Well, I don't really consider our lakes unmanageable.

They are classified into three management goals: trout only, warmwater only and mixed species.

The majority of our lakes are mixed species - which means we do a put and take fishery of trout and there is natural production of warmwater fish within the lake. I would say the only lake we manage hard for warmwater only would be Silver Lake (Cowlitz Co.).

Then we have our trout only waters (i.e., Mineral, Swift, Merrill, Coldwater etc.) which despite the fact that there are bass in Mineral we are NOT changing the management to mixed. I would like to see a no bass limit on that lake - but we will see how that goes.

The mixed species management, in my humble little opinion, allows us to do several things.

1. Give anglers a put and take fishery for trout.
2. Give anglers the opportunities for warmwater fishing when trout fishing declines in the warmer months.

As I said above, the majority of our lakes are mixed species. Regardless of whether a person is a warmwater advocate or an anti-warmwater person - these fish are here and they ain't going anywhere. You can rehab a lake for the next hundred years and those fish are going to show right back up!!! Must be those new kind of bass that grow legs and walk from one body of water to the next. But more likely it is the fact that people continue to plant them whereever they feel like it.

So, it is better that we manage them and try to make some sort of fishery out of them - rather than ignore them hoping that they will go away because they just simply aren't going too.

Education is always the best tool. Warmwater fish do not need to be in every single lake in Washington. But I think that we should provide this type of fishery in lakes where they do currently exist. (By exist, I don't mean Joe Angler planting a bunch of bass tomorrow in a trout only lake and saying, hey provide a fishery, there are bass here! Uh, nope. Not gonna work!).

This has been a good debate. Very good points on both sides of the coin. Not an easy answer to find though.

stace