Tag: fishing

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The Paddlefish Opener

By Bernie Hunhoff

Boats dot the Missouri River near Yankton for the annual paddlefish season opener on October 1.

Fishing is often a solitary sport in South Dakota, where anglers drift and cast on massive reservoirs, or on prairie rivers that flow for hundreds of miles. That changes every Oct. 1, however, when hundreds of people gather along a very short stretch of the Missouri River for the opening of the month-long paddlefish season.

Paddlefish are filter-feeders, meaning they won’t bite traditional bait, so they are caught by snagging hooks that are cast into the tailwaters of Gavins Point Dam, just a few miles west of Yankton. Men and women cast and drag, again and again, somewhat like fly fishing but less ballet and more muscle. They fish from boats or the rock-strewn shore. Some stand atop a tall concrete wall on the north side of the dam. When a fish is caught, all the anglers and spectators watch.

Paddlefish is a primitive species that swam eons ago with the dinosaurs. Due to its size and shark-like appearance, it seems like a creature more fit for the world’s oceans rather than the lakes and rivers of middle America.

The largest ever caught was speared by an Iowa fisherman in 1916. It weighed 198 pounds. The South Dakota record is a 127-pounder landed by Bill Harmon in 2014 at Lake Francis Case. Hundred-pound fish measuring 4 to 5 feet are not uncommon.

Bryan Mendlik, Scott Mendlik and Kellen McClure caught and released a “slot” paddlefish below Gavins Point Dam that measured just under 45 inches.

Landing such a large fish is no easy matter. On some occasions, it takes many minutes and several men. As soon as a fish is brought out of the water, the angler and his friends grab a tape measure, but they don’t stretch the tape along the paddle-like snout, which can be one-third of its overall length; the scientific measurement is from the eye to the fork in the tail.

The sport of paddlefishing is heavily regulated in South Dakota, and one of the rules states that fish between 35 and 45 inches must be immediately released because they are in their breeding prime. The six Missouri River dams greatly interrupted the natural spawning of the great fish. Much of the slack has been replaced by artificial breeding programs in hatcheries, but paddlefish do still breed in the wild.

Biologists want to give them every chance to do so, and the anglers obviously agree because there’s always an urgency to get every fish measured and then released when it’s within the range.

The snagging season at Yankton runs the month of October. There was a time when it began on Oct. 1 and then concluded after a certain quota of fish were harvested. That created a bedlam of action, as everyone rushed to snag a fish before the season ended. The river and shoreline became so congested that authorities deemed it unsafe.

Naturally, such mayhem created more regulations. Today only 1,600 licenses are made available in a June drawing. (A May season is held at Lake Francis Case, where just 350 licenses are allowed.)

License winners at Yankton now have the entire month of October to bag a fish, but opening morning is still a sight to behold — especially when it turns out to be a classic autumn morning with blue skies and gold leaves on the cottonwoods that shade the river.

Anglers and spectators alike mark Oct. 1 on their calendars.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Catch, Move and Release

By Bernie Hunhoff

Steve Nelson and grandson Howie pull a fish from a stock dam before relocating it to a new pond suffering from die-off.

Fish inhabit about half of South Dakota’s 100,000 stock dams and small ponds, thanks in small part to longtime South Dakota promoter Steve Nelson and his grandson, Howie.

Nelson, who lives in Pierre, became a fan of stock dams nearly a half-century ago when he explored Roy Houck’s buffalo ranch, northwest of Fort Pierre in Stanley County. The Missouri River reservoirs hadn’t yet developed as world-class walleye fisheries, so anglers were then more likely to search for small bodies of water to fish.

As a tourism leader, Nelson often worked with the state Game, Fish & Parks Department to help families find a place to cast a line. Today the Glacial Lakes country and the four Missouri reservoirs get most of the attention from tourism officials and anglers, while stock dams are unappreciated treasures.

Nelson continues to do what he can to promote the dams — not by publicizing them, these days, but by catching fish in dams that are overstocked and transferring them to new dams or to ponds that suffered a die-off. Usually, he’s assisted by his grandson Howie, 12, and by some of Howie’s friends.

Three years ago, they learned about a dam that suffered a fish kill because a farmer accidently sprayed an alfalfa field nearby.”We restocked it the next year, and the fish are doing really well,” he says.

Winter kill is the most common threat to fish life in smaller ponds.”Ideally a pond would be 15 to 20 feet deep, but if they get under about nine feet and you have a hard winter with a lot of snow cover on the ice then you don’t get photosynthesis and the water can become oxygen-dead,” he explains. When that happens, Nelson and his young associates wait until the water level is once again high enough to sustain aquatic life and then they introduce more fish.

