When I asked John Krizek if he knew what his 72-inch lake sturgeon weighed, he said, “I have no idea. We don’t have a scale that big on the boat. We were in shock.”
Krizek, of Antioch, and his fishing friend of 30 years, Steve Esler, have fished Wisconsin’s hook-and-line season for lake sturgeon in September out of River’s Edge Resort at the Wisconsin Dell for about 25 years.
On Sept. 20, they went downstream on the Wisconsin River and got close to the sign saying no rentals past this point. At 2 p.m., Krizek hooked into a sturgeon.
“It took me an hour,” Krizek said. “And you are afraid you’re not going to be able to get it in. We almost couldn’t get it in the net. We had to fold him to get him in.”
The sturgeon would have been legal to keep (there is a 60-inch minimum).
“We didn’t register him,” Krizek said. “I didn’t want to keep him out of the water that long.”
They’ve done sturgeon fishing long enough to have a system.
They use a 3/0 Gamakatsu hook on 17-pound monofilament with a swivel and a 1 1/2-ounce egg sinker on a foot and a half leader.
“Catch everything with that rig: walleye, carp, drum, catfish, smallmouth bass, sturgeon,” Krizek said.
Seventeen-pound mono?
“If you can’t get the fish in the boat [with that], don’t fish,” he cracked.
Most people use a gob of worms or night crawlers, but he caught his on a fathead minnow.
“They were hitting crawlers all week, then all of a sudden mine took off on a minnow,” he said.
The weight question bugged me enough that I reached Margaret Stadig, senior fisheries biologist with Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
“It can be extremely difficult to estimate a lake sturgeon’s weight based on length alone,” she emailed. “If you think about it, a single female lake sturgeon can lose 40 pounds in one year when she spawns but still be the same length. So it can be highly variable.
“I did a quick query of the lake sturgeon speared that were 72 inches and the range is anywhere from 60 to 110 pounds. But it seems like the average is right around 90 pounds. No matter how big the sturgeon, that is an impressive fish.”
John Procai caught and released Wisconsin’s hook-and-line record for lake sturgeon (170.5 pounds) on Sept. 22, 1979 from Yellow Lake in Burnett County. It was 79 inches long with a 39-inch girth, according to burnettcountywi.gov.
I also wondered about age.
“Age is even harder to estimate, particularly as they get longer and older,” Stadig emailed. “Likely this fish is anywhere from 50 to 70 years old. But again, a lot depends of health, growth, etc. I couldn’t even begin to give you an `average’ as that isn’t even concrete information we have here in the Winnebago system.”
In memory
Howard Halsne, inventor of the Howie Fly, died last week, his great nephew Shane Kwasinski messaged. Mr. Halsne, 82, worked as an engineer, earning patents n heating and cooling. His greatest invention was the Howie Fly, still a preeminent presentation on Lake Michigan. Visitation is Friday, 3-8 p.m. at Smith-Corcoran Funeral Home, 185 E. Northwest Highway in Palatine.
Illinois hunting
I will post harvest numbers for firearm deer season when they come at chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors.
Wild things
Odd three days of firearm deer hunting with dozens of grasshoppers clicking in the weeds and mosquitoes to be swatted. At least I didn’t discover a single tick.
Stray cast
Al Pacino’s acting is snagging salmon; Lily Gladstone’s is floating dry flies.
