# 1-day season seems likely for Lake Winnebago sturgeon spearers



## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

This article from Wisconsin is impressive compared to the sturgeon spearing we have here in Michigan. I thought the nonresident license in WI was $50 last year if anyone is interested in going to Wisconsin.

1-day season seems likely for Lake Winnebago sturgeon spearers

http://cgi.greenbaypressgazette.com.../archive/out_19679807.shtml&AFFIL=outgreenbay

OSHKOSH  Clear water and good ice conditions might result in a one-day sturgeon spearing season on Lake Winnebago, according to a Department of Natural Resources release. 

The 74th consecutive spearing season on Lake Winnebago opens at 6:30 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 12 and could close at the end of the day if spearers reach any one of three harvest caps. A separate spearing season on the upriver lakes of Buttes des Morts, Winneconne and Poygan also opens at 6:30 a.m. Feb. 12, and will close at 12:30 p.m. that day. 

The state Natural Resources Board in December 2004 approved emergency rules giving the DNR authority to close the Winnebago season at the end of opening day if spearers reach harvest caps. The caps of 500 juvenille females, 500 adult females or 2,000 males include fish from the Lake Winnebago season as well as the upriver lakes season. 

This 74th season promises some of the highest harvest rates and participation in the history of the fishery, said Ron Bruch, the DNRs senior sturgeon biologist and a fisheries supervisor in Oshkosh. 

We want people to enjoy the tradition of this unique season, Bruch added. But we also want people to realize when theyre sitting in their ice shacks that were in a transition year and that coming years will be different. 

The emergency rule allowing for a one-day season on Lake Winnebago was passed to provide addition protection to the sturgeon stock following the record-setting 2004 season, Bruch said. Spearers harvested 509 adult females on opening day, surpassing the total allowable harvest for adult females of 425, but the permanent rules allowed the season to continue for another day, at which time an additional 175 adult females were harvested. All told, 259 more adult females were speared than the total harvest cap.


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## Ranger Ray (Mar 2, 2003)

I have fished the Murc walleye tourney on Winnebago and the sturgeon would jump out of the water next to your boat. It was awesome to watch.


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## thousandcasts (Jan 22, 2002)

I guess Sturgeon spearing is one of things you have to do before you can understand it. Me? I don't get it all. Do people actually eat Sturgeon? I can't imagine chomping down on a piece of meat that's been swimming around for over 100 years. Then again, I once participated in a dog fish (bowfin) spearing tournament and at the weigh in area, guys were fileting them, battering them up and tossing them into a turkey fryer. You'd a thought these guys were eating filet mignon the way they were tearing into those dogfish filets. Um...despite several offers, I stayed the hell away from those filets!


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## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Sturgeon has impact on regional economy

Lake Winnebagos sturgeon population is estimated to be worth $3 million annually to the economy of the region surrounding the states largest inland lake.
Sturgeon spearing is unique to the Winnebago area. In 2002, when the study was undertaken, the DNR estimated roughly 8,700 people on Lake Winnebago were involved in spearing, Stoll said.

http://cgi.greenbaypressgazette.com.../archive/out_19719886.shtml&AFFIL=outgreenbay


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## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

A gathering of generations

NEENAH  For as long as he can remember, Andy Meyer has spent the second weekend in February sitting in a sturgeon spearing shack on the ice of Lake Winnebago.

http://cgi.greenbaypressgazette.com.../archive/out_19719793.shtml&AFFIL=outgreenbay


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## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Spearfishers rush out for quick sturgeon season
Event has been trimmed from 16 days to 2 

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/news/archive/local_19793028.shtml

By Ed Culhane, Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers, Posted Feb. 11, 2005 

WINNECONNE  The 2005 sturgeon-spearing season opens Saturday, but these days its more of a race than a season, and the runners are already on their marks. 

By noon Thursday, thousands of spearfishers had dragged their shanties onto the Winnebago lakes. 

It was the first day they could legally cut their big spearing holes, and in areas known to hold large numbers of sturgeon, shacks were springing up faster than mushrooms after a spring rain. 

Its like a couple of cities have gone up out here, said Tom Kilsdonk of Darboy, whod just finished setting up a shack on Lake Poygan. 

Harvest caps designed to prevent an over-harvest of adult female sturgeon, a fish that can take 25 years to mature and reproduce, have drastically shortened recent seasons, from 16 days to two when good ice and clear water favor the spear throwers. 