Walleye fishing can be complicated and tedious for some youth, while pond fishing is exhilarating.”Howie and his friends just like to catch fish,” he says.”They don’t always care what kind of fish or how big. They want some action. One day we caught 50 bluegills in an hour. As soon as the bobber hit the water it was going down.”

Most of South Dakota’s stock dams are on private land, so permission may be required to fish them. However, Nelson says South Dakota has five million acres of public land with hundreds of ponds — including three national grasslands in West River country and state-owned lands scattered throughout the state. Some of the public waters now have boat docks, restrooms and fishing piers.

Most small ponds and dams can be fished from shore, although Nelson says a small boat may be helpful in late summer when the water warms and fish concentrate in the deepest part of the pond, which is usually the center.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Chasing Cats

By John Andrews

Illustration by Mike Reagan.

In the spring of 1949, Roy Groves was a 64-year-old grandfather who lived with his wife Alice in a little white house just a short walk from Toby’s Lounge, today a legendary chicken shack in Meckling. He stood just under 6 feet tall, was stocky and had the quiet countenance you might expect from the grandfatherly figure shown in black and white photographs with an old fishing hat perched atop his head.

Groves knew a lot about fishing. Some considered him an expert. In fact, during a remarkable four days in May 1949, he pulled two monstrous catfish out of the James River that proved to be state and world records — a 94-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish and a 55-pound channel catfish.

His blue catfish record stood until September of 1959 when Ed Elliott, an electrician from Vermillion, caught a 97-pounder in the Missouri River. It was surpassed again by current record holder Steve Lemmon of Elk Point, who landed a 99-pound, 4-ounce blue in the Big Sioux River on July 21, 2012. But when Groves died at age 82 in 1967, his channel cat was still the state champion, and it remained so until 2019, when the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks issued a ruling that justified what many anglers had long suspected — that Groves’ channel cat wasn’t really a channel after all. His 70-year-old record was voided.

The decision rankled Groves’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom still live in South Dakota. But it also rekindled interest in the bewhiskered creatures that swim South Dakota’s waters.

***

South Dakota is home to three types of catfish. Channel cats are the most widespread; they live in rivers and lakes throughout the state. Flathead catfish are found primarily in the Missouri River and its tributaries, the James and Big Sioux, but there is also an isolated population in Lake Mitchell. Blue catfish swim almost exclusively in the Missouri below Gavins Point Dam, though they can be caught along the lower James and Big Sioux rivers, as well.

Flathead catfish are one of three species of catfish found in South Dakota. They swim mostly in the Missouri, James and Big Sioux rivers. Photo by Sam Stukel.

Channel cats are easily recognizable by their whiskers, or barbels, that extend from the corners of their mouths. Their bodies are drab olive in color with white bellies and no scales. They lurk close to the bottom of a lake or river, preying on crustaceans, insects or other fish. All in all, a slimy-looking catfish may not be the most attractive species to find on the end of your hook, but according to Geno Adams, the fisheries program administrator for Game, Fish and Parks, they are among the state’s most underutilized fish.”We have some absolutely phenomenal channel cat fishing in South Dakota, and they just don’t get used like they do in some other states,” Adams says.”We’ve always been a walleye-centric state. That’s our number one sport fish. Channel catfish are pretty well dispersed around the country. Walleye are not. But these Missouri River reservoirs are absolutely full of fantastic catfish. When people from other states move here and they’re big cat fishermen, or they come for a walleye trip and get winded off the reservoir and the guide takes them into the back of a bay to fish cats, people are astounded by the quality of catfishing in these reservoirs.”

Biologists are currently studying channel cats and flatheads on the James River from Olivet to its confluence with the Missouri. They hope to learn more about their lifespan and how the populations move and grow. B.J. Schall, a fisheries biologist with Game, Fish and Parks who is helping lead the study, says channel cats can be among the most accessible fish for beginning anglers.”Catfishing can be really inexpensive and really easy to do,” Schall says.”You don’t need the equipment that a lot of anglers use for walleye fishing. You can pull up to a bank, throw out a piece of bait that sinks to the bottom and just let it sit. That makes it a little more low tech than the guys who have depth finder systems and sonars in their boats. And if you can get access to a river system, you can just bump onto the bank and fish. It doesn’t necessarily require a boat.”

Anglers like Jason Stansbury fish for the occasional channel cat, but he’s part of a group that’s passionate about landing trophy flatheads. Flathead catfish stay away from swiftly moving water, opting for deeper pools with plenty of cover. They can live a long time, which allows them to grow to monstrous proportions. Part of the Game, Fish and Parks’ research on the James includes taking spines from a catfish’s pectoral fin, which helps determine age. The oldest flathead they’ve discovered to date was 25 years old, and the largest weighed nearly 48 pounds and measured 44 1/2 inches. But they can get bigger. Davin Holland holds the current state record with a 63-pound, 8-ounce flathead caught in the James River.

