I’ve been fishing the Croix just about exclusively for the last 5 years. Mostly Smallmouth & Musky. Up until today, I’d never even seen a Sturgeon, let alone caught one. For awhile now, I’ve been telling my pops I wanted to catch one, and that sooner or later with all this time on the Croix, I would get bit by one by accident.
Well today we anchored in a deep pool & I threw out a crawler on a circle hook. Gave it 10 min, nothing doing, went to pull my line in, suddenly it takes off like a freight train. Instantly I knew it was a Sturgeon — and a big one. I was only using a heavy bass rod, but fortunately I had some fairly strong power pro on (40 lb?).
Anyway, I was clearly not stopping this fish, so I had my pops pull anchor and start following it with the troller. This went on for several minutes before I even got it up enough to see how huge it was. It was enormous. The water was crystal clear, and my first long look at it, I figured it was 7 ft long. I’ve caught a 52″ & 50″ Musky, and this sturgeon made them tiny in comparison. And here’s the kicker: it was HOOKED IN THE TAIL.
So here I am with a bass rod, trying to pull a 100+ lb fish backwards by the tail. I COULD NOT MOVE THE FISH, we followed it around for a long time, and I kept pressure to attempt to tire him. After several minutes, he tired to the point that he stayed near the surface, as opposed to the initial minutes of deep digging up river, but there was nothing I could do to truly tire him. At any point he could chug off, and there was nothing I could do to hold him back.
Clearly he wasn’t even gonna fit in our musky net, so our first plan was to beach him, but it became clear that there was absolutely no way my under matched tackle could pull that fish backward onto shore — I couldn’t even get him near shore. Eventually he made his way down river were it was only 2 feet deep, and we made the decision to try to net his nose.
So, my 61 y/o pops (with back problems), jumps out the boat into the river and miraculously manages to scoop the fishes nose into the net. It’s a musky net — but not a huge musky net — so practically half the fish is hanging out the net. Standing in the boat, I grab my side of the net with one hand, and the half of the fish hanging out the net by the tail with my other hand, meanwhile my pops is holding his side of the net bag from in the water. The fish is thrashing like crazy and the line breaks almost instantly once the fish is in the net.
At this point, we had about another 3 or 4 seconds, where we could have tried to hail mary heave the fish/net into the boat. Personally I was just thinking of all the chaos that would ensue if we did manage to get it in the boat (and I really didn’t wanna hurt the fish), meanwhile my dad was apparently thinking we should drag him to shore in the net. Well in those 3 seconds of indecision, as we hung onto the net for dear life, the fish thrashed so hard, it broke through the cheap net bag & escaped through the bottom of the net to freedom. We watched it’s fins for a minute or so, as it slowly sauntered away down river through the shallow water.
Yeah, I would have liked a photo, but I honestly didn’t care. We had that fish up on the surface near the boat for so many minutes that I saw all I needed to see, plus I would have never been able to hold it up for a photo anyway. My initial 7 ft guess was surely a little high (as first guesses tend to be), but I can absolutely guarantee it was AT LEAST 6ft, because I had it right up on the surface past the front end of the boat several times and it was LONGER than the boat is wide (a little tri-hull with a 6ft beam).
So…how’s that for a first sturgeon?
