Mr. Walleye was ruining my clever idea.

I wanted to know how Gary Roach, inductee of numerous fishing halls of fame — and the man I’d most want on my team in Survivor: Hennepin Island — would fish for walleye without live bait on Lake Mille Lacs.

So I called him.

“Opening day,” I started. “You’re on Mille Lacs. Live bait isn’t allowed. What’s your advice?”

“Probably go to Leech or Winnie or Red,” he said.

This was Wednesday, the day before the Minnesota DNR killed my clever column idea for good by reversing its decision to ban live bait on Lake Mille Lacs all summer. That unprecedented restriction, paired with a similarly unprecedented demand that no walleyes be kept, gave the best odds that walleye fishing would not be closed in the middle of the summer, as happened last year.

Resort owners, guides and local leaders, by and large, accepted this double whammy through their representatives on the Mille Lacs Fisheries Advisory Committee, a 17-member panel formed in September by the Department of Natural Resources at the urging of Gov. Mark Dayton. Dayton, like the rest of the state, apparently felt a pang deep inside when walleye fishing was shut down last summer to avoid busting the state’s quota.

The idea behind the committee was to improve the relationship between the community and the DNR, so the DNR would no longer be accused of ignoring Garrison, Isle, Wahkon and Malmo every time St. Paul wanted a new rule making it harder to catch a walleye.

With the lake’s walleye population at a historical low, one of the best ways to protect the fish population is to make it hard to catch them. So the nocturnal fish cannot be targeted at night, and the minnow-eating fish cannot be fished for with minnows. Next step, perhaps: hookless fishing?

Nonetheless, there are still a ton of walleye in the lake — even Mr. Walleye agreed on that. The ice fishing bite was excellent, and with a dearth of forage leading into the spring, a banner bite is expected for the May 14 opener.

My clever idea was to help the legions of anglers who know fishing can be great on Mille Lacs, want to support the local economy and plan to hit the Big Pond on d’opener — but could use a few words of wisdom about this whole no-live-bait thing.

“So Gary, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you had to be on Mille Lacs for the opener. What’s the game plan? Twister tails, right? … Gary, you there? … Hello?”

“Look,” Roach began, pausing to make sure the slow brain on the other end of the line was keeping up. “They’ll hit plastics later on, when it’s warmer. It’s been cold lately. The water will still be cold. They’ll be shallow. They go shallow to eat minnows. They like to bite on minnows in the spring because they like to eat minnows in the spring.”

“So, you really don’t think … ”

“Sure, you can catch a few fish. But it’s not like Canada, where the fish won’t stop biting. Up in Canada, they’ll eat anything. You can dip ’em in gas, for crying out loud. I actually did that once to make a point: unscrewed the gas tank and dipped a jig in the gas. Still caught a fish. I wouldn’t try that on Mille Lacs. You can catch fish all day on so many lakes in Minnesota in the cold water, but the shiners really make a difference. And you know what else? You can keep a few, too.”

Ouch. I could picture DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr lamenting: “If I’ve lost Mr. Walleye, I’ve lost Minnesota.”

The next day, when Landwehr and the DNR announced they were reversing the live-bait ban following a wave of negative feedback, I could see where they were coming from.

Among the committee members who pressured the DNR to allow live bait was Tony Roach, Mr. Walleye’s nephew and a Mille Lacs guide. Tony Roach had gotten an earful himself from potential clients at the Northwest Sportshow.

Resort owners spoke of phone calls from ticked-off clients — “average fishermen,” as Dean Hanson, who operates Agate Bay Resort in Isle and co-chairs the advisory committee, described them. They were OK with throwing back any walleye they caught, but they weren’t OK with being forced to fish for them with nothing but fake bait.

So those who stood to lose money pressured the DNR, and the DNR — making it clear that a midsummer closure would be “two to three times more” likely — obliged. So, it’s a fair question to ask: Who are they to risk our otherwise constitutional right to fish all summer long?

One way or another, no more than 28,600 pounds of walleyes, give or take, will be killed by angling this summer. That’s the state’s allocation negotiated with Chippewa Indians who have court-upheld rights to the fish. We reach that number, walleye fishing stops. It’s just a question of whether we kill that many at all, and how quickly.

It’s called fishing. It’s supposed to be a challenge. If you’ve gotta learn to catch walleye without live bait, so be it.

One problem with that: Even Mr. Walleye would disagree.