Stansbury’s biggest is 56 pounds, caught while fishing from the bank of the Big Sioux.”They’re not like catching walleyes,” says Stansbury, the catfishing expert for Wild Dakota, a popular hunting and fishing television program.”These fish are territorial predators. They’re smart fish. I always say that any size flathead you catch is a win.”

Protection for large flatheads is another reason behind the James River study. Avid catfishermen like Stansbury have long been concerned about the potential overharvest of trophy flatheads because in some places there have been no size limits. Schall says biologists have run some modeling based on their current research that indicates any new regulations are unlikely to result in significant changes in the number of large fish in the system. Still, the Game, Fish and Parks Commission is considering a resolution that would limit anglers to one harvested flathead per day that measures more than 28 inches.

Catfish can be caught from shore, but anglers searching for trophy flatheads and blues often spend the night in boats. Photo by Sam Stukel.

Stansbury caught his 56-pounder in 2019 using a bullhead for bait. The fish bit at around 1 a.m., which is typical given their nocturnal nature. He battled the fish for nearly half an hour before he had it in the net.

Tom Van Kley lives in Sioux Falls and sells insurance for Mutual of Omaha by day, but many nights and weekends find him searching for trophy flatheads and blue cats. He was introduced to catfishing almost by accident.”We were walleye fishing up by Trent,” Van Kley says.”We ended up catching some red horse suckers that we cut for bait, just to see what we could catch. We were sitting by the campfire and our rods just started getting smashed by 8- to 10-pound channel cats. From that night on, catfish just got into my blood.”

Eventually he began looking for even bigger cats, but the transition wasn’t easy.”The first year that I primarily targeted flatheads I didn’t catch one all year long,” he says.”Then finally, on our last trip of the year down in Omaha, I caught two out of the Missouri River. The next year I didn’t catch one until July. But then I went out with a guy who really knew what he was doing and he kind of showed me the ropes. We just smacked them. We caught eight or nine fish that night up to 25 or 30 pounds each, and I never looked back.”

His biggest catch came during a tournament in Sioux City. He was fishing near Dakota Dunes on the lowest stretch of South Dakota’s Missouri River.”We were sitting on this spot that I thought would be pretty good, but it was midnight and we had no fish. And the weigh-in was at 2 a.m. My buddy wanted to call it a night, but I said, ëA lot can change in two hours.’ About 35 minutes later one rod folded and we had a 20-pound fish on.”

They rebaited their hooks and waited. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw another rod bend. He grabbed it and less than 10 minutes later reeled in a 56-pound flathead. They won the tournament with 76 pounds of catfish.”We’re usually fishing from 7 p.m. until the sun comes up,” Van Kley says.”You put in a lot of work to catch a few fish. If you pull in three or four flatheads in a night, you did pretty good. You put a 50-pound fish on the floor and it’s pretty surreal.”

It’s a thrill that Roy Groves knew well.

***

Groves awoke at 5:30 on the morning of Sunday, May 22, 1949. An hour later he was unfolding his chair at one of his favorite fishing spots, about a mile north of where the James River flows into the Missouri just east of Yankton. He cast out two lines — one a 20-pound test line and the other a little heavier — using crawfish and chub minnows for bait.”He cast from the bank into a spot that he was pretty familiar with,” says Marc Rasmussen, a senior vice president at BankWest in Pierre and Groves’ great-grandson.”He knew there had been some fish out there, but he wasn’t having a very good day. He sat there for a long time and only picked up one carp. He kept having his minnows chewed off the line, so he knew something was going on down there, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.”

Groves fished for nearly 12 hours that day. Shortly after 6 p.m., he put his last chub minnow on the 20-pound line and cast it out. Two minutes later,”Wham! It felt like I hooked a submarine,” he later told a local newspaper reporter.

The fish swam about 15 feet before Groves set the hook, but that didn’t faze it. The giant cat took about 100 yards of line off Groves’ reel.”She did what she wanted with the line after that,” Groves recalled.”After a half hour to 45-minute fight, she just dove to bottom and stayed there.”

Roy Groves of Meckling is pictured with his 94-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish (measured by grandson Gary Groves), which set a state record in 1949. It was the second record catfish Groves had caught that week.

Groves grabbed a pair of pliers from his tackle box and started hitting his fishing pole. The vibrations traveled along the taut fishing line, rousing the cat into another burst of swimming. Groves’ hands were already bloody from trying to stop his reel. His line was quickly running out. Finally, the fish stopped fighting, and at 8:20 p.m., Groves pulled his state record 94-pound, 8-ounce blue catfish ashore.

