Have Spear, Will Wait in Wisconsin

He knows they’re down there, somewhere, vacuuming red worms out of the silt just as they’ve done for millions of years.

He also knows the chances one will pass beneath his 3-foot by 4-foot hole in 138,000 acres of ice are not good. So John Mattes watches closely, one 20-pound trident on his left, another spear with four tines on his right, staring into the rectangle of eerie green light minute after hour after day after year, 30 seasons now.

“I’ve been here four hours today,” the 55-year-old barber from nearby Hilbert says without glancing up. “I have six hours to go. But you can’t move. They’re in the hole for a second and then they’re gone.”

When the Arctic storms begin stacking up one behind the other, waiting in line to freeze this land and lake, the hardiest of the hardy from towns along the shore begin preparing for the obscure ritual of sturgeon spearing.

They patch and paint their shanties, oil their ice boots, sharpen the weighty spears their grandfathers gave their fathers and their fathers gave them. They try to forget about last season and the previous one--or in one man’s case, 33--without ever seeing a sturgeon in the water. They buy the license that will allow them a single fish and decide that this year, against heavy odds, the Big One will glide below their hole in the ice.

“Sturgeon spearing is tantamount to religion in these parts,” says fisheries biologist Kendall Kamke of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. “They teach it in school. They preach it in church. They dream about it.”

The tradition--which was passed from the Indians to French fur traders to the rugged settlers of the Upper Midwest--waned earlier this century after commercial boats decimated the main sturgeon stocks in the Great Lakes and dams on the surrounding rivers kept most of the surviving fish from swimming upstream to a handful of small lakes in Michigan, the only other place to spear sturgeon.

But Lake Winnebago was different. Largely cut off from Lake Michigan by the glaciers of the last Ice Age, Winnebago has a separate sturgeon stock that spawns in the Wolf and Fox rivers.

So the tradition, and the fish, flourished here.

Now, however, the Winnebago sturgeon are in trouble, pierced in the back and dragged from the shallows in such numbers and for so long that state biologists have enacted desperate measures in an effort to head off a calamity.

Instead of a 16-day season, there was a limit this year on the number of fish: 400 juvenile females, 400 adult females and 2,000 males. And those heading out on opening day last month knew that when 80% of the limit in any of those categories was met, 24 hours’ notice would be given, and that would be it.

Everyone knew the end would come quickly--a few days, no more.

Bottle of Beer Is Breakfast

“Hi, Mike. Breakfast, please.”

Mike Comins, owner of Payne’s Point Bar in the west shore town of Neenah, cracks open a bottle of beer and fills the order.

It is shortly after 7 a.m. on opening day, and the fishermen are fortifying themselves for 10 hours on the ice. Beer, eggs, coffee, cigarettes--anything to cut a boredom so vicious that even the patient sportsmen in this land of long winters are glad it happens just once a year.

It is possible to catch sturgeon by just dropping a line in the water and dozing off, but no hook-and-line fishing is allowed here. Besides, says paper mill worker Gary Kerkman, who has landed an astounding seven fish in 20 years, catching a sturgeon isn’t the point. Spearing a sturgeon is.

So many of the fishermen have spent days on the lake already, creeping in their pickups over the thinner ice near shore and then speeding out over the vast expanses. Using compasses and hand-held Global Positioning Satellite systems, they halted above known shoals and drilled holes in the ice, plunging a pole 20 feet down into the lake bottom to retrieve a fistful of sediment. If the silt also contained a few lake fly larvae, known as red worms, they marked it as a good spot for a shanty. If not, they drove on.

Others, figuring luck to be the only real swayer of sturgeon odds, skipped the search for red worms. They spent a day towing their handmade shanties to a lonely spot four or five miles out, far from the old Christmas trees the fishing clubs had laid out to help fishermen find their way home in a storm. They cut through the 20-inch-thick ice, shoved the massive blocks into the water and sent them banging along under the frozen surface, moving off with the current.

Then they lowered their shanty over the hole and went home to wait for today.

“Time to spear a fish,” says the beer-for-breakfast man.

It is 14 degrees outside, 20-below with the windchill. The ice is slick as a skating rink and far more translucent following a month that brought no snow and an unseasonable inch of now-frozen rain. The sky is a brittle blue.

Inside the shanty belonging to Ron Augsburger and his three sons--which accommodates just two at a time--it is shirt sleeve-warm, thanks to a propane heater, insulated walls and an aluminum shell. It is dark, too, the only light the strange glow coming from the floor.

Most shanties are painted a flat-black on the inside. Snow is packed along the base as a sort of light-resistant caulking. The sunshine then penetrates the ice outside, lighting the lake bottom below and reflecting back up through the hole, illuminating any fish--and giving the fishermen the skin tone of the very ill.

No bait can be used to lure the sturgeon, so the fishermen place their faith in decoys: a glossy white bowling ball in one shanty, two pink yard flamingos in another, a full can of Coke, a shiny Timex and hundreds of hand-carved wooden fish weighted with lead.

