Hi Dave,
I can tell you a bit about Big Platte lake. I moved up here from SW lower Michigan with my job 16 years ago and rented a cottage on BPL for the first three years and fished it fairly hard, even there wasn't much worth catching at that time. There were lots of SM bass, very few pike, some channel cats, lots of small perch, the occasional crappie, walleyes were very scarce back then, caught the occasional rainbow or brown down in the deeper west end. It was far from the best lake to fish in those days.
The DNR planted a lot of walleye fingerlings in 2000 and 2002 so for the last four or five yesrs people have been doing their best to catch out all the "planters" (there is very little natural reproduction re. walleyes in that system). Thank God, the state planted 158,000 fingerlings last July so that lake should be a 'eye factory again in three or four years. Til then.....pretty much a "dry hole".
Butch