Rasmussen remembers seeing the big blue mounted above the fireplace in Groves’ home, right next to the Shakespeare rod and reel he’d used to land it. In fact, when Shakespeare heard about Groves’ record-setting catch, they supplied him with new equipment for several years.”The fish was a big part of his life,” Rasmussen says.”He wasn’t a boastful guy, but whenever he would talk to the kids and grandkids, he’d talk a lot about how proud he was. People used to follow him around. He’d have to sneak out to go fishing because they would all try to get into his spots.”

Catching one monster catfish would have been enough to secure his angling legacy, but the blue was actually the second record cat he’d caught that week. Four days earlier, and about 200 yards farther downstream on the James, he landed the channel catfish that eventually became the subject of intense scrutiny within the South Dakota fishing world.

For 70 years, fishermen, biologists, ichthyologists and anyone else intensely interested in catfishing looked at the old black and white photos of Groves standing alongside his champion channel, examined the fin structure and wondered if it wasn’t really a blue catfish.”It was always presumed to be a channel cat,” Rasmussen says,”and there are channel catfish that have been caught since that time in other states that have been bigger.” (The current world record is a 58-pound channel taken from a reservoir in South Carolina in 1964, though there are questions about that fish, too, since the largest channel catfish generally weigh in at 30 pounds or a little more.)

ìI think for many people in South Dakota, the real question was, ëHow does a channel cat get to be more than 35 pounds?'” Rasmussen says.”The nature of them is to be a smaller fish. But when you look at the type of fins, the tail fins on a channel cat are a little bit sharper and the fin near the tail is squared off. They say very clearly that it’s not the color of the catfish that makes that determination, but I think at that time they didn’t know better.”

Geno Adams began hearing the questions when he took an administrative position with Game, Fish and Parks in 2009.”Ever since then I’ve gotten emails or calls asking why we wouldn’t turn over that state record because everyone knew that it was not identified correctly,” Adams says.

He shared the photos with fisheries experts at South Dakota State University and other ichthyologists around the country. Their opinions were overwhelming.”It was resounding,” he says.”It didn’t take people long to look at it. They could tell by the anal fin that it was not a channel catfish. When 100 percent of the people are instantly saying it’s not a channel cat, it’s time to do something. I wanted to do this for channel catfishing and channel cat fishermen. It’s a pretty cool thing to have a state record, and to have this category be inactive forever because of a misidentification didn’t seem just.”

Game, Fish and Parks announced in May of 2019 that the channel catfish record would be voided, almost 70 years to the day since Groves pulled his trophy out of the James River. Rasmussen and other family members were initially upset, but given nearly a year to examine the evidence themselves, they’ve come to agree with the decision.”This is not taking away from Roy’s prowess as a cat fisherman,” Adams says.”He was a legitimate catfishing expert, probably one of the best cat fishermen of all time in South Dakota. He was like the godfather of catfishing in South Dakota, and we did not want to take anything away from him or the family.”

The announcement coincided with the launch of Catrush 2019, a campaign designed to generate interest in catfishing. With a new state record up for grabs, anglers responded. On May 20, just three days after the record was voided, the new benchmark was set when Chuck Ewald caught an 8-pound, 3-ounce channel cat at Whitlock Bay. His record lasted only two days. It fell another six times by June 10. Drew Matthews holds the current state record with a 30-pound, 1-ounce channel caught in a farm pond by Murdo.

Though voiding Groves’ long-held record was a difficult decision, perhaps he would have been happy to see fishermen taking the same joy that he did in chasing the elusive cats.”We knew it wouldn’t be the easiest thing or the most well received by those who are involved in that record, but we also knew that the vast majority of people out there were going to be happy with the decision, and that’s the way it’s turned out,” Adams says.”I heard countless stories of people going catfishing who hadn’t gone in 20 years, or they’d never gone before, and they decided they wanted to go try to catch a state record channel cat. From that aspect it was a success in highlighting channel cat fishing in South Dakota.”

Even Rasmussen has gotten in on the fun. He and his wife live along Lake Oahe, where they enjoy fishing for walleye, northerns and catfish, but nothing like the behemoths that his great-grandfather caught. His biggest is a 12-pound channel.”That’s enough of a thrill for an old man like me,” he says.

Still, monstrous fish lurk in the murky waters of South Dakota’s rivers, waiting for someone with the right combination of skill, time, patience and stamina to land them.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Catfishing With Nata

By Rebecca Johnson

Nata Jones and her husband Brad enjoy fishing at Apple Tree, a peaceful bay by the Missouri River east of Springfield.

