Photo by Ron Hustvedt.

Walleye fishing was pretty darn good last year, a trend that should continue throughout 2008, DNR fisheries managers say. That’s great news for Minnesota’s walleye anglers who live and die by DNR management efforts. Some anglers are quite content with the walleye population, while others never seem to be satisfied.

The job of keeping the walleye population in balance is the responsibility of the hundreds of folks in DNR fisheries offices around the state. Two of the men heading that section of the DNR are Ron Payer, fisheries chief, and Roy Johannes, fisheries program consultant. Both are longtime employees whose careers span nearly three decades. Needless to say, they have a broad perspective on the management of our state fish.

Minnesota remains the destination of choice for walleye anglers around the country. This includes everyone from tourists coming for dinner or tournament anglers making a stop on one of Minnesota’s big lakes or rivers chock-full of walleyes. All those nonresidents come here for an opportunity that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the country in such a wide variety of ways. Oh sure, there are plenty of walleyes in several other states and some other places where the average size is larger, but no other state has such a broad range of walleye fishing experiences as Minnesota.

With lakes and rivers dotting the woods and prairies, walleyes may be caught down deep, in weeds and all locations in between -- even in the middle of the lake. Check the address book of your favorite national walleye tournament trail and you’ll see more addresses in Minnesota than any other state. Heck, the headquarters for most of those national walleye tournament trails have a postal code of “MN.”

Things aren’t all duckies and bunnies, however, for Minnesota’s walleyes. There are plenty of challenges and even more unknowns that may greatly affect fisheries in the near future and well beyond. Johannes and Payer recently took some time from their jobs dealing with those challenges and the routines of managing our state fish to chat with Minnesota Sportsman.

“Walleyes are a resilient species and have maintained overall decent numbers over the years. I think the walleye fishery is in good shape with good numbers and good size structure on most waters,” Payer said.

One factor that makes managing our state’s walleye population so challenging is a large number of very good anglers.

“Our anglers are skillful and have good equipment along with access to lots of information, such as the Internet and other sources of information. This puts a lot of pressure on the fishery, but the walleyes have hung in there pretty well,” he added.