To some folks, yes, unfortunately!
It's been a bit of a shitshow since getting back. I caught something while up there and in the small-ish crowds this year,so fighting that off and taking care of stuff after returning has taken up most of our time.
Sturgeon season may have been a success overall, but for what we're used to, it was a complete flop. The pic below, out towards the fishing shacks, shows the terrible turnout. That's about 1/10th of the usual suspects out there, and every one of those guys had to traverse back to shore in order to skirt the cracks and get out onto somewhat safe ice for what they're doing. For regular fishing, that's perfectly fine, but for sturgeon, there's some big holes that have to be cut in order to land one if you're lucky, and that really added to the instability of the ice. There was a guy being interviewed on the local news who was asked how it is out there, and he joked that there's only about 4" of bad ice, but the problem is that it's the top 2", and the bottom 2". Friday afternoon, 2 rescues happened, and as far as I heard, nobody died over the weekend. I heard that they were air rescues due to the instability of the ice, but I wasn't there at that point, I only heard about it after the fact.
The first day, there were a total of 13 sturgeon brought in to the weigh station we normally go to. There hasn't been a year that we've been there, that there weren't at least 13 in LINE to be weighed! The ice was terrible, there's open ice in our creek, and all the way down the shore there was 3-6' of open water, so there was no way to get on the ice from our launch unless you had an Argo. Speaking of, I've never seen more of those things in my life! I didn't know they were so popular around here, although, as one of the neighbor's friends learned, they are flat useless if you lose the key! They somehow lost the key out on the ice Friday, and had to track down someone to make a key for them Saturday, after coming off the ice, so they could pull it off the ice on Sunday. They were a bit nervous having to leave it overnight on Friday and Saturday, but unless someone found the key, it wasn't going to get stolen.
My son dropped off a nice present for me as well. He won it on a strip card (10-liner, or "buy a spot and hope your name is the winning one" for non-redneck gamblers). $15 won him a nice bottle that he didn't want to take home. I was digging it at first, until I realized what a PITA it's going to be storing this bottle. He's already been notified that we're finishing it this coming year, whether he comes up to visit/work/help or not!
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