The sturgeon population remains strong and healthy. Still, an emergency rule could cut this season short after one day if 500 or more adult female sturgeon are speared by 12:30 p.m. Saturday on all four lakes combined


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## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Sturgeon season is open-and-shut case for one local spearer

Last year, my sturgeon season lasted approximately 10 seconds, Ruffing said. Poor guy. It messed him up.

http://cgi.greenbaypressgazette.com.../archive/out_19756319.shtml&AFFIL=outgreenbay


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## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Caviar wishes come true

http://cgi.greenbaypressgazette.com.../archive/out_19846258.shtml&AFFIL=outgreenbay

Winnebago sturgeon roe makes delightful delicacy

Im sitting in Betsy Krizeneskys kitchen watching her prepare the food of the gods. I was giddy with anticipation. 

It had been a long time since I had eaten raw sturgeon eggs. 

Years ago, a friend and former colleague, Maija Penikis, stopped over at my house having just returned from Russia with a jar of beluga caviar and a bottle of Russian vodka. 

We spread the caviar on crackers, tossed it in our mouths and chased it down with the vodka, which we drank chilled. It was one of the best dining experiences of my life, and the fact that I could not walk afterward in no way detracted from it. 

Id heard that caviar made from the roe of lake sturgeon  the species that inhabits Lake Winne-bago  is comparable to the finest Russian caviar, so I figured it was my journalistic duty to check it out. 

With the sturgeon spearfishing season under way, this is the time for it. Krizenesky is not a spear-fisher, but she has some contacts in the fishing community who are more than willing to harvest the eggs for her in return for a few jars of dining ecstasy. 

She started with a gallon-sized zip lock bag filled with a mass of several hundred thousand sturgeon eggs, which are imbedded in a fair amount of yellowish fat and pink ovarian tissue that acts like a shock-absorbing net inside the giant fish, keeping the delicate eggs from getting pounded into paste. 

Wearing disposable gloves, she gently strained the eggs through a colander, separating them from the fat and the ovarian tissue. The eggs were then transferred to a fine mesh strainer and rinsed under the tap until the water ran clear. 

Using accurate scales, she adds a half-ounce of salt for every pound of eggs, gently mixes it and then begins filling the jars. It takes a week to cure, but you can start dipping into it after a day if you cant wait. 

She had a bit shed put up the day before, so we sampled that. She also had a bottle of chilled Russian vodka, a brand not sold here. 

The first Russians she met were friends of her parents. They fascinated her. 

They were so talkative, and their emotions were so close to the surface, she said. My family was Scandinavian, which is the opposite of that. 

She studied the Russian language in college and spent the summer of her junior year studying in Russia. This was during the Cold War, when most Americans perceived Russians as a hard, stoic, humorless people. Thats their public face, she said. She saw their private faces and couldnt wait to get back. 

I was on fire, she said. Russians are so profoundly emotional, they are so passionate about everything. They love to discuss things, like politics, and theyll stay up all night talking. You dont ever ask a Russian how they are doing without expecting to hear an answer. 

I used a mother-of-pearl spoon to dip some fresh caviar on a cracker, took another sip of vodka and nodded attentively. 

After graduating, she took a low-paying travel agency job as an escort for American tourists going to Russia, and did get back, a dozen times in that role. 

I refilled my small glass with vodka and dipped into caviar for the third or fourth time. This is a great interview, I thought to myself. 

Krizenesky became a teacher of the Russian language. She traveled to Russia as a translator with the Appleton Boys Choir and later with the delegation Appleton sent to its sister city of Kurgan. 

She and her husband, Dave, have vacationed in Russia. 

By now she was back at the sink, having limited herself to a couple sips of vodka, and was busy processing caviar for her friends. When she noticed Id emptied my cup for the second time, she offered me a refill but I took a pass. 

The fact was I never wanted to leave her kitchen, but I figured I better get out of there while my legs were still working.


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## thousandcasts (Jan 22, 2002)

As I'm sitting here tying up spawn bags, the last thing on my mind is eating them! Yuck! :lol:


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## toto (Feb 16, 2000)

You know TC, with a couple of beers, well okay, several beers, those there salmon eggs ain't too bad. I once saw bubba eat my whole stash before I could stop him. :yikes:


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## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Sturgeon season ends with a slow last day

http://cgi.greenbaypressgazette.com.../archive/out_19966668.shtml&AFFIL=outgreenbay

The 2005 sturgeon spearing season went out with a whimper. 

