Thanks for the kind words about our facility, Tobias. We do try, although I must say I think there are some other places in the stat that are pretty nice as well.

When comparing Indiana waters with those of KY and TN, and a few others, there are some cold hard facts that many lake users do not know or understand.

The first is that most of that difference is about topography, not fishing or fishery management. Some of the big rivers in those states run in long deep valleys between large hills. Compared to TN and KY, Indiana is relatively flat. That is fact one.

Another fact is that very few lakes have ever been built in the USA with a primary design focus of fisheries management. They are built to control flooding; which is why the source of the funding came through the US Army Corps of Engineers (COE). I some of the southern lakes and other agency was formed as the Tennessee Valley Authorit (TVA). In other places dams were built by the Bureau of Reclamation.

The purpose of nearly all the big man-made waters in the USA were built for flood control and/or hydroelectric production. Fishing, boating and other recreation activities are nice bonus features in some of these projects, but are not why the lakes were built; and were never seen as a source of funding for lake development. They are still not.

Suggestions like damming the White river to make a large lake because anglers feel they need more water is an ill-informed suggestion. Such a a project would likely cost billions of dollars in today’s marketplace. If there is no need for flood control or power production, and if we are to begin building large lakes for fishing, the cost of fishing would be astronomical. Not only is there the cost of the construction, but the project would also require the purchase of all the involved land. Indiana has some 6.3 million people. At least one estimate indicates about 10% of that population fish at least once per year. That would be about 630,000 people to split the cost. At even $1 Billion, the cost of such a lake built by IDNR would require each angler in the state to pay something in the neighborhood of $1,587 each, just of that one project.

Another fact is that the days of building big lakes in the US are probably over. Most of the large rivers are now controlled to some degree, and environmental concerns would cause serious problems getting large land areas flooded nowadays. I know of no initiatives out there in the management pipeline that appear to offer any real hope for new large lakes of the scale we saw built in the 50’s and 60’s, and 70’s. There is just not going to be any new 60K acre lake in Indiana in our lifetimes. What we need to focus on is how to best utilize what we have and protect the resource that is left. That means better and more appropriate watershed management, more effort on enforcement and education about things that damage angling overall. And that is going to cost a lot of money that anglers are going to have to pay; because no one else wants it to happen enough to pay for it for us.