By Louie Stout
The next best thing to catching walleyes might be saugeye, a species that appears to be doing quite well in Cedar Lake in northwest Indiana.
Fingerlings were stocked there last year, and according to District Fisheries Biologist Courtney Weldon, they’re doing quite well. She and other fisheries folks surveyed the Lake County fishery, located southwest of Crown Point, Ind., last fall and found an abundance of young saugeye.
Saugeye is a hybrid cross between a walleye and a sauger. There is no size limit, but the bag limit is 6.
“They went in measuring about an inch and half (76,675 of them) last spring and the ones we saw in the fall averaged 10.3 inches,” she said. “We saw a great return (survival).”
That didn’t seem to be the case for 3,163 surplus walleyes that were stocked in the fall of 2024.
“We never saw one of those fish,” she said. “It was shocking, but we did capture four older walleyes that were not fish we planted.”
However, she noted, the lake is very difficult for biologists to electro-fish because there is no weed edge on the 1,750-acre lake. Cedar has a maximum depth of 16 feet and averages about 8 feet deep. Also, the walleyes could have been in deeper water when they were there. She plans to go back again this fall to re-survey the lake.
She says the saugeye results could lead to more stocking. The lake has an abundance of forage for them to eat.
“Saugeye can tolerate the shallower and hotter water found in that body of water,” sha said.