Fishing for the Prehistoric Sturgeon on the Mighty Columbia

The alarm sounded at 4:00 am – well before daybreak and actually it was really unnecessary because I was wide-awake already. Four hours earlier when I went to bed I had quickly determined that the back of a Honda CR-V was an insufficient sleeping spot for a person of my height, weight, and age – mostly the latter. I had plenty of foam padding and blankets but I just couldn’t get comfortable and so I tossed and turned, curled up and stretched out – my highlight of the night was actually my two trips outside to relieve myself under the incredible view of the stars above.

We were on the southern Washington coast about 20 miles north of Long Beach and would be departing on a chartered boat from the Port of Ilwaco at 5:00 am. Most of us had gathered the evening before and enjoyed a nice dinner and some adult beverages in preparation for our morning assault. The mission: catch a white sturgeon that is not too big and not too small but falls somewhere precisely between 44 inches and 50 inches long. That measurement is taken from the tip of the nose to the fork in the tail and to say that a sturgeon out of water does not always cooperate when you are trying to measure them would be quite an understatement.

Our boat was the Legacy – in the photo it is just to the right of the boat named Four Seasons.

The Sturgeon season on the lower Columbia is strictly regulated – this year it ran from May 10th to June 5th and only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays and only from sun up until 2:00 pm. You are allowed to keep one fish per day (two total for the short season) as long as it falls between 44 and 50 inches of length. In other words, your odds of catching a keeper are relatively low. However the odds of catching one that is either too small or too big are pretty good. You can only use single point barbless hooks and the typical bait we used was one or two herring.

The morning broke calm and mostly clear with the sun filtering through a bit of a marine layer over the ocean. This was my first time sturgeon fishing but some of the guys in the group had been doing this for years and over the years they had developed a few traditions. Prior to striking out to the dock I learned about the tradition of Bloody Caesars for a bit of a wake-up or in our case a little hair of the dawg after the previous night’s festivities. A Bloody Caesar is a drink popular in Canada that contains among other things – Celery salt on the rim of the glass · 1 1/2 ounces vodka · 4 ounces Clamato juice · 2 dashes Worcestershire sauce · 2 dashes Tabasco sauce. Although I suspect the vodka and the clamato juice measurements in the ones we had were flip-flopped. They were actually pretty tasty but the acid level in my stomach was pretty high from the previous night and so after one I switched to beer.

Cape Disappointment Lighthouse watched over our journey.

The eleven of us joined the Captain of the Legacy and the deckhand for the trip out of the harbor on fairly calm waters and with just a bit of a chill in the air. We skirted the mouth of the Columbia, hanging close to land and heading eastward up the Mighty Columbia and under the Megler bridge that runs from Oregon to Washington. Just east of the bridge was a spot that our boat and others – aided by their experience and fish finders – had picked as the spot to drop anchor. 

Fish on!

The poles were baited and cast by the deckhand and everyone started staring intently at the tip of their pole waiting for the telltale strike. Sturgeons are generally bottom-feeders, primarily eating a diet of shellfish, crustaceans, and small fish. Since your bait is resting near the bottom it can also be nibbled on by crabs and other bottom feeding fish and we found initially that we were in a spot where we were losing our bait to these scavengers. So we pulled anchor and moved to another nearby spot. 

Twice during the day we had 3 sturgeon hooked at the same time which makes for a whole lot of commotion to avoid getting lines and fish tangled.

Then the work\fun began. It’s fairly obvious when you get a bite that you have a sturgeon on your line and when you see it happen you take your pole out of the holder and give it a good yank to set the hook. 

The exterior of the sturgeon is armored with five lateral rows of bony plates called scutes which you need to avoid when they are thrashing around inside the boat.

Sturgeon have been referred to as “primitive fish” because they have remained relatively unchanged since their earliest fossil record – and they definitely have that prehistoric look when you see them up close. A sturgeon’s skeleton is almost entirely made of cartilage, much like a shark. Also like a shark they are smooth-skinned, have no scales, and have a similar tail fin but unlike a shark they have no teeth. 

They don’t bite but they thrash around quite a bit and if they catch your leg with their armor plated scutes it will definitely leave a mark!

White Sturgeon are the largest and longest-living fish in the Columbia River Basin – they can live 80-100 years – and their first spawn does not occur until they are around 15 to 20 years old. Their average lifespan is 50 to 60 years, The combination of slow growth and slow reproductive rates and the extremely high value placed on mature, egg-bearing females (for caviar) make sturgeon particularly vulnerable to overfishing. Hence the strict size regulations and short fishing season.

Although verifiable records are not available, most experts agree that the biggest sturgeon taken in America’s freshwaters, was a 12½-foot, 1,285-pound cow sturgeon that went blundering into a salmon gill net in the Columbia in the spring of 1912. 

Several of the fish we caught were just barely over the size limit but they still had to be thrown back.

The largest one that we caught on the day was too big to easily bring into the boat so when it finally stopped fighting and we were able to get it along side the boat we did a quick rough measurement and pulled the hook out and let it go. That sturgeon topped five feet in length and according to a chart I found it would have weighed about 65 pounds and would have been around 20 years old.

Of the ten fish we landed, nine were over the 50 inch limit and the one above that Kevin Thelin caught was our only fish under the 44 inch size limit.

White sturgeon are typically found in the Eastern Pacific; from the Gulf of Alaska to Monterey, California. However, some are landlocked in the Columbia River Drainage, Montana, and Lake Shasta in California, with reported sightings in northern Baja California, Mexico.

Sturgeon can put up quite a fight and we had several that jumped clear out of the water while we were trying to reel them in. When they get near the boat and see the net they turn and bolt and the line goes ripping out and the fight to bring them in resumes. After a few runs they start to tire and you can eventually bring them into the net.

The one that I caught was 54 inches and it bolted three times on me before we were able to get it into the net. I was so exhausted that my arms were like jelly and I didn’t have the strength to lift it up for the picture. My bicep was sore for the next two days from the workout.

Even though we didn’t get any keepers, we did net 10 fish and lost another half dozen that we had hooked. So there was a lot of action and combined with good weather and a great group of guys it was a great day spent on the water.