Idaho’s Snake River Sturgeon

It was late afternoon when the first faint tap echoed through the braided dacron line. In early August the Hells Canyon section of the Snake River is laced with strands of drifting weed, and I wondered if perhaps a clump had hit the line. It had been two hours since I lowered the sour chicken leg into the deep hole. By now it would have lost much of its flavor--if it was still attached to the hook at all.

I took a turn on the Penn Senator reel.  A trout rolled onthe edge of the main current. Fish usually bite when you pay the least attention and I watched a deer feed high on the opposite hillside and waited.

A bump, a light tug, then nothing. It might have been a whitefish mouthing the bait, or one of the twenty-inch carp that fill the Snake’s clear shallows. Or it could be a catfish attracted by the chicken’s exotic smell. Unlikely, but possible. Minutes passed.  The shadows settled deeper into the canyon.   Another bump echoed up the line. Was one fish or two working the bait? If a single fish, had it just stripped the double stainless-steel hooks?

 I took a firm purchase on the coffee can-sized Penn reel and braced against the rowing frame. The line suddenly went slack. I spun the crank and prayed for weight.

 Then the tip rod tip arced into river.  There was no give in this fish, only the reel’s startled shriek as it felt the sting of the hooks and sounded into the deep hole.  The reel shed line and despite my best effort, could not lift the rod tip.

 Sturgeon!

 Judging from the howling reel and double ben rod,  this fish was huge.

Despite decades of study, Idaho’s white sturgeon are something of a mystery. According to Fred Partridge, a Senior Fisheries Research Biologist for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, it is impossible to draw hard-and-fast conclusions about sturgeon. Though the fossil record dates back 100 million years to the Cretaceous era, sturgeon are docile, reclusive fish that seek the Snake’s deepest holes and swiftest water.

Further complicating studies, sturgeon are bottom feeders, consistently rub against rocks, and are therefore extremely resistant to tagging.

Because they are difficult to track, one study will claim sturgeon migrate, the next will insist they are territorial; one says they spawn in fast water, the next in deep eddies; one says they can live to be fifty years old, the next a century. No one disputes, however, that Idaho’s white sturgeon can grow to be stupendously big. A sepia photograph taken in 1898 shows a 1,500 pound, 20-foot monster being dragged by a four-mule team onto a bank below Twin Falls.

Jerry Hughes of Hughes River Adventures in Cambridge mentioned that during a June float trip through Hells Canyon his group hooked three fish in one night, including one monster that, in his own words,”. . . we couldn’t handle. In fact we couldn’t even turn it. We never saw it because it never came to the surface and if Tom Wolfe, one of our guides, hadn’t cranked down on the drag and deliberately broken it off, it would have spooled us. I don’t know whether what we hooked was a very strong fish or a very big fish or both.”

Fifteen hundred pounds and twenty feet would be a modern rectord.

 The Snake, however, has witnessed dramatic change since the turn of the 19th century. Dams now block upstream migration limiting both the sturgeon’s food base and its ability to spawn. Then too, the Twin Falls monster was caught on a set line (a cable with hooks strung to an anchored barrel, now illegal). The largest sturgeon caught on a rod and reel was 600 pounds, which might only indicate the equipment’s upper limit.

Violet Shirley, who was born in Hells Canyon and now caretakes the Hells Canyon Museum at Kirkwood Bar, remembers that her father once caught a fifteen footer. “He used to throw the eight-footers back,” she recalls. “Until the jet boats began bringing commercial parties into the upper reaches of Hells Canyon, there was always plenty of fish.” Violet remebers that the commercial parties often only the prime steaks were cut out of the fish; the rest was left to rot. In 1960 the Idaho Fish and Game restricted the limits to longer than three feet, less than six. By 1970, all fish in that range had been eliminated.

Recent studies find that the healthiest sturgeon populations exist from C.J. Strike Reservoir, upstream to Bliss. The same studies find that only nine fish per year can safely be removed.

 Due to increasing pressure, concerns about the number of sturgeon fishermen and their relative success have surfaced. For that reason the Department of Fish and Game created a mandatory permit system in 1989. The permit is free and records the length of each fish, where it was caught, and the number of hours spent fishing for it.

 Will Reid, a resident Fisheries Biologist for the Fish and Game, says the permit system is not meant to restrict the catch-and-release season, but reflects a need for more information. Some estimates claim that there are 10,000 sturgeon fishermen in Idaho and though Reid doubts there are that many, he is concerned about inexperienced fishermen who don’t know how to handle the fish.

 “Sturgeon are easy to catch,” he says. “They have extremely slow growth rates and are subject to predation until they reach at least a foot in length. Also, that big gill covers makes a good handle, and if you damage the gills, big fish or not, he’ll die.”

Though I managed to stop the fish, I was unable to gain on it. Turning the reel handle had no effect. I checked the drag. No luck. Any tighter and I risked breaking the monofilament leader. Attracted by the sounds of the fight, the rest of the group gathered around me.

 “So what does it look like?” Craig Fegley of Plano, Texas, asked. In answer to his question, the sturgeon erupted out of the deep hole and, with the rod trailing white line out to its prehistoric head, for an instant hung motionless above the Snake’s smooth surface. It was eight feet long, 250 pounds plus and looked every bit of 100 million years old before it splashed back into the river and disappeared on yet another reel-straining run.

 “Golly!”  Joe Wolff of Arlington, broke the ensuing silence. “That’s some fish!”

“I can’t believe I’ve been swimming with that thing,” another guest confessed.

Other than Jerry Hughes and guides Scott Warden and Corey Chase, none of the rest of the group had ever seen a live sturgeon. Before this, the biggest I’d ever caught was a four-footer in California’s Suison Bay. Aside from the Twin Falls freak, the biggest I’d ever even seen in a picture was 7’6.” This one was bigger.

 It was a once-in a lifetime experience. I handed the rod to Wolff, who fought it for ten minutes before turning it over to his friend Fegley, who in turn handed it off to Keith Dull. Keith had traveled to Idaho from Richmond, Virginia, with his wife Susan, simply for the whitewater and scenery. The sturgeon provided a rare bonus.

 A half-hour and several reel burning runs later, the sturgeon turned quietly in the shallows. Though just inches short of eight feet, it proved to be surprisingly docile, allowing itself to be handled without protest. The Fish and Game advises anglers to release the fish as quickly as possible. Excess handling and, even worse, removing it from the water for pictures, can severely stress a sturgeon. After extracting the barbless hook, Corey walked it in the shallows. Water moving past its gills helped to revive it and less than two minutes after it surrendered, the monster fish flipped its tail and disappeared back into the dark eddy.

We caught three other fish on that trip. Shortly after midnight we hooked and landed a powerful eight-footer and the following day we released two smaller fish.

 The only thing I regretted during my five days on the river was losing a monster that straightened two stainless steel 06 hooks. The realist in me knows it is doubtful there are any eighteen footers still living in the Snake. But the optimist in me listens to Jerry Hughes, who can recall three instances this last season when the 11-foot rod and deep sea reel didn’t even slow the fish down.

 There must be a simple reason anglers no longer catch and release eighteen foot sturgeon. I suspect that, in at least one way, record sturgeon resemble record trout. Since the first fish to bait are usually the smallest, the eight-footers we caught might be behaving like eight-inch trout, snatching the sour chicken leg away from the real lunkers lying in the bottom of the hole.