Just about everyone who has spent a fair amount of time fishing in Michigan has experienced it: An angler pulls up to the dock -- or steps out of the river -- and is met by a green-shirted, clipboard-carrying person, who asks for a few moments of their time.

What follows is a litany of questions: What were you fishing for? How did you do? How long were you fishing? Where do you live?

Welcome to the Department of Natural Resources Fisheries Division's survey program. It's one way the DNR tries to understand which resources are important to Michigan anglers and whether those needs are being met.

Tracy Kolb, a biologist who works out of the Charlevoix Fisheries Research Station and is in charge of the Statewide Angler Survey Program, said the underlying principles are fairly simple.

"The point of the whole program is to characterize how many fish are harvested out of the Great Lakes, inland lakes and tributaries to the Great Lakes; how many hours anglers are spending fishing and what fish they're targeting," she explained.

"The primary goal is to ensure we have enough information to manage our fisheries across the state. Another goal is to get that information back out to the anglers. We currently are developing an online database that will allow anglers to search for and obtain our survey data."

While collecting survey data, DNR clerks also attempt to collect as much biological data as they can from the anglers' fish. They'll weigh and measure fish and take scale samples that will be used to age those fish. The data gives biologists a picture of the overall health of various fish populations.

"We check tags so we can figure out the percentage of hatchery fish in the harvest," Kolb said. "We notice how far they're traveling. But not all hatchery fish are tagged, so we do what we can."

Data from these surveys can point out trends that fisheries biologists might otherwise miss, such as the fact that many fish stocked in Lake Huron actually wound up being caught in Lake Michigan or Lake Michigan tributaries.

In addition to information on the fish, creel clerks try to collect information on the angling public. They'll ask anglers for their zip codes and age, though that data hasn't been crunched yet, Kolb said.

"We want to know which lakes are really important to people, which lakes they're willing to travel long distances to fish, and which lakes are mostly just local fisheries," Kolb said.

"We're working at 56 ports on the Great Lakes and currently at four inland lakes," she continued. "We work the open-water season for all the Great Lakes with 33 clerks, most of whom cover two ports each -- all the weekend days and three days during the week. We also have winter creel surveys at the Bays de Noc and Saginaw Bay."

In some cases, the survey data is augmented by aerial surveys to get an idea of how much fishing actually is going on.

"We do aerial boat counts on Lake Erie, Saginaw Bay and northern Lake Huron," Kolb said. "In the winter we do aerial ice shanty counts on Saginaw Bay, too."

On inland lakes, the program currently has three clerks working.

"Right now, one is working Lake Bellaire, one's working Clear Lake and Long Lake (St. Joseph County) and one is working Mullett Lake," Kolb said. "We have two other clerks who normally work inland who currently are stationed at Great Lakes ports in the 1836 Treaty waters. We rotate those two from the Great Lakes to inland lakes and tributaries every few years."

Clerks are trained on how to interact with the public and how to communicate the importance of the surveys. For the most part, anglers are cooperative, Kolb said.

"I haven't heard of any major issues that have taken place between survey clerks and anglers," Kolb said. "Most of the people we interview don't have any problems with our clerks and some of them really get to know the clerks -- they see them every day. We have some people who are willing to wait for the clerks if they're busy interviewing someone else. And we have some people who will call clerks and tell them when there are a lot of people coming in.

"We've got great fishermen in the state of Michigan."

The Statewide Angler Survey Program costs the DNR about $1 million annually.

Although most survey data are collected to provide a big-picture view of fisheries, creel surveys sometimes are conducted to answer very specific management questions. The season-long creel survey on the Au Sable River below the dam at Mio this year is an excellent example.

The stretch of the Au Sable River from Mio to McKinley currently is being managed as a research area for trout since the regulations there vary from those that might be in place on similar waters. As DNR fisheries managers are looking to further simplify fishing regulations, they want solid information on how much fishing pressure the water is getting, how many fish are being caught and how many of those fish are being harvested.

"We spend a lot of money stocking that stretch of the river, so we need to know if we're getting our money's worth," said fisheries biologist Steve Sendek, who works on the Au Sable. "There's a lot of interest from the public in protecting large brown trout there, but there's also a lot of interest in still being able to harvest some trout. So we need to know what anglers are catching, what size and what species, so we can develop regulations that might help produce larger fish in the population but still allow a component of that population to be harvested.

"The creel survey is a tool that will give us a picture of what's going on there."