I think they pull the gates depending on river flow. I want to say that occurs when the river flow reaches 36,000 cfs.

Sounds great! Keeping my fingers crossed!!

I humbly disagree. It’s a blue sucker. I have the fortune to see most of the rough fish in the Miss R in pool 3 and 4. The color and shape is typical for blue sucker. The body isn’t broad enough, nor is the nose shaped like a Smallmouth buffalo (too pointy). Anyway, my 2 cents worth.

Could it have been a blue sucker? They are torpedo shaped when smaller, while buffalo are shaped more like carp. Blue suckers also have a long “nose”. Used to be fairly common in the Miss. R. Highly prized commercially, also known as the “sweet sucker.” Fairly rare.
http://www.gen.umn.edu/research/fish/fishes/blue_sucker.html

I’ve had really good luck with R&L Repair in Red Wing, (I know you said the Rochester area, but maybe you could have it done during an extended vacation at Everts?) They do a great job, and are competitively priced.

The ramp at Diamond Bluff is $5/day or $35 for a season. There is a pay box at the ramp. Don’t cheat, because it’s patrolled regularly and you will get a notice on your windshield. You can park at the ramp (there’s only room for 2 rigs) if you have a season pass, or you can park 1/2 block south in the lot. Don’t park on the street. The only problem with parking in the lot is that you have to time it so there isn’t huge cruiser wakes banging your boat around while you run for your vehicle . I used the ramp yesterday, and it’s in good condition. You can access Buffalo slough through Brewer lake cut which is upstream of the ramp (second cut upstream), don’t try the Sturgeon Lake cut (first cut upstream), you won’t make it unless you’ve got an airboat. A buddy of mine got his vehicle broken into twice at the North Lake access , so beware!

Red hedge trimmers? I don’t even have a hedge.

Confession from a former IDA “grumbler” . I learned about this site 4-5 years ago. I saw somebody (Tuck?) on TV catching walleyes on the Miss. R. Sorry, I don’t remember the name of the TV show. Anyway, they were promoting the fishery and the website. Man, was I ticked when I got onto this site and viewed what information was available….for free no less ! My first thought was “well there goes the neighborhood !! I fish pool 3 backwaters mostly,(can’t seem to catch a walleye on pool 4 unless they’re jumpin in the boat) but I haven’t fished much the last couple of years, as family priorities come first . Anyway, the more I became aquainted with this website, the more impressed I became. I am giving credit to James and Dustin, as I know they are intimately involved, but I realize there are others who make this site what it is. To the doubters reading this post, I don’t know any of the people associated with this site personally, (I have talked to some on the river) so I’m not posting this to promote my buddies. James et. al. you have a product here to really be proud of, no foul language, no sophomoric nit-picky arguments, etc., that is such a turn-off on other sites. I know people crab about this site, because I was one of the crabbers (is that a word?) before I became familiar with what this site represents. I have personally benefitted from the knowledge posted here. I’d post fishing results myself, but most people already know how NOT to catch walleyes, which is my specialty . So, if people wanna crab there’s not much you can do about it. Let them remain bitter, and you go fishin!

Thanks for the info guys, I really appreciate it. It seems I am changing my mind about every 10 minutes on what to buy. Currently I am thinking about the Eagle Fishmark 480 Fishfinder and then getting a hand-held GPS that I can remove from the boat and take hunting. I can’t justify spending too much right now and the Fishmark 480 seems reasonably priced. Does anybody have any thoughts on the Fishmark 480? Thanks again.

I was wondering if a team could sign up at the rules meeting at 7 Friday night?

Has there been any decision on the tournament date?

Sweet! Count me in too!

Sounds like fun! Count me in!

I received this article via e-mail. I tried posting the link itself, but couldn’t get it to work (no netscape on my computer). Here is the text, but alas no pictures copied over. It is pretty long, but interesting. I think I’m going to buy stock in kevlar helmets. Anyway, FYI.

Asian carp swimming, eating their way toward Great Lakes
Bob von Sternberg, Star Tribune

Published June 22, 2003 CARP22

UTICA, ILL. — The 20-foot flat-bottomed johnboat roared up the Illinois River at 30 miles per hour, leaving a roiling brown wake. Suddenly, the water exploded.

Twenty pounds of fat, silvery carp shot into the air, twisting 5 feet above the river’s surface before slamming back into the water.

