Lake Sturgeon in the Lake St. Clair System

Read this part first

Lake sturgeon are protected almost everywhere on the Great Lakes. In Michigan waters the rules are specific, limited and revised — some waters are closed to sturgeon fishing entirely, some are catch-and-release only, and where any harvest exists at all it is tightly controlled and requires registration. None of that is something to work out from a forum post or a memory of last season.

Read the current Michigan DNR guide for the exact water you intend to fish — Lake St. Clair, the St. Clair River and the Detroit River are handled separately — and plan on releasing every sturgeon you touch. This page is written on that assumption.

The best sturgeon water in the Great Lakes

Lake sturgeon were once so abundant in this system that commercial crews stacked them on the riverbank to burn. By 1900 the population across the Great Lakes had been reduced by something like 99 percent, through a combination of targeted harvest, dams that cut off spawning rivers, and the destruction of the clean gravel and cobble they spawn on.

The St. Clair system held on. The St. Clair River runs fast, cold and clean over hard bottom from Port Huron down to the delta, which is exactly the habitat sturgeon need to spawn, and Lake St. Clair below it is a shallow, productive feeding ground. Protection came, then decades of research, then a binational habitat effort that has constructed spawning reefs in both the St. Clair and Detroit rivers. The population here is now the strongest in the Great Lakes and the reference point everyone else’s restoration work is measured against.

That is the context you are fishing in. A sturgeon in this river is not a by-catch. It is the result of a century of somebody else’s work.

A fish older than your grandfather

Lake sturgeon routinely live past fifty and can pass a hundred. Males may take fifteen years to reach maturity and females twenty or more, and a mature female does not spawn every year — she spawns every three to five. That reproductive math is the whole reason the species collapsed so completely and recovers so slowly. Kill one adult and you remove decades of future spawning from the system.

They have not changed much in a very long time. Bony plates instead of scales, a cartilage skeleton, four barbels under a protrusible vacuum of a mouth, and a shark-shaped tail. They feed by dragging those barbels across the bottom and inhaling whatever registers — insect larvae, crayfish, mollusks, and in the modern lake, a great many round gobies.

How to hook one, and how to unhook one

The technique is not complicated. Anchor above a channel edge or a hole in the St. Clair River in 20 to 45 feet, put a fist-sized gob of nightcrawlers on a large circle hook, hold it on bottom with enough lead for the current — often 6 to 12 ounces — and wait. The bite is a slow heavy load, not a tap. Do not swing. Let the fish turn against the circle hook.

Then fight it hard. This is the part people get wrong out of courtesy. A twenty minute battle on light line in 70-degree summer water builds lactic acid in a fish that may weigh more than the person holding the rod, and that is what kills released sturgeon. Heavy rod, real drag, 65 to 80 pound braid, and get it to the boat.

Handling: the rules that actually matter

Never lift a sturgeon vertically. Not by the head, not by the gill plate, and not on a lip gripper or a hanging scale. These fish have a cartilage skeleton and a long heavy body designed to be supported by water along its entire length. Hanging one vertically tears internal connective tissue and organs in ways that do not show and are often fatal days later.

Keep it horizontal and keep it wet. Unhook it in the water alongside the boat if you can, with long pliers. If you lift it for a photograph, get both arms under the body, hold it low over the water, and count the seconds you have it in the air — under ten. Never let it thrash on a hot deck. Never put a finger under the gill plate.

Measure, do not weigh. A measuring board along the fish gives you a number without hanging it, and length is what fisheries biologists want anyway. Then hold it into the current, facing upstream, until it pulls away from you on its own.

What you are participating in

Anglers who fish the St. Clair system for sturgeon are, whether they think about it this way or not, part of the monitoring effort. Tagged fish get reported. Length data gets used. The population that exists here exists because people decided, over about a hundred years, that it was worth the restraint. Fish it in that spirit and it will still be here when the fish you released this summer is finally old enough to spawn.