If you are a local or someone who has visited Crawford Reservoir in the past it used to be an amazing fishery! Over the past 10 years it has become less productive due to low water levels because of severe drought conditions. With the water levels not staying high enough on the shoreline for long enough, there is no structure for spawning habitat and predator evasion to allow this fishery to stay viable for all species. The substrate of Crawford Reservoir is stark and bare which does not allow fish to spawn or hide from predatory fish. There is a simple solution to this problem. We must add artificial structure to the reservoir!!!! This would sky rocket the numbers of mutiple species such as crappie and perch to allow them to thrive and survive. This creates a balanced ecosystem to provide forage for larger predatory fish that will generate larger size game fish for recreational fishing. This will allow the perch and crappie population to grow in volume and size to once again allow for abundant to fishing.
There has been many attempts to add artifical structure to Crawford Reservoir(which would have been fully funded by the state). The only thing holding this venture back has been a handful of people on The Crawford Water Conservancy District. Their only reasoning for not allowing the project to proceed is their concern that these structures may block the damn not allowing water to pass. This problem is of no real concern as these structures are anchored to the bottom of the reservoir and there is not enough flow to even allow this to occur.
Lets do the right thing and bring back this resivior to its former glory! Which in turn will help recreational fishing and the local economy of small towns such as Crawford and Hotchkiss.