Despite the warmth, Augsburger, a retired utility worker, wishes he’d spent the morning in the more Spartan shanty a few hundred yards east, the one he sold just this year to his son’s friend at the Oshkosh Fire Department.

“I fished that shack for 30 years, and I never saw a fish,” the 65-year-old Augsburger growls. “He goes in this morning and a fish swims by five feet down and he spears it. Didn’t even have his decoys in the water yet.”

“Yep,” Scott Rassmussen, 26, says with a grin outside the shanty that now sports his name on its door. “I just had time to get him back there near the tail. He was fighting like crazy.” It’s a good fish story. And there’s proof.

The sturgeon is lying on the ice at Rassmussen’s feet--57 inches and 45 pounds of slate-gray swimming dinosaur. The blood around the holes in the fish’s back has turned a flaky cherry-red. The sturgeon’s slick skin is beginning to freeze.

“They haven’t changed their form much in 200 million years,” DNR sturgeon biologist Ron Bruch says. “They were here when the dinosaurs were here. And whatever killed the dinosaurs didn’t kill the sturgeon. They’re fascinating beasts.”

Swimming Against Evolutionary Current

Indeed, the slow, cartilaginous lake sturgeon looks like a creature that’s been swimming for eons against the evolutionary current.

Shaped like a torpedo, its body is marked and protected by rows of hard, pointy bucklers and shield-shaped armor that run from head to tail. Its mouth is little more than a hole on the underside of the head, ringed with loose flaps of white flesh that wave as it sucks up worms.

“That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” one woman would exclaim later in the day.

“Ugly,” the fisherman who speared the offending fish would agree quietly, “but beautiful.”

The females can grow to six feet, 150 pounds and survive a century and a half, although few even approach those numbers any more. The males are smaller and most live only about 40 years today.

All but packed with reproductive organs, the fish nonetheless mature slowly. Males spawn just every other year, females only once every four years. They have been overfished ever so slightly each year for decades, biologists say, and their numbers have dropped to critically low levels.

(In the handful of smaller Michigan lakes, this was the last year for sturgeon spearing except on Black Lake. Next year, fishermen can take a total of five sturgeon there.)

The Lake Winnebago stock consists of 40,000 adult males and, more significantly, just 7,800 adult females.

The “old ladies,” as Bruch calls them, are the biggest, the most sought-after. They are also the key to the stock’s survival.

But with nearly 10% of the adult females speared each season in recent years, the fishery has been faltering and will collapse, Bruch says, without a change.

But halfway through opening day, things are looking good for the fishermen, bad for the fish.

There are 3,947 shanties on the lake, a record. At the same time, the sturgeon--which sometimes swim very little and other times go like mad--are on the move. That means they are passing beneath spear holes in great numbers.

When the sun falls below the horizon, the fishermen are already queued up, dragging their prey by the tail to one of nine DNR check-in stations.

Gone are the days when you speared your fish and took it straight home to smoke the dense white meat and maybe salt the roe for caviar--neither of which are shared with anyone but family and very close friends. Now, if you want to fish next year, you take it in for study.

The fish are weighed and measured, their white bellies slit to determine the sex, and the leading “ray” of the front pectoral fin is sliced off to be placed under a microscope where scientists can determine age by counting the rings.

By 9 p.m., the numbers are in, and Bruch is shaking his head.

The problem was with the precious adult females. Fishermen speared 307 of them. If they’d have speared just 13 more, reaching 80% of the 400 limit, Bruch could have given notice and closed the season after tomorrow, Sunday. Now, fishermen will have both Sunday and Monday on the ice.

“I think this is the first time I ever wanted them to catch more fish,” Bruch says.

The next morning, there are even more shanties on the lake. A disaster of preservation seems imminent. There is no reason not to expect that another 300 or more females will die today, and tomorrow--something the fishermen want and don’t want.

Then, two things happen. The sturgeon suddenly halt their frenzied swimming. Maybe they are gorged; red worms poured out of the slit bellies of many fish caught opening day. Maybe it’s the change in temperature.

The mercury has risen to the mid-30s, and the deep, unsettling groans of shifting ice have all but ceased. That’s a bad sign. Silence means the ice is getting soft.

Recalling two snowmobilers who drowned the week before, the Augsburgers and many others begin pulling out, leaving their seat belts off and their windows open in case they break through.

Just 118 adult females are speared on Sunday, 47 on Monday, for a total of 472. When the three-day season is officially over, the sturgeon stock has been reduced by 1,484. It’s more than the biologists had hoped, but not nearly as many as they’d feared. There will be another season and, everyone hopes, another after that.

Neither Mattes nor his son nor father-in-law got a fish. None of the Augsburgers did either. Kerkman missed an easy shot at the biggest sturgeon he’s ever seen swimming, and his two buddies didn’t even land a decent fish story.

But they’ll all be back.

They’ll sharpen their spears, dangle the same lucky decoy that brought no luck, and they’ll shiver and wait and wait some more.