'A super giant fat sturgeon'

Aug. 19—Greg Poulsen and everyone on the boat knew he'd hooked into a big fish.

And why wouldn't they? It was one of those days you hear about.

Fishing on C.J. Strike Reservoir with outfitter Brett Jones of Jones Sport Fishing, they'd been into slabs all day. Two of the sturgeon they got to the boat measured better than 9 feet. One of them, at 9 feet, 11 inches, was just a half-inch shy of the Idaho record. They also boated an 8-footer and one longer than 7 feet.

"We hit three fish over 9 feet — that is nuts — in the same day. It was just a very odd day of giant fish," Jones said. "It was pretty cool as far as fishing goes. I don't think it's beatable. It's one of those made-up stories that actually happened."

Poulsen, fishing with his wife, Angie, and two of their friends, said fighting them is hard — but fun — work.

"They are just huge," he said. "When they are fighting, it's like you are pulling a refrigerator off the bottom of the river."

But these are no static hunks of metal and plastic. They are hundreds of pounds of muscle and cartilage. Their prehistoric brains are programmed with the fight-or-flight instinct. The fish Poulsen hooked did both. A mere 30 seconds into what would be a 40-minute battle, the sturgeon breached, thrusting all of its 10-foot, 4-inch body out of the water.

"Everyone started freaking out because it was so big," said Poulsen.

Big as in a new state record, if they got it to the boat. But of course they didn't know that then. They just knew it was a hog. Jones said he's terrible at estimating the size of a fish before running a tape measure along its back, but he was sure this one would go all of 9 feet.

"When you see a super giant fat sturgeon come out of the water like that — first of all, it's mind-blowing they can even breach that high," he said. "When you are standing in the boat and that thing's head is over your head, it's just a mind-blowing experience."

C.J. Strike Dam and Reservoir sits on the Bliss Reach of the Snake River in southern Idaho, southwest of Mountain Home. It's about where the river, after flowing across the Snake River Plateau, starts bending toward the north to slither past the Morley Nelson Birds of Prey National Conservation Area and eventually squeeze through Hells Canyon.

The stretch between the dam and Bliss, Idaho, holds about 4,000 sturgeon, based on annual surveys by Idaho Power Co. But it's tough to fish. Unlike the Snake River in Hells Canyon, the fish can't be counted on to stick to certain holes.

"There is a lot of water you have to comb through," Jones said. "They generally kind of like to stick together, but we find them in random spots — new spots — almost every week."

Poulsen said it didn't take long for Jones to home in on them.

"It was slow at first, but once he found them, he put us right on them. He would hook them up and we would reel them in."

He, his wife and their friends were what Jones calls "sturgeon virgins." They'd never fished for or caught one before.

"We caught a ton of fish and they were all huge," Poulsen said. "We didn't know what to expect, but we wasn't expecting that."

Nor was he expecting to set a record and take the title of Idaho sturgeon king back home to Eagle Mountain, Utah.

"When we got out of the boat to look at it — my heck, it was just huge. It was just big. There is no other way to put it."

It smashed the old record set in 2019 by Rusty Peterson and his friends who teamed up to pull a 9-foot, 11.5-inch sturgeon to the surface of a deep hole in Hells Canyon.

How long will Poulsen hold the record? Nobody knows, of course. They are rare but it's known that more 10-footers lurk in the river's deep holes.

As part of an effort to monitor the white sturgeon population, biologists from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Nez Perce Tribe and Idaho Power Company sample sturgeon each year by catching them with set lines and rod and reel. In 1993, Idaho Power biologists hooked one in the Bliss Reach that measured 131.5 inches — that's just a half-inch short of 11 feet. More recently, they hooked a 10-foot, 8-inch sturgeon in Hells Canyon. In 30 years of sampling, biologists have handled more than 4,000 Snake River sturgeon and just 10 of those have gone double digits.

There are old-timey stories of people using teams of horses to drag even bigger sturgeon out of the Snake. But neither fish caught for research nor old yarns qualify for state hook-and-line angling records.

Jones doesn't know if the fish Poulsen caught had ever been touched by humans. Sturgeon are open to catch-and-release fishing only in Idaho and anglers must release them. Researchers and those who fish for sturgeon sometimes come to know certain fish they catch more than once. Sturgeon can live many decades and accumulate nicks and scars that make them identifiable. But the new record fish was pristine.

"I don't know if that fish had ever been caught," he said. "That fish was super clean."

With so much water in the Bliss Reach, Jones believes it's possible there are big sturgeon that have yet to be caught.

"There could be a fish 8 inches bigger that no one has ever seen."

Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273. Follow him on Twitter @ezebarker.