“Watch out — south of here, they wham right into the boat or jump in,” said Nate Caswell, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who was driving the boat.

Neither happened on this trip, but for the next 15 minutes, dozens of the ugly, hulking Asian carp performed their odd airborne ritual, flipping, leaping and skipping across the water.

“They freak out at the slightest disturbance, but nobody knows why,” Caswell said. “We want to keep them out of the Great Lakes if we can, but the fact is they’re on the way.”

It’s not just fish that are freaking out these days. The carp have worked scientists, resource managers and politicians into a frenzy.

Throughout the Great Lakes basin and along the Mississippi River, officials and researchers are desperately trying to fashion a way to stop the species’ advance.

The beasts have made their way upriver for more than a decade and are now less than 50 miles from Chicago’s Lake Michigan lakefront, held back by an electrified “dam.”
The carps’ voracious eating habits (one fish eats half its body weight per day) and breeding habits (they’re also known as “river rabbits”) could wipe out the base of the Great Lakes’ food chain. Beyond the ecological disaster that they would wreak, the carp could devastate the lakes’ $4.5 billion commercial and sport fisheries.

Add to that the grotesque spectacle that has been captured on videotape several times: Flying carp slamming into boaters, crashing into boats and flopping wildly in hulls.
“I’ve been hit by them — everyone in my crew has been,” said Caswell, who has been monitoring the carp for a year. “One of these days, some boater going 50-60 miles an hour is going to take a 10-pound carp to the noggin, get knocked out of the boat and drown.”

Pam Thiel, who supervises the carp project on the Illinois River, said such spectacles “seem like slapstick humor, but it’s really black humor when you realize what these carp could do to the Great Lakes.”

The carp are the most recent poster child in a widespread battle against invasive, non-native species, which federal officials estimate cause $137 billion in economic losses nationwide every year. More than 160 of these species have invaded the Great Lakes; a similar number have moved into the Mississippi River. They include such varying species as sea lampreys and zebra mussels.

But most Minnesotans haven’t heard of the Asian carp, much less been alarmed by their approach.

“I’ve been talking about these things for several years, but not a whole lot of people are paying a lot of attention,” said Jay Rendall, exotic species program coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “When they do start showing up here, they will.”

Four species of Asian carp — grass, silver, black and bighead — were imported into the United States in the 1970s by southern aquaculture operators who were using them to clean up fish farm waste and aquatic plants from the bottoms of their ponds. Then, they got out “through the accidental and intentional, legal and illegal release,” said a Fish and Wildlife Service bulletin.

They began moving north, up the Mississippi and its tributaries, piling up below dams, crowding out other fish species and filling commercial fishing nets so full that the nets couldn’t be lifted.

They have become so ubiquitous in the river’s lower reaches that when a fish kill of undetermined origin occurred four years ago on the Mississippi in Illinois, biologists discovered that 97 percent of the fish were Asian carp.

“On the ecological side, they just outcompete native fish,” Rendall said. “They filter up so much zooplankton, there’s not going to be much left for the native species to eat.”

Confronting a specter of a devastated Great Lakes fishery that would become, in effect, a vast carp farm, governments of both the United States and Canada have poured more than $1 million into heading off disaster.

Last month, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley convened the Aquatic Invasive Species Summit, a gathering of nearly 70 scientists, engineers and biologists who are trying to get carp under control. “The longer you put off solving a problem, the more it costs you in the long run,” Daley said. “An aggressive solution to a problem is always cheaper than repairing the damage later.”

Dennis L. Schornack, the chairman of the U.S. section of the International Joint Commission, which manages water bodies along the U.S.-Canadian border, called invasive species “the No. 1 threat to both the ecology and the economy of the Great Lakes.”

Thiel said the issue has received high-profile support “because this could cost big bucks, and people like Mayor Daley realize that.”

The Great Lakes’ last line of defense against the carp is an electrified “dam” that has been installed in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal about 25 miles from Lake Michigan. The canal was originally the Chicago River, which dumped raw sewage into the lake. It was re-engineered in 1900 to flow the opposite way, connecting it to the Illinois River’s drainage.

That inadvertently gave the carp and other, more benign, species a portal into the Great Lakes.

“Connecting the two had major implications for the whole mid-continent that no one could forsee,” Thiel said.

Since the electric barrier was switched on in April 2002, it has apparently done its job of repelling carp. But it has an expected lifetime of only three years, and federal officials are scrambling to beef up its reliability and build a permanent replacement.

