Can you Burn a Lake by making a fishing report about it?

[etucker1959]

In another thread the OP thought that was a big reason why the fish reports have become few and far between on this website. I gave my opinion of one of the reasons (which actually their is many) why their are fewer reports on here now then as before. I'm not going to just state my opinion or call people paranoid, but give my own personal experiences that prove posting fish reports are not bad for the lake. You can make up your own minds when I'm done stating my case.

1. How much readership and influence does this website have?

An average fish report on here might get as few as a few hundred people reading it or a little over a thousand people at most viewing the thread. Now compare that to Western Outdoor News? Their readership is 10's of thousands or more then FNN. Yet when they report on hundreds of lakes a week, I don't see any of them get a stampede of people! Yes their are overcrowded lakes at times but their is usually a reason why. (it's not because someone wrote a fish report about it!) It was because their was a Free fishing derby there for example. (the lake was stocked with a tremendous amount of fish at the time) Or it was opening day at some well known reservoir with lots of hungry fish that haven't been fished for in months! Those are some of the reasons why you see a lake that looks like an overcrowded party boat fishing for Sand Bass! Lol

2. How many times have the reader read about wide open fishing at a lake you've never been too and just showed up and wiped them out?

It happened to me just 3 times in my whole life! One of them was just last year at Lake Silverwood in June, when they were forced to dump 20,000 pounds of trout in a small area in only 10 day's! (that was just a freaky thing that will probably never happen again!)

3. My own experience at writing fish reports on FNN.

When I joined this website 9 years ago I was the park catfish king! They were stocking them almost monthly back then and I would catch between 700- 1,000 catfish a year. I did my own experiments, I would catch 30 catfish that day and write a report and see if in the next day or two would their be any change in the amount of anglers fishing for them? Nope!!!! Nothing would change. If you think about it for a minute, a park catfish is the perfect fish for the imaginary Bucket Brigade to show up and fish for! The catfish is good eating, their is no enforcements on limits and their Free to fish for! (a perfect Bucket Brigade scenario) Expect the Bucket Brigade doesn't get their information on the Internet! (they have their own sources)

4. My own experience about reading a fish report on FNN and trying to duplicate the results.

I sorta thread jack a thread last week and got roughed up in the process. So I kinda wanted to prove my point in real time! So what I did was look at a recent FNN fish report where the OP wiped them out and the tried to duplicate the results. So on Friday Sept 18, 2020 I went to Lake Piru with 2 of my fellow FNN fishing buddy's and tried to catch some Crappies. I've never been to the lake before, so I was only using the information the OP put out in a fish report. Before I tell you the results, I'm going to tell you what we were fishing with. (to illustrate that we were better armed then your average Bucket Brigadier) Now a true Bucket Brigadier wants to fish as cheap as possible! They might be willing to pay the $14 parking fee and fish from shore. But renting a boat for $100 isn't very cost effective! (we did) We were armed with #2 pound test line and plenty of Mini jigs and Poor Mans baits! Plus Crappie niblets and meal worms to make our baits as appealing as possible! We also brought 3 fish graphs with us to see the bottom and mark any fish or bait schools. We took the information we got from the fish report and fished are butts off for 7 hours. I also think we fished one of the better Crappie area's too! We didn't even come close to what the OP caught! Let me rephrase that, "we weren't even in the same ball park as the OP!" Lol