GO FISH

April 14, 2012
    Who doesn't love the card game known as "Go Fish?" Look at it this way, its easy enough for you to play it with your kids and it's a fast game.
     That is how I felt this past week at the paper ... the week went by fast and I got to spend some time with the kids showing them outdoors-type stuff -- especially the fish this week. You see, Shawano is known around this time of the year for the sturgeon spawn. Every April the prehistoric fish make their way into Shawano to spawn.
     This spawning draws hundreds of fish to the Shawano dam and just as many spectators to Sturgeon Park in Shawano to view them. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is also around pulling the fish from the river, tagging them, collecting the eggs and sperm from the fish and then releasing them back into the river.    
     These sturgeon can live well over 100-years-old. Shawano even made history this year. On Tuesday, the Wisconsin DNR captured its largest ever sturgeon -- a female closed to 7-feet, 3-inches long and weighing 240 pounds. According to DNR fisheries supervisor if the female sturgeon hadn't just spawned, she would have been about 270 pounds!
     The DNR estimated the huge fish to be about 125 years old.
     By Wednesday, the spawning activity on the Wolf River near the Shawano dam had begun to wind down, but I was still able to make some nice images looking down from the walking bridge onto some onlookers searching for the sturgeon. Some of my favorite photos this week were of this.
    On Thursday I learned that a local organization -- Walleyes for Tomorrow -- was releasing fry into Shawano Lake -- the fry hatched from the eggs the group was collecting for the past several weeks -- 4.7 million egs collected. WOW!
     Friday I met up with a group of folks from Walleyes for Tomorrow and boarded a boat with them and went to the middle of Shawano Lake to begin releasing the fry. We released about 60,000 of the tiny fish no bigger than a fingernail. It took about an hour to release them.
    Here are some images from a fishy week. Enjoy!