Although carp have been found within a few miles of the barrier, the main advance remains farther away, according to the results of an annual survey of the Illinois River that was conducted earlier this month.

“We didn’t get them any closer than 21 miles from the barrier,” said Thiel, who supervised what was dubbed a carp corral. “But they were more numerous where we were netting them.”

A 14-boat armada carrying nearly 50 fishery biologists criss-crossed about 100 miles of the Illinois River for a week, repeatedly setting gillnets and recording their unwanted catches.

Thiel spent one morning with Caswell and fellow biologist Eric Leis on a stretch of the river centered on Starved Rock State Park. Although the biologists had had a 15-carp haul the day before, pickings were slim.

“Well, that bites,” Caswell said as he pulled in a nearly empty net.

“I guess we solved the problem — we’ve caught all of them,” Leis said.

By morning’s end, they had hauled in only four carp, which were tossed into an oversized cooler.

After being tested for diseases and pathogens, the fish would be “bled out and deep-sixed,” Caswell said. “They stink so bad there’s not a Dumpster around here that would take them.”

Marveling at their bloated ugliness, he described the fish as “like salmon from Bizarro World. In a postapocalyptic world, all you’ll have left is cockroaches — and carp.”

Bob von Sternberg is at [email protected].

I am so sorry to hear of your son’s passing. I lost my favorite fishing buddy in 1989. That was my dad who passed away at age 51 from a heart attack. I was 19. It hurt so bad, I didn’t know if I would make it. I know you are hurting and can’t imagine what you are going through. I have 4 little ones now, and losing them would be unbearable. But, (I know this may not help very much right now) you can take refuge in the fact that you had a great relationship with your son, and have great memories of him that will last your lifetime. Some fathers sadly don’t have that priveledge. God Bless you and your family.

All I do is let them flop around in a pile of salt (it doesn’t seem to matter what type of salt) until coated and them freeze them.

Just a little warning to check the ice every few yards if you go all the way down to the island. The current through there is pretty strong, and the ice thickness varies because of the current. I tried fishing down there a couple of years ago and the ice went from 12″ to 2″ pretty quickly. I actually stepped through, but didn’t go in. An ATV did go through while we were there. The rider jumped off and went completely under, but got out in just a few seconds. His buddies hooked a rope to his ATV and pulled it out. Needless to say, we left, carefully. Oh, we never saw a fish on the depthfinder and never got a bite, but we didn’t stay very long either.

I met Bruce Gruening at the landing at Diamond Bluff one night a week before the tourney. We visited a while and I found out he hadn’t much luck pre-fishing. I offered to show him a few spots on lower pool 3 and he accepted. Turns out he had a little bad luck during the RCL. He opted to release two fish (18 and 19″) early on day one and ended up only weighing 4 fish, one of which was a 16 incher caught late in the day, and his co-angler lost a 28″ish fish on day two. If he had kept the two fish from day 1 and was able to land the big fish on day 2 he would have made the final cut to fish on Friday. I know…shoulda, coulda, woulda….Anyway, I just wanted to chime in an let people interested know that Bruce is one heck-of-a-guy, and does a little guiding around Rhinelander, WI if anybody is up there and looking for someone to guide them in that area.

FYI. Be careful if you use the access at North Lake. The ramp is sand only and shallow, which may be a problem if you have a heavy boat. Plus, a buddy of mine had his pickup broken into twice while parked there. If you want to fish the lower end of the pool, use the public access below Treasure Island.

Ralph is selling bait and licenses, plus very limited amounts of tackle out of his bike store next to 4-seasons until he opens the large bait shop again. Otherwise there is a bait store down old west main from 4-seasons (down by the pottery place/sears) I haven’t been in there, I have only seen the cardboard advertisements placed on hwy 61 in town.

It was probably lymphocystis which is a disfiguring viral disease found in walleyes/saugers. I haven’t heard of fish dying from it, but it sure looks gross.

Has the DNR verified the catch as a flathead? I am curious if the fish was aged. This is done by removing a spine. I am curious to know how old the fish is/was?

The plant has 2 units that produce electricity. One unit was taken off-line for a refueling and maintenance outage in early Feb. It should be back to full power now. The plant is only taken off-line for outages or when a reactor trips (which may occur for a variety of reasons). The next outage I believe is scheduled for November.

Gooser