Catfishing is a popular sport for Yankton residents because the wild Missouri River flows just south of town. There are tricks to landing the wily cats, and to cooking them. But it’s nothing you can’t learn. Ask Nata Jones.

Nata is a native of Chernivtsi, a city of some 240,000 people in the Ukraine. She met Brad Jones of Yankton while vacationing in Minneapolis, and within a year she left her chocolate store and was married at the Chapel in the Hills near Rapid City.”It was a beautiful wedding at a wooden church in the mountains,” she recalls warmly.

Nata Jones

She liked South Dakota even before she discovered the Missouri River.”I love small town people. Everybody is so friendly and smiling. You don’t need to worry about nothing,” she says with a charming European accent.”If something happened, everybody would help me.”

She applied for three jobs and was amazed to find herself with not one but three. She tried to balance them all for month, but eventually chose to be a certified nursing assistant at Avera Yankton Care Center, a nursing home on Eighth Street, not far from the river. She loves to visit with the residents, and she likes her co-workers.”I never have a day when I want to stay home,” she says.

Not that she doesn’t like home. She and Brad live in a wooded area near Lewis and Clark Lake.”The first year I am here we see millions of geese come by,” she exclaims, still with wonder in her eyes.”I see by the house deer, turkey, raccoon. I never see this in Ukraine.”

And then there are the catfish and walleye.”I fished in the Ukraine, too, but this is a little bit different here,” Nata says.”In the Ukraine I don’t have time and beautiful place to go. Now I just come home from work and if it’s sunny out (Brad and I will) go.”

Their Chesapeake Bay retriever, Rex, always goes along.”He is very important fisherman,” says Nata.”He likes to jump from the boat ramp and just fly into the water.” Rex is also an environmentalist; he swims below the surface to retrieve discarded plastic bottles and then deposits them on the bank.

As Brad and Nata Jones concentrate on fishing, their dog Rex enjoys chasing bull frogs and retrieving plastic bottles from the Missouri River bottom.

Nata and Brad fish for whatever finned creatures are available but Nata proclaims catfish her favorite, explaining it’s the most expensive fish in the Ukraine. Channel cats seek areas where fast water becomes slow. Brad finds the perfect, clear water channels either by boat or along shore.”He is the real professional. He knows all the secrets,” Nata says. They use stink bait from a local bait shop to lure the bottom feeding fish, because the whiskered swimmers will generally eat anything they can catch in their mouths but their strongest sense is smell.”(The stink bait) smells very, very bad but this is what catfish like,” the angler says with a laugh.

Reeling in food for dinner is the ultimate goal but that is not Nata’s definition of a successful expedition. She doesn’t care if they get a bite. They enjoy the boat ride or the time ashore. She can’t imagine ever moving from this home near all her favorite fishing spots.”When my husband retires, he wants to leave to Montana or Yellowstone,” says Jones.”I said no because we have such a beautiful place here. We cannot leave.”

Baked Catfish with Onions and Tomatoes

Here’s one of Nata’s favorite recipes for catfish, although it can be used with any white fish. Baking times vary according to the thickness of the fish.

2 lbs. catfish

1 medium onion, diced

2 large tomatoes, diced

2 tsp. olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Remove all skin and cut fillets into 8 pieces. Place into lightly greased baking dish. Saute onions in olive oil until translucent. Add tomatoes and cook until soft, stirring often. Spoon mixture over fish and lightly salt and pepper. Bake for 45 minutes at 375 degrees or until fish flakes easily with a fork. (Sometimes Nata replaces the two large tomatoes with 3 coarsely shredded carrots for a twist on this basic recipe.)

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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More from Poinsett Summers

Our May/June issue includes a feature on Lake Poinsett, where well-known photographer Greg Latza and his family are the newest residents of a lake community that has attracted people to its shore for centuries. Latza sent us several beautiful photos taken the last few summers. We couldn’t use them all, so here are some that didn’t make the magazine.

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Fishing for Funds

By Rebecca Johnson

You may remember John Alvarez. The former Arizona copper miner survived a 1994 car accident near Tucson with a serious head injury — as if a bowl of Jell-O had been thrown onto cement, he told us in 2006. Three months later Alvarez regained his speech and told his doctor he wanted to go back to work.”Really? Where is it that you work?” the doctor asked. He couldn’t remember.

Alvarez relearned the alphabet and basic skills like using the telephone and running a television. He knew he’d never return to mining. He also found urban life too frustrating and stressful, so he and his wife, Dee Ann, moved to a small acreage near her quiet hometown of Bridgewater. Alvarez cast for bullheads in nearby Wolf Creek with his son Trevor. Realizing that fishing was good therapy and fostered companionship, he founded My Fishing Pond, a 501c3 nonprofit, in 2002. It’s a big, well-stocked pond. Brain injury survivors, children with special needs and the elderly can catch and release fish among the cattails and enjoy burgers from Alvarez’s grill. Close to 250 people from 15 different South Dakota facilities visit the pond each year at no cost to them.

