of these is the general and widespread increase 

 in fishing interest and activity in t±ie country. 

 The other factor applies specifically to the water 

 involved, which has gained considerably in 

 reputation as a fishing area . Rumors of good 

 fishing are a powerful magnet to attract fisher- 

 men. This tendency for good fishing to bring 

 about an increase m numbers of fishermen has 

 been mentioned by others, such as Eschmeyer 

 (1942) and Frey and Vike (1941). 



the census clerk recorded only the number of 

 hours that the fisherman had been fishing up to 

 the time of the interview, as well as the parts of 

 the day involved (morning, afternoon or evening) . 

 Thus, all of the data can be expressed in terms 

 of catch per fisherman-hour . In the event that 

 the fishing of more than one person was entered 

 on a single census form, as often was the case, 

 someone of the fishing party acted as spokesman 

 for the group . 



Methods 



Field operations. The field technique which was 

 used followed in general the conventional method 

 of creel census operation. With the exception of 

 a comparatively few returns which were submit- 

 ted voluntarily by the fishermen and routed 

 through boat liveries or sporting goods shops, 

 the data were recorded by personal interview 

 with the fishermen by an employee of the survey 

 (or in some instances by a boat livery or resort 

 operator) . 



In the summer work part of the contacts 

 were made by boat or foot travel and the fisher- 

 men were interviewed while fishing. A large 

 percentage of the contacts were made at boat 

 liveries and landings as the fishermen came in 

 from their fishing trips. In the winter work, 

 contacts were made on the ice at the actual fish- 

 ing site . The winter fishing did not consist en- 

 tirely of ice fishing however; a small amount of 

 fishing was done in open water below the dams. 

 This open -water fishing has not been separated 

 from ice fishing in the tabulations of the data. 



The necessity of covering several fishing 

 localities each day required the use of consider- 

 able travel by automobile, which added to the 

 expense of the operation. Also, a large amount 

 of traveling was done by motorboat which, al- 

 though slower than an automobile, permitted 

 access to more out-of-the-way fishing spots. 



Report forms . A separate field data form was 

 used for each of the 4 separate seasonal projects 

 but in reality these represented only modifica- 

 tions of a generalized form used by many other 

 creel census workers. The changes from one 

 season to the next were mostly in the nature of 

 simplification since it appeared that certain in- 

 formation was relatively nonessential and could 

 be dispensed with in favor of covering more 

 ground. 



The principal items on the field form 

 were: the locality and pool number; the date; 

 the time of day fished; the number of men and 

 number of women in the fishing party; the number 

 of hours fished; and the catch in terms of Kinds 

 of fish and number of each kind. 



An effort was made to carry out the inter- 

 views as nearly as possible at or toward the end 

 of the day's fishing for each individual fisherman, 

 in order to secure information concerning the 

 length of the average fishing period. Since many 

 of the fishermen quit fishing only at the end of 

 the afternoon or (in the summertime) of the eve- 

 ning.a large share of the contacts had to be made 

 late in the afternoon or evening. The field men, 

 however, attempted to make a certain number of 

 contacts in the morning or at mid-day to catch 

 the early -bird fishermen and to secure informa- 

 tion regarding variance of fishing success with 

 the time of day. In any event, whether or not 

 the fisherman had concluded fishing for that day. 



The field forms were printed on cards 

 which were carried loose by the field operators 

 and later were assembled in file boxes. An at- 

 tempt was made to design the printing of this 

 form so that the recorded information could 

 readily be handled by punchcard tabulating tech- 

 nique. This attempt was only partially successful. 



Tabulating procedures . Part of the sorting and 

 tabulating of the collected data was done by hand 

 methods and part of it by I. B. M. electric punch - 

 card technique. It was found that a number of 

 serious errors were made during the card-punch- 

 ing process, and therefore much of the electric 

 tabulating work had to be rechecked by hand later . 



