The Friends of Birch Lake (where we have our cabin) plan to build fish cribs later this month. Already a couple dozen lie sunken on the lakebed, though I confess I know the locations of only three or four. They're tough to find with the low-quality sonar unit on my fishing boat (the lake friends group does have a map, but sometimes even that isn't a great deal of help).
Anyway, the theory is that you build these frames of large logs, spiked together and festooned with brush. You weigh them down with concrete blocks, set them on the ice in the chosen spots, and wait for spring. Then, in theory, once in place they attract fish. So in a lake like ours, largely stripped of weeds by rusty crayfish and with limited bottom structure except for a rocky, humpy area on the northeast side, these cribs become good places to find walleyes and smallmouth bass.
That much in my experience is true -- I have caught fish around the Birch Lake cribs (though I've had more success observing those fish while snorkeling than I've had catching them). What's less certain is that cribs help produce rather than simply attract fish -- big difference. The idea is that the cribs provide cover -- places to hide -- for fish fry, so that more avoid getting eaten and grow to adulthood, and thus the populations of perch, bass, walleyes and bluegills get bigger. What's more likely is that the cribs just concentrate fish -- the number in the lake stays about the same, but they are more focused on the cribs (less scattered) thus easier to find.
Either way, I'm all for adding cribs to the lake. I wish I could help build them, but it looks like I will have to be out of town on business the the day appointed. I hope my fellow Birch Lake Friends members will be generous about sharing the locations -- or that I get to see the cribs on the ice before it melts.
Do you have cribs on your lake? What is your experience with them? Have they improved the fishng? How and to what degree?
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