting begins!

Large fish are first sorted. The drum collected are sent up a conveyor belt to be of disposed of once the trawler returns to its launch point. If you’ve never held a drum, we highly suggest it. They get their name from a weird drumming feeling you can hear and feel in their body.

Rough fish are quickly counted and thrown back while game fish are measured and counted then thrown back. Once all the large fish are removed, fisheries staff and volunteers painstakingly count all the young fish.

One thing that was very fascinating during this outing was that we had 6 trawl pulls with a lot of large fish and 3 with a lot of small fish. And when we say a lot, we mean we counted 300+ young trout perch by ourselves and didn’t even have the highest count during that sorting. We were told the big fish just hadn’t found the little fish in the spots we were sampling.