Over the years, Alvarez has received donations of labor, supplies and money. And he’s constantly fundraising to keep his pond and cookouts going. It’s not easy; he isn’t cleared to drive a car because of his head injury. But he’s put over 17,000 miles on a donated John Deere Gator utility vehicle selling raffle tickets for things like shotguns, gold bars, hotel stays and gift cards. And he’s found that to be therapeutic, too.”Thirteen years ago I would not be able to talk to you the way I am now. The fishing pond has made me understand and get my brain going so I can. But my wife says, ‘You talk too damn much,'” Alvarez laughs.

This year he could use a little more funding than $1, $5 and $10 raffle tickets can provide. The concrete walls of the pond are deteriorating, and he needs approximately $8,000 to dig up the concrete and replace it with a sodium benzonite pond sealant. Without this repair, there likely won’t be another season at My Fishing Pond.

If you’d like to donate, mail checks to My Fishing Pond Inc., 26331 432nd Ave., Bridgewater, SD 57319, or call Alvarez at (605) 729-9400 to find out how your business can purchase a $500 sponsorship sign with your logo. He’d be happy to chat with you about it.

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Goin’ Fishin’

By Fran Hill

At the farm, the guys rely heavily on working dogs to help with the sheep. From sorting for sheering, weighing or vaccinating to moving the lambs away from the feed bunks so the tractor and feed wagon can make their way for daily feedings, the herding instincts of our border collies are essential. However, with one of our loyal and hardworking pups no longer much of a pup, Hubs has felt the need to look around for a new generation of canine coworkers.

His search ended late last December when a cousin’s Australian shepherd had a litter of beautiful puppies. Immediately Hubs claimed a female, and in March Nilla came to live with us — in town. There were many sound reasons why we brought this puppy into our dachshund-ruled home flanked by city streets instead of immediately making her nest among the sheep at the farm. I won’t deny that a large factor might have been how my heartstrings were tugged as she slept in my lap during the 5 1/2-hour drive home from picking her up.

It has been an interesting few months as Nilla navigated the puppy door to the fenced backyard, mastered housebreaking, chewed a dining room chair, learned to sit for jelly beans, trampled my herb garden and the rhubarb (but hasn’t chased away the snakes), made some day trips to the farm to begin the transition to her working future, snuggled, wrestled and snoozed with our dachshunds, and dug holes in the backyard every time it rained. Every time it rained. And, if you weren’t aware, it has been a fairly wet spring and early summer.

Our smart, curious and friendly puppy doesn’t seem to have any interest in the dirt when it is dry, but a quick downpour and suddenly she is excavating a path to China. I blame the earthworms. Our soil is rich with night crawlers that become super active in the rain. If Nilla finds one squirming across our damp concrete patio after a rain shower, she dances with excitement. Maybe she just wants to go fishing.

I haven’t been fishing in a while, but Nilla has got me thinking about it. There is something about freshly caught walleye from the Missouri River that just can’t be beat. Maybe I shouldn’t be scolding Nilla for digging holes to find worms. Maybe I should be rewarding her with a taste of freshly pan-seared fish with a light lemon and butter sauce. Manicured lawn be damned; let’s go fishing.

Fran Hill has been blogging about food at On My Plate since October of 2006. She, her husband and their two dogs ranch near Colome.

Lemon Butter Fish

(adapted from Cooking Light)

4 fish fillets (about 3/4 inch thick) — cod (which is what I had on hand), halibut, walleye or whatever

black pepper

kosher salt

1 teaspoon flour

2 tablespoons butter, divided

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon parsley, finely chopped

Pat fish dry and season both sides with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with flour.

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a large nonstick skillet. Add fish to the pan and cook until lightly browned. Carefully turn fish over; cook another 4-5 minutes (until fish flakes easily). Remove from pan and set aside to keep warm.

Add remaining tablespoon butter to pan and cook until lightly browned, swirling pan to melt butter evenly and prevent burning. Remove pan from heat, stir in lemon juice.

Drizzle sauce over fish. Sprinkle with parsley. Serve immediately. (Serves 4)

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Grill Your Next Catch

By Julie Blumer

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the Sept/Oct 1988 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

Fish will never replace steaks and burgers on South Dakota barbecue grills, but when we talked to him in 1988, Sioux Falls restauranteur Dave Thompson suggested that more people charbroil the fish they catch in our rivers and lakes.

Thompson learned about barbecuing fresh fish on trips he made to the coasts. He said that considering South Dakota’s growing reputation for fishing, it’s time more people tried grilling their catch.

