I support the 10-fish limit because, in good years, CDOW has no trouble getting enough eggs, and the macks seem to be growing just fine on the remaining fish and there still lots left over for the anglers. I think that if you wanted to do something to guarantee a steady supply of eggs, you'd want to make sure that the environmental conditions were conducive to a good spawning run, and good survival of juvenile and adult kokanee. A couple of years back, Blue Mesa was so low that the fish had to struggle to swim up the old Gunnison River channel in the Iola Basin, most of which was just a big mud flat...if I remember correctly, that was a particularly poor year for egg take. A new and growing threat in Blue Mesa are the illegally introduced yellow perch. If a large population develops, and they happen to be hanging around the shallow end of the lake when all the kokanee come down from Roaring Judy, it'll be a massacre. If the perch get the kokanee, then there'll be fewer kokanee to feed the big lake trout, the anglers (like me), and to produce eggs for the next generation!
I'm curious whether the majority of anglers actually catch a limit of kokanee every time they go out. I know that some of the anglers I see at Blue Mesa definitely do, but a lot of them seem not to. I almost always limit at Blue Mesa, but that isn't always the case on other lakes.
