Leviathan Landed.  Gavin Schreurs of Lake Benton, Minn. with the sixty-inch lake sturgeon he caught on an unseasonably cold August morning of fishing  on Big Detroit Lake.  Lincoln Schreurs Photo.

By Nick Simonson

August cold fronts are a strange and jarring occurrence.  One week it’s near 90 degrees, humid, and every largemouth bass is living the good life in the warm shallows of the lake around the docks on the south shore.  Suddenly overnight, it feels like pheasant opener as a chill north wind riles up the water and drops the morning temperature on my dog walk through the nearby wooded neighborhood into the forties.  The timing of such a front couldn’t have been more notable with my godson Gavin and his brother Lincoln arriving for a stretch of so-called summer fishing over the weekend.

Huddled in the red leather seats of the old Lund in coats and sweatshirts under our life jackets, we watched the steam rise off the lake as the continued northerly gales rolled the surface of what just two days before was eighty-degree water. The readout on the depth finder now showed 69.4 as we pulled out from the boat lift. Thankfully the wind had decreased overnight, and we were able to find our way and anchor up on the steep breakline near the cabin which showcased a couple of large arcs on the sonar.  I hoped they were the sturgeon we’d be trying for and willed it into the universe by offering my opinion up to the brothers whom I had fished with regularly when they were young, but only more sporadically since my family had moved away.

Rods baited with balls of nightcrawlers, we cast them out behind the boat once the anchor hung up in the soft sand below, and the wind gently blew the craft from side-to-side at the end of its tether. Despite the cool conditions, each boy diligently kept their hands on the fishing rods, feeling for what could be a subtle take during the first forty minutes or so of our sit.  Having nothing more than  few tick-tick-ticks from the schools of small bait-stealing panfish below, I offered up a ten-minute notice that we’d be headed in to grab some trolling gear to try for the lake’s more readily-biting pike, or maybe a muskie, if we were lucky.

Staring at the shoreline behind us after uttering the words, I blew through my hands to warm my knuckles, and swigged the bottom half inch of cooled coffee from my travel mug. From the periphery of my right eye, I caught a jolt as shocking as the shifted weather conditions. The baitcaster in Gavin’s hands jumped in an arch from left-to-right like a fuel gauge needle as the key is turned in an old pickup truck.  With a start he pulled in the opposite direction and the rod’s parabola bend nearly doubled with the weight of a fish below.

In moments, it was no longer under the boat as the gray-and-cream form of a lake sturgeon rocketed up and out of the water, fully tail-walking all its girthy five-foot length across the surface before splashing down twenty feet alongside the boat.  The battle and the five-alarm fire drill began as our collective adrenaline surged.  Lincoln reeled up his rod and tossed it to the front of the boat as I pulled the massive landing net loose from its stowage in the bow.  Gavin stood on the jump seat in the back of the boat, and I told Lincoln to fire up the video camera on his phone.

Never has five minutes felt like five hours as the leviathan below pulled line and gave it back. Gavin answered each run with a raise of the rod and a reclamation of the green braid back to the gold spool on the blue baitcasting reel in a continuous tug-of-war.  When the fish would sprint toward the anchor rope, he would steer it back toward the stern.  If it edged him near the kicker and the main motor, he would guide it back along the gunwale, keeping it alongside us and clear of the obstructions as it dug deep and hugged the bottom of the lake.  Intensely focused on when it would breach the surface again, I coached my godson as best I could, not knowing how the fish was hooked or what would come next, but he played it expertly letting it run as needed and putting the mettle to it when appropriate, finally gaining more line than he had lost.

With a few hard cranks and strained raises of the rod which at times seemed bent in a J-shaped curl over the side of the boat, Gavin loosened the fish’s grip on the sandy substrate below and brought it up the 18 feet of the water column with a flurry of handle turns.  Out from the boat the sturgeon breached and slid across the surface as I laid the net flat a foot below the rippling waves.  The sharklike form coasted over the rim and into the mesh as the three of us bellowed out a simultaneous victory whoop so loud that we likely woke half of the sleepers along the south shore.

At sixty inches, it was bigger than any sturgeon I had ever caught, and Gavin smiled as I lifted the insanely girthy fish to him for a photo and a quick release.  Likely stocked in the lake system near the start of the restoration process which had been ongoing over the past three decades, the fish was easily over fifty pounds and perhaps pushing sixty.  We admired its incredible roundness from a life spent snapping up the high-protein snails on the bottom of the lake, before it went back into the water with an easy release followed by high-fives and the admiration of sturgeon slime on the pads of our life jackets.

While the weather might have hindered us from the planned weekend of summer bass fishing in sleeveless tees and board shorts, and jumping from the dock with the herd of dogs while trying to catch errant footballs over the warm weedy shallows at the cabin, the fish raised by the cold front would serve as a reminder that even when things switch unexpectedly, incredible opportunities will always be available…in our outdoors.