Illinois DNR: A fishing tournament update

Everyone, The Illinois Department of Natural Resources anticipates new fishing tournament permit application rules will go into effect in April 2015. The application process is not yet online, so tournament anglers have continued to send in paper applications. To date the Department has received nearly 1,200 tournament requests. As part of the permit procedures, an online account will be created for each club or tournament trail that has submitted paper applications. Notification of that account will be sent to each tournament director via e-mail. Each tournament director will enter catch information after each tournament. This information will be used by the biologists make management decisions. We thank the tournament angling community for their patience as we’ve worked through this process and look forward to receiving their catch data. The new proposed rules can be found at http://www.dnr.illinois.gov/adrules/Pages/Proposed.aspx under the second notice tab. More information and a Question and Answer section on the rules can be found here:https://suntimesmedia.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/fishing_tournament_news_release.pdf