Lake Superior Journal: Get Along Lil’ Fishes, Wrangling in a Different Kind of Rodeo

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The Loch Superior Monster – it had to be 10 feet long – wacked hard into my legs and swept my partner completely off her feet, dumping her into the swift-flowing water.

An expletive worthy of an ore-boat sailor escaped my mouth while my partner scrambled to get as far from the fish as she could get, clambering back on land.

Let’s be honest – no one expects to be knocked over by a fish, even if it’s just playing with you.

The impressive gray fish circled me and then, before disappearing, flipped its dorsal fin at us in what I believe was a Pisces’ version of a road-rage gesture.

It was my first and only up-close-and-personal encounter with a Lake Superior wild neighbor that I’d been hankering to meet all of my married life – a lake sturgeon.

First, let me say, interacting with wildlife is no problem on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula with a house right on the lakeshore.

I constantly witness chipmunk and squirrel wars on my porch, contend with marauding bears that destroy my bird feeders and avoid eagles that dive-bomb my kayak.

Lake sturgeon, though, just grab my imagination, and they don’t hang out just everywhere.

In my family, sturgeon are legendary, thanks to my husband’s story of a neighbor who met his demise while fishing sturgeon on the Snake River in Idaho, where my husband grew up. As the story goes, the fishing line looped around that man’s ankle, and the hooked sturgeon dragged him underwater several miles downstream. Gruesome, yes, but the oft-repeated story grants the sturgeon a certain mystique, along with a very healthy dose of respect, in my family.

Bottom-feeding sturgeon actually are among the least malicious of our game fish, not at all like northern pike that might nip a taste of us as we swim.

As a species, sturgeon date to the Triassic period, some 245 to 208 million years ago. There are 25 or so kinds of sturgeon, fresh and saltwater. On this continent, perhaps the largest sturgeon caught was on the Fraser River in British Columbia in 2012 – an 11-foot-2-inch, 1,100 pound leviathan that took more than two hours to land. Great Lakes’ sturgeon are smaller, but still can reach 7 feet and 300 pounds. They can live for 120 years and don’t mate until around age 20. On Lake Superior, they spawn between April and early June, heading into tributaries.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to meet one.

Besides lots of critters, we also have lots of critter research, much of it right here in the Upper Peninsula. There’s the granddaddy of them all – the moose/wolf study going on for 50+ years on Isle Royale – and a study of bears and osteoporosis that is trying to figure out why, with all that time hibernating off their feet, bears don’t show signs of osteoporosis. Besides the hawk migration study on Brockway Mountain, there are ongoing studies of how birds migrate over Lake Superior, the visual landmarks they use and the flight paths they take.

The research that hooked my imagination, of course, is a 25-year-long study of lake sturgeon. The nice thing about being a writer and a resident in a relatively small community is the opportunities it can open – like an invitation to participate a Michigan Tech professor’s spring research data gathering that’s fondly known as the “sturgeon rodeo.”

To prepare for sturgeon wrangling, you start on land, putting on your chest waders and felt-soled boots. Then you load yourself up with equipment: a 2x3-foot rectangular net, a set of scales, a measuring tape, a bag of tags, a cooler and anything else deemed necessary, like your lunch and a water bottle.

The theory is that you will net, measure, weigh and tag the fish (if it isn’t already tagged). The cooler is for any eggs you retrieve from the egg traps, which will then be delivered to the fish hatchery.

Once you’re fully loaded (and now empathizing with the pack donkeys in the Grand Canyon), you trudge about a mile through the undergrowth until you reach a section of river where the sturgeon may be.

This rodeo isn’t a spectator sport, so any fisherman or woman with a secret fishing hole will forgive my lack of specifics. When it comes to spawning, sturgeon tend to be creatures of habit.

Once you reach the designated spot, you have to get into the often fast-flowing river (it’s spring), keep your footing on moss-covered cobbles, and then … oh yeah … you have to actually catch a sturgeon in your net – a net that is almost certainly smaller than the fish. (Did I mention they average 4 feet?). For what it’s worth, you work in teams of two.

During my first two rodeos, we never saw a sturgeon. On the first one, we also didn’t find any eggs. On the second rodeo, we found eggs in the traps, high-tech gizmos consisting of a cinder block wrapped with scrubby sponge material and tied with a nylon rope. When the sturgeon spawn, eggs float loose in the water and catch in the scrubby Velcro-like material.

If you get eggs, at least you know sturgeon were in the river, though they may have come and gone because their migration and spawning depends on weather, rainfall, water conditions and depth, and the flow into the river. They don’t do anything on a precise calendar – they are fish, after all.

On my third rodeo, the sturgeon arrived. The day was gorgeous with brilliant sunshine, a bright blue sky, fluffy cloud, and trees starting to leaf out. Two other teams were in the middle of the river, and my partner and I were standing thigh-deep in water 20 feet from shore. Cursing and splashing came from the other teams. At least one person had totally submerged in water, but our section remained rather quiet.

That’s when the Loch Superior Monster swam by. It was gray, had deeply corrugated skin and was all muscle. At the time, I swore it was 10 feet long and 18 inches wide, but that might have been shock speaking. In retrospect, it was probably about 4 feet long, maybe 5.

As you read earlier, there was no catch, just lots of release. The sturgeon definitely took our measure more than we could take its.

To our defense, this is a wild ride of a rodeo – trying to wrangle an ancient streamlined fish to weigh, measure and tag it, all while standing in a rushing river. Those fish are strong, and, I don’t care what anyone says, they are crafty.

We spent another couple hours on the river, but the day was another bust – researchwise. Oh, we saw them (and occasionally dodged them), but no one could catch a sturgeon long enough to get any data.

Sturgeon: 5, Researchers: 0.

Yes, five of us all lost our wrestling matches.

Call me crazy, but it was a lot of fun. Sure, I can’t tell you the exact size of this one that got away, but I did take home a nice fresh story to add to my family’s growing legends of the sturgeon.

Author Lesley DuTemple, a proud resident of Eagle River, Michigan, has wrangled many a slippery story of the region, even if she has yet to catch a sturgeon. She is a frequent contributor to this magazine and a children’s book author to boot.