Spearers landed only 19 sturgeon Wednesday  the lowest daily total for the 12-day hunt. In all, 1,238 sturgeon were speared this year on Lake Winnebago and the one-day season on the upriver lakes of Poygan, Winneconne and Butte des Morts. 

The season closed Wednesday because enough adult female sturgeon had been harvested Tuesday to trigger the shutdown of the season the following day. 

Its been a mixed bag of results for spearers. Winneconne resident Jeff Nacius said he ventured out on the ice for more than a week before spearing a 22-pound sturgeon. 

I speared for nine straight days, and I was glad I saw one. I was luckier than most, Nacius said Wednesday while driving off Lake Winnebago. Its not the most exciting sport. It gets boring staring down the hole. 

More than 10,000 licenses were purchased for the 2005 season, but spearers had to designate whether they wanted to spear on Lake Winnebago or take part in the one-day season on the upriver lakes. 

Spearing on the upriver lakes is allowed only once every five years. The option reduced the number of spearers on Lake Winnebago by 39 percent, said Ron Bruch, sturgeon biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. 

The sturgeon spearing season ends the day after 80 percent of the 500 fish limit for either adult or juvenile female fish have been caught. The short 2004 season was the result of near-ideal conditions, whereas three of the past four spearing seasons have been 10 or more days. 

Besides the 12-day hunt this year, spearers had a 10-day season in 2003 and the full 16-day season in 2002.

ALSO:

Spearing season draws to conclusion this afternoon

http://cgi.greenbaypressgazette.com.../archive/out_19954902.shtml&AFFIL=outgreenbay

Department of Natural Resources officials set the end of the sturgeon spearing season at 12:30 p.m. today. 

Spearers killed 17 adult females on Tuesday, triggering a harvest cap that forced the season to close the next day. There have been 1,219 total sturgeon speared on Lake Winnebago and the upriver lakes, including 412 mature females. The harvest cap trigger was 400 mature females. 

Some spearers were not clear on the difference between an adult female and a juvenile female. According to DNR senior fisheries biologist Ron Bruch, any female sturgeon 55 inches or longer is considered an adult, based on the average length of female sturgeon when they first spawn. 

I will be re-examining the average age of maturity again this year, Bruch said, looking back at the last 10 years of data collected during the spring spawning runs. 

If there has been a change in the growth and maturity of the female sturgeon in the Winnebago System, we may need to modify the 55-inch standard for management of future harvest-cap counts.


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## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Sturgeon spearing season ends after 12 days

OSHKOSH, Wis.  The 2005 sturgeon spearing season on the waters of the Lake Winnebago system closed February 23, after a successful 12-day run. State fisheries biologists had been prepared to close the season in one day, if necessary, to protect the systems lake sturgeon population, one of the healthiest sturgeon populations in the world.

After twelve days, 1,238 sturgeon were taken from Lake Winnebago and the Upriver Lakes. Season totals were 255 juvenile females, 423 adult females, and 560 males. It was the harvest of five adult female sturgeon, which pushed the harvest of adult females to 80% of the harvest cap, that triggered the closing. Last year the season closed after two days with a total season harvest of 1,845.

State fisheries biologists say cloudy water kept the 2005 opening weekend harvest well below the totals that would have triggered the DNR to close the season under emergency rules aimed at preventing a repeat of 2004. Under permanent DNR rules, the season runs 16 consecutive days or until the end of spearing hours on the day after spearers reach 80% of any of three harvest caps.

Ron Bruch, DNR fisheries manager of the Lake Winnebago and Upland Lakes fishery noted that water clarity issues at the beginning of the season, and the fact that 4,169 spearers chose to spear on the Upriver Lakes on opening day (February 12) resulted in a slow start. This year, spearers had to choose whether they wanted to spear on Lake Winnebago or the Upriver Lakes. They could not choose both, and that decision reduced the spearing effort on Lake Winnebago by 39 percent and resulted in a longer season.

Ron Bruch, DNR fisheries manager of the Lake Winnebago and Upland Lakes fishery noted that water clarity issues at the beginning of the season, and the fact that 4,169 spearers chose to spear on the Upriver Lakes on opening day (February 12) resulted in a slow start. This year, spearers had to choose whether they wanted to spear on Lake Winnebago or the Upriver Lakes. They could not choose both, and that decision reduced the spearing effort on Lake Winnebago by 39 percent and resulted in a longer season.

According to Bruch, the focus now shifts to identifying sturgeon issues that need to be addressed for future harvest seasons, and to finalizing recommendations to ensure healthy sturgeon stock.


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