Fish need to be firm and solid to be charbroiled. “Most of the fish we charbroil are swordfish, tuna and red snapper — fish that have a more steaky-like firmness to them. The softer fish… just fall to pieces,” he said. Salmon and walleye, favorite Dakota gamefish, are also just right for the outdoor grill. He said many people don’t like to barbecue oily fish like catfish because the meat can become mushy.

Although he had never tried to charbroil carp, the barbecuing process can help eliminate the “fishy” taste. “You get the charcoal marks on it (fish) and you fry the seasonings in real well. A lot of the fishy flavor comes from where the skin is; get the skin off the fish, that will help.”

Thompson said some fish are just fishy. “It depends on the time of the year it’s caught and size of the fish. Big walleyes aren’t as good as 1 1/2-3 pound walleyes. You get up to the big 7-8 pounders and they are not near as good eating as small fish.”

For the calorie conscious, Thompson said fish is low in calories, depending on what you add. Butter, sauce and other treats will tip the calorie scale. He said teriyaki sauce and lemon pepper butters seem to be the perfect partner for fish.

To begin grilling, grease the grill and fish with oil, to prevent sticking. On an open grill, fish should be cooked on each side. To determine the time, measure the fish at the thickest part (behind the head) and allow 10 grilling minutes for each inch. Cooking time will also depend on how hot the coals are and the distance between the coals and fish. Spread chive butter, teriyaki sauce or lemon pepper butter on each side while grilling. To accompany the freshwater cuisine, Thompson suggested an icy draft beer, wine spritzers or white wine of any kind.

Thompson said fish should be prepared and cooked the same day or the following. “If you keep fresh fish at all, you need to keep it between two ice bags to keep the temperature down so bacteria can’t grow.”

Whether you call it barbecuing, grilling or charcoaling, the searing coals will spice up the taste of fish. “You get that smoky flavor, the same way a steak picks it up from the charcoal or the wood that you’re using to give it a woodsy-outdoor type of flavor, rather than just a broiled piece of fish that might be kind of flavorless.”

Stuffing the fish with herbs and flavorings such as basil sprigs and sliced lemons will also perk up the flavor. Intensify the smoky flavor by putting various aromatics, such as mesquite, hickory or cherry wood chips on the hot coals.

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Fly-fishing in the Black Hills

By Ron Robinson

On our first morning of fishing the outlet basin below Pactola Dam, Bill landed his first big brown trout, let him go, and pointed to the sky. “Look there.”

I squinted upward. Spiraling high above was a bird of enormous wingspan. “What is it?”

“Osprey.”

“You sure? A fish hawk?”

Bill nodded, then waved his hand toward the top of a high-line tower a hundred yards away, where a collection of sticks had been fashioned into a large nest. We’d seen such nests before, along with the birds that built them. Last Chance run on Henry’s Fork in Idaho had plenty of ospreys, distinctive white markings bright in the sun, soaring high, circling, then folding their wings and plunging like meteors into the water, emerging in seconds with their catch firm in their talons and flapping off, their trout streamlined nose first to carry back to their nest. But in the Black Hills?

“Have you ever seen them here before?” I asked.

“Never,” Bill said. “But we haven’t done the Hills thoroughly in quite a few years.” It was, I thought, a significant admission. Bill Geyer was raised in the Black Hills, in Lead and later in Sturgis, and had been fishing its streams and impoundments since he was old enough to wave a bamboo rod. If he had never seen an osprey at Pactola before, I reckoned it a relatively new experience. Yet there it was. And later we saw another, perched at the tip top of a spruce over the pond below Hanna, watching rising trout with predatory interest.

Seeing ospreys wasn’t the only new experience during our two-week sojourn back in 2000 to what had been the earliest fly-fishing ground for both of us. On our 13th early morning jaunt up Spearfish Canyon, we spotted a mountain goat trotting along the road. He was in molt, the white fur hanging in clumps form his back. When he heard our pickup, he wheeled, took a defiant stance in our lane, and glared as though daring us to come closer.

Finally, after a few seconds, the standoff ended. The goat, apparently satisfied that he had called our bluff, turned and trotted casually across the road and into the brush. Bill put the pickup into gear and drove on.

“You ever–?”

“Nope.” Another first.

Then of course there were the big fish. Years ago, when I first wet a line in Rapid Creek below Pactola, I remember catching what was the largest trout I’d yet caught, a heavy-bodied brown that rose to a dry fly in a pool formed where the stream bent against a granite cliff. I think I still have the outline of that fish, proudly traced on butcher paper, somewhere among my memorabilia. My recollection is that it ran something in excess of 14 inches.

