The joy of fishin’

Hell's Canyon above Pittsburgh landing

Last week  some of our good friends invited us to go sturgeon fishing on a jet boat on the Snake River. On the way down I took this picture looking down on Hell’s Canyon.  It was a beautiful autumn day; not too cold, but  definitely jacket weather. Another benefit was the fact that the abundant poison ivy along the riverbanks had turned to brilliant oranges and reds for the fall, so when we made stops along the shore the kids could easily avoid them.

We were hoping to catch (and release) a few sturgeon. Along the way, we fished for small-mouthed bass and steelhead trout. Luckily the river is teeming with bass so it doesn’t take much to be easily gratified. Especially when you have worms! After several tries we finally got a bite by a sturgeon just after lunchtime. The thing with sturgeon is that you don’t just reel them up. They’re typically 4 to 6 feet long and can sometimes get (as we soon found out) up to 11 or more feet long.  Normally it takes 15 to 30 minutes of reeling and letting out line to wear them out enough to finally pull them in and have a look, then let them go. Last time we went, we caught 3 or 4 sturgeon, ranging from 3 to 6 feet long, and it took 45 minutes or so for the last one. Today was a different story.

After the first half hour, it became evident that we had hooked an extremely large fish. Due to the exertion needed to pull up the weight of this fish, we had to rotate through shifts with the adults on board, each person taking a 10 to 15 minute shift on the rod. We would excitedly reel a few feet in, then the fish would decide to descend again at will and let more line out. 3 hours later, no progress. It wasn’t tiring at all. We finally decided to try using the boat to slowly pull it downstream a bit. No luck. the line eventually broke, and we admitted defeat. Our friend mentioned that he had never hooked a fish so large that he couldn’t pull it up. So we must have hooked one of the oldest and largest fish in the river, who had been there since before the dams were put in. Now we can tell people it was as big as we want because we don’t have pictures to prove otherwise! Here’s a picture of Mary’s turn at the reel:

Mary's turn at the rod