I got a letter back from DNR concerning one of the tagged sturgeon we caught & released a while back here.
it was one of the bigger fish we caught. Last fish of the trip, Dusty caught it.
We had it at 56" with a 21" girth.
The fish was originally tagged July 1 2004... which interestingly enough was the 34th birthday of Dusty's son Which is "the boy"'s dad, my cousin. Our dearly missed family member that surely would have been with on that trip if he were still with us today. I'm certain he is with us on all of our adventures together but, you know what I mean.
The fish was measured & reported as 51.6 inches in 2004.
Another interesting fact is that the fish had not been caught in the time between july 2004 up until the day before we caught it...
yep, the fish was caught right there in the same area we were fishing on Saturday May 9 2009. I'd be willing to bet we watched it being boated & released by a boat fishing close to us on that saturday. That fish had a rough weekend, cought on hook & line after being freed from a net about 5 years earlier, released from hook & line only to fall for the same trick the very next day.
Dusty, it's no wonder that fish faught so hard on the 10th when you caught it, he knew what was going on because he had just did that whole thing the day before!!
The other guys reported the fish as a 60 incher, so either they didn't have a tape & gave it a generous guess or they had some sort of special fishermans tape measure with built in fish story compensation.
The fish grew about 4.4" between july 2004 & now, thats less than an inch a year.
Using the girth/length chart they provided the fish should have weighed 41 pounds & would have been around 30 years old when we caught it.