I caught larger trout later, of course, but in the Hills that one was then close to what they call on those TV fishing shows”a good fish, nice fish, big fish.” On Henry’s Fork, however, 16-inch trout are considered average. And on the Green River below the dam at Flaming George in Utah, trout in the range of 20 inches are caught regularly. Yet here in the Black Hills, I caught what I count as the largest rainbow I’ve ever taken.

Bill got several good-sized browns the first morning out on the basin. I got only a few hits. The second day, using one of Bill’s vintage bamboo rods, I was frustrated by the vagaries of the wind and by my lousy timing on the backcast, which was attuned to my stout old graphite rod. Still, I managed one perfect cast of a pearlescent midge pupa, and watched in awe as a large rainbow that had been taunting me in the clear water near shore all morning swung around, opened his mouth, and snatched the fly.

All right, here is where I am supposed to give an account of the epic fight, how I hung on until my hands bled as the fish peeled off yards and yards of line. Only it didn’t happen that way. The bamboo did the fighting for me, giving in when I tried to horse it, providing just enough resistance to keep the fish booked. The rainbow scooted left, then right, then back again left. Then it slid in toward shore, and I, who hate wading, walked right into the water in my plain old boots and socks.

I bent the bamboo rod almost double trying to urge the bull trout to head for my net. It preferred not to, and thrashed about, trying to turn tail. In desperation, I scooped the net, made for fish of more modest proportions, under the trout’s head, but when I lifted, more than half of its length dangled out, its tail whipping water drops. At last I abandoned the net and cornered the rainbow between submerged rocks. With slack on the line, the tiny hook just fell out.

Bill didn’t exactly have his camera at ready, so there was a touchy interlude, with me holding the trout in the shallows, while Bill ran toward me, fumbling with the lens cap. Then I reached down, grabbed the fish, held it up for the requisite photo, and slipped it back into the water. As it fled, I remembered that I had forgotten to measure it. It was as long as my arm, though, that I knew, and 1 also knew I’d never caught a rainbow bigger. The adrenaline high lasted the rest of the day. The memory will last much longer.

Bill couldn’t understand why I didn’t seem keen on fishing the basin after that. I’m not sure I can fully explain even now. I’d gotten my big fish. Anything else would be anticlimactic.

Editor’s Note: Ron Robinson’s fly-fishing tale is excerpted from “These Are the Good Old Days: Fly-fishing in the Black Hills,” a story that originally appeared in our Sept/Oct 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Fishing for Answers

By Bernie Hunhoff

Biting the friendly hand of Washington wouldn’t be wise, considering that Uncle Sam has been feeding us lots of goodies in South Dakota for a long, long time.

South Dakotans get about $1.50 back for every dollar sent to Washington — far more than most states — and what do we have to show for it? A family farm economy, an Air Force Base and National Guard, national forests and grasslands, veterans hospitals, interstate highways, Mount Rushmore, airports, rural water systems and many other staples of South Dakota life.

Then let’s not forget the D.C. Booth Fish Hatchery in Spearfish. The pastoral little hatchery in the center of Spearfish has been raising trout since 1892. Next to the cavalry and homesteading, it may be the oldest federal program in the state. And it may be one of the first to go.

We heard rumors last week that the hatchery on Spearfish Creek is on a closure list. There’s no confirmation from Washington; neither is there a denial. If it’s true, that’s a sad way for the feds to say goodbye to a 117-year-old fisheries partner.

Government spending as a percentage of our nation’s GDP is too high. We can all agree on that. But the closure of the Booth hatchery seems to be a knee jerk reaction. Shouldn’t someone stand up and explain the reasoning? Shouldn’t someone from Washington show up and say here’s what it costs, here is the cost/benefit analysis and here are the options?

Shouldn’t the community of Spearfish — which has contributed many thousands of volunteer man-hours to the hatchery through the years — and the state of South Dakota be given some time to respond?

This is no way to run a government. Maybe the D.C. Booth Fish Hatchery is the most wasteful federal program in America. We suspect that it is not. But shouldn’t we know that before we net the trout and drain the ponds? Every dollar spent by Washington should be similarly analyzed. Sadly, the programs that seem safest are those with a wealthy constituency. The little hatchery in Spearfish doesn’t have a lobbyist so it’s fair game.

We’re all at fault for this debacle. Dysfunctional politics have forced the hands of those who feed us federal dollars. Because elected officials are unwilling or unable to make sound analytical decisions — apparently because they can’t face the consequences of standing up to powerful special interests on all sides of the political spectrum — we must deal with bureaucratic rumors of back-office decisions that nobody wants to own. Our congressional delegation should be sharpening their hooks. At the very least, South Dakotans deserve an explanation and a chance to make our case for the hatchery.