I have just finished up my northern pike spearing season here in Minnesota. From an opportunity perspective I had a pretty good year. I made it out to the spearing house about 15 sits.
To me a sit is a spearing opportunity that lasts anywhere from about 3-5 hours. I spear-fished on four different bodies of water this winter. A few weekends were spent up in Crow Wing County near Brainerd and the other efforts were all in southwest Minnesota.
From a “how many fish did I get to eat” perspective, it was a terrible year. Of the 15 opportunities, I saw a northern pike on about 10 occasions. When spearing in the lakes county region, I saw pike and whitefish every time I was out. In the northern Minnesota’s pike zone, you can harvest up to nine or 10 fish, but they basically need to be little ones.
There is a fish or two you can harvest in the slot, but they have a fisheries management plan that calls for the removal of the many hammer handles that really create an underwater environment that allows very few fish to grow to a large size. Up on Cross Lake I speared 2-3 little fish each outing.
Back closer to home the limit is two northerns per day, and they have a minimum size of 24 inches. Fish in these warmer water shallow lakes grow pretty fast, and the larger ones are easier to overfish, thus the very small daily limit. I only harvested about five pike in this area. This is not to say that I never saw any fish.
Over the course of the winter, I would estimate I saw 50 smaller pike in the hole. They were all just too small to harvest. I really don’t like to kill little fish anyway, kind of the way I was raised. There is a variety of reasons for my poor outcome for the 20-21 pike season.
Now is the time I start listing my excuses. First, the ice in my area really did not get suitable until about the first week of January. We had super warm temperatures and did not have 8 inches of travelable ice until mid-January. This cut the season about in half of a normal year.
The second excuse I am spouting is that our water quality was very poor most of the season. Of the 50 or so lakes within 60 miles of my house, there are fewer than 10 with water clear enough to spear in and with a measurable pike population. Water clarity is considered good in my book if you can see the bottom of the lake in 7 feet of water.
Due to the very dry fall, the lake I did my best in last season in 4 to 5 feet of water had only 15 inches of water under the ice this year, and it was so stirred up that you could not see your decoy in 6 inches of that water. I am surprised that the oxygen content of this lake was still very high last week when it was checked. It looks like the fish might survive this winter without a winter kill. This leaves hope for this lake next year.
The most interesting reason for poor water clarity this season was one I had never experienced. I called a guy who called a guy who is a fisheries biologist, and he explained that the reason the water was so dingy was as a result of winter time algae blooms.
We are familiar with a late summer algae bloom that covers the lake in green and blue slime and can kill your dog. It also smells really bad. I had never seen one in the winter. He explained that due to very late ice conditions and the fact that the ice was not very thick and had almost no snow cover, the sunlight was able to penetrate and cause an algae bloom.
It seemed like a very reasonable explanation. The question that remained with me though was how the lake could be clear one day, clear the next day and murky as all get out on the third day. This happened about five different times this season. We also had spots with clear water and only 300 yards away you could not see sikkim. These examples were all far away from the lakes’ aeration systems so it was not a factor that they might be stirring up sediment as they operated.
All in all, it was a pretty difficult year and I am not the only one who experienced this. Spearers are not all that numerous in my neck of the woods, but most of my spearing mentors took their houses off several weeks ago and just cashed in the season waiting until next year.
The old saying that a bad day fishing is still better than a good day at work can be used here. Even though I did not spear many pike, it was cool to see a pike slide into the hole looking to see what I was offering. I also got to see lots of white fish, largemouth bass, walleyes, perch and bluegills and even a bullhead or two.
Looking down in the water at what looks like a 62-inch big screen TV of the underwater world will always be a way I want to spend my time when the pheasant hunting season is complete. In a month we will start our prescribed fire efforts, and that needs planning too. I think I will do that next.
Scott Rall, Worthington, is a habitat conservationist, avid hunting and fishing enthusiast and is president of Nobles County Pheasants Forever. He can be reached at scottarall@gmail.com or on Twitter @habitat champion.