On the name alone, it seems like not such a great deal for the fish.
The FishSticks Project sounds like some perch and walleye will soon be relocating under a pile of tartar sauce.
Actually, the initiative undertaken by the Belle Plaine Sportsman’s Club could be the best thing that ever happened to the aquatic vertebrates at the Cloverleaf chain of lakes. Certainly the smaller fish will give it two gills up.
Somewhere around the time the Milwaukee Brewers get their season started, the 22 Chinese elm trees that now lay bundled lengthwise at six points around the frozen lakes will become part of the habitat at Cloverleaf Lakes. When warmer weather arrives and the lake ice melts, the trees will be lowered and anchored onto the floor of Grass Lake, Round Lake and Pine Lake, providing shelter for prey on the lam from the bigger fish, and affording a hangout for fish in a progenitive kind of mood.
“The fish will reproduce in there, they’ll grow up in there, and the smaller fish can hide from the bigger fish,” said Craig Ford, co-chair of the Belle Plaine Sportsman’s Club. “It’ll give them a spot where they can just grow up as fish. It’s going to be pretty interesting down there.”
Some of the early concerns raised by local residents over the project included snowmobile safety. Treetops and branches sticking two or three feet out of the lake could make for an unpleasant surprise for an unaware snowmobiler, or water skiier. Thus, one of the agreements before setting the project in motion was that no trees would be placed farther than 100 feet from the shore.
“The farthest group of trees is 76 feet from the shore,” Ford said. “We were very careful about that, because it’s a legitimate concern.”
The project, for which the Belle Plaine Sportsman’s Club applied for a $25,000 grant from the Department of Natural Resources, is being done in stages. The first stage was removing the 22 70-foot trees from the Waupaca County farm of Jay and Laurie Ford — Craig Ford’s brother and sister-in-law — and delivering them to the lakes.
“The trees needed to be cut fresh,” Craig Ford said. “So we cut them fresh and hauled them off in an old International tractor. It was hilarious. That tractor is little, but it’s still powerful. We hauled them off with in groups of two or three, tied together with chains. No one’s got hurt throughout all this, thank God.”
The next phase involved bundling up the trees before setting them on the frozen lakes, this in order to prevent their separating and scattering should an unexpected stretch of warm temperatures make for a premature submerging of the trees.
Toward the end of February the bundled trees will be temporarily anchored to a tree or other fixture along the shore. Once the lake conditions are right, the groups of trees will be fixed to the lake floor with a sharp, V-shaped anchor, and just like that, the crappie and carp will have a new hangout.
“There are three to five trees in each of the units,” Craig Ford said. “Some of the branches — or, what we’re calling ‘FishSticks’ — may stick out from the lake. The DNR considers that beneficial for birds and turtles.”
Interested parties are urged to attend the monthly meetings of the Belle Plaine Sportsman’s Club at 6 p.m. on every fourth Tuesday of the month at Butch’s Archery on state Highway 22 in Belle Plaine.
“Everything with the project seems to be going calmly so far,” Craig Ford said. “It’s a change for people. It’s something they’ve never seen before. We’ve tried to get the word out so everyone knows what’s going on. So far, everything seems to be going great.”
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