I get to hunt and fish non-stop but last week was the best trip that I’ve had in a longgg time.
On the drive home I kept trying to think how that I was going to adequately write about the trip in such a way so as to portray how much fun I had. I’m a writer and supposed to be able to put into words deep feelings, adventures and events but sometimes
I feel inadequate. Such as right now. But let me try.
As a kid you’d read outdoor articles by the big-name writers about hunting out West and the huge mule deer that acted like that they had never seen a human.
The smile on the girls faces says it all!
I felt like that I was thrown back to those day from the second that I left home.
Unless you’re Rip Van Winkel, then you’ve noticed that there has been a hugggeee influx of people with different driving etiquette than typical Idahoans have. It almost feels like that we’re driving in LA rather than little ole’ Idaho.
Granted, I got up at 3:40 and jumped in the already loaded truck and took off right away but unbelievably I drove the whole 185 miles and did not pass or get passed by one car!
Well, on the outskirts of McCall an old timer pulled out in front of me in an old pickup and turned off in the middle of town.
I’ve never driven anywhere in my life for 185 miles without seeing a car in my lane, much less the present Idaho, so you can see why that I felt like that I had stepped back in time 75 years which set the pace for a magical trip and it only got better.
Dave and Christi with Dave's sturgeon.
Upon arriving at the Hammer Down River Excursion outfit, I met owner Homer Brown, grabbed a cup of coffee and we were soon off for the river. I don’t think the ride to the river would have been 30 minutes but we had to stop every two minutes for me to take a pic of a turkey, chukar, bighorn or elk. But we will talk about that in the third article. I’m going to have to write three articles to cover this trip.
This first one will cover Sturgeon Fishing, the second Smallmouth Fishing and the third will be about the wildlife that we saw.
Well, despite having to fight through all of the wildlife to get to the boat ramp we finally made it.
At the ramp we met up with Bret and Dirk whom were going to be fishing with us. We loaded our gear and shot off upstream.
We stopped at a little backwater eddy to grab a few smallmouths for bait which didn’t take long and we were soon off to the first sturgeon hole. Many of you know sturgeon but if not, they like hanging out and feeding in the still pools. So, we pulled into the first hole, ran the nose of the boat into the shore and tied it off.
Homer pulled out the big sturgeon rods, slapped on a smallmouth of which he had sliced off the head and reared back and cast the bait out to the edge of the current. I believe that he said he had on a 12 oz. wt. so he could really cast it out.
For sturgeon you’ll want a stiff rod and a big Penn reel. And of course, since sturgeon in Idaho are catch and release only you also have to use a barbless hook.
Like all good fishing trips, after a couple of days they all blurred together and I forget exactly who caught what on which day. To my recollection Dirk was first up. Before long we had a hit and Dirk brought in a smaller one.
We pulled up stakes and hit another hole. I reeled in a 4-footer and then at the next hole we hit payday. Sturgeon don’t slam your bait aggressively. You just see the rod tip bobbing a little as they pick it up and doodle. You have to have perfect timing. If you set the hook to soon-Game Over.
Bret was up next. We had a hit and right away we knew he had a hog on. Bret is stout and he was getting worked over. He’d fought it for 10-15 minutes and then it ran at us and went airborne. Well, somewhat.
About 3-4 feet of him came out of the water, enough to let us know that Bret had a solid 9-footer on the other end. His head was twice as wide as the fish that I’d boated. In another 5-minutes the line went limp. Uggh, I hate it when you lose a big fish!
Later I boated another sturgeon. This one was a 5-footer but it seemed to pale in comparison after seeing Bret’s whale. As the day wound to a close, I was plenty happy. We’d boated three sturgeon and hooked up on a good 9-footer.
The next day I fished with Ben and Mary and Ben’s folks Dave and Christi.
Again, I will mix up the sequence but I think Dave boated a smaller one and then Christi hooked up on a big one and the cat fight was one. I wasn’t sure for a while who was going to win. I’d gone up on the bank for something or the other and Homer yelled out to untie the boat and jump on, he had to follow the fish.
It was a toss-up as to who was going to end up weighing more, Christie or the sturgeon. A good while into the fight Dave took over and we finally got up close, near the bank. I jumped off the front and went around the side of the boat. It wasn’t a perfect landing spot since it was a little deep but fish don’t always seem as congenial about photo shoots as they should be.
We soon had it in for everyone to get a family photo and whatever else seemed appropriate after boating a nearly 7-foot sturgeon.
The majority of outdoorsmen/women are great people to hang with and that had been the case the last two days. We’d had a great time fishing, telling stories and just being out in God’s great outdoors.
What a trip and I haven’t even talked yet about the smallmouth bass fishing or the abundant wildlife we saw. Stay tune. Coming up in the next couple of articles.
Tom Claycomb is a hunting enthusiast and writes a bi-monthly column for Great Basin Sun.