The reality is the state needs to have a smelt hatchery and start providing good bait to people. They do it in Maine and sell them in New Hampshire. Currently our state stocks fish in lakes but provides no food for them. It is a failing system that is putting pressure on bait fish within the lakes. As far as I’ve been able to tell from talking with some high up people is that F@W doesn’t have a good relationship with the VT DEC(department of environmental conservation) and don’t coordinate on what really needs to happen. You can’t keep stocking trout with out putting bait into the lakes and ponds. I’m thinking they need to start putting smelt into the lakes and then we can start having a good population of health fish in our lakes and ponds. With the addition of bait fish the other fish will in turn be able to have a thriving population. I most definitely plan on being at the next meeting in the NEK and recommend that you go if you care about the VT fisheries.
This is a great idea and easy to setup since the hatcheries could be configured for smelt, just don’t know about the metrics involved in getting smelt to a size ideal for release into the wild.
My guess is this should be applied to Champlain initially since there are plenty of food smelt populations on several inland waters that seem to be self sustaining.
Wouldn’t be a stretch to do this with suckers too, but growth rate might be hard to achieve without warm water which would be expensive in our cold climate.