Fabulous Fishing Fun

Friday night, at Rock-A-Thon, a fellow teacher asked me if I would be interested in joining him for an evening of spearfishing for whitefish...I said "you better believe it!" So yesterday, I went over to his house for some pre-fishing dinner. We had venison and home grown potatoes....very tasty! Venison is actually not as common as you might think up here. Deer do not live in Fairbanks, or anywhere close to Fairbanks...it is just to cold. If you want deer you need to travel to the coast. I believe that is where the deer we ate came from. Anyways, we hit the road at about 5:30-ish. Like I have said before, Fairbanks is great because you travel ten miles in any direction and you are in the middle of nowhere. The river we were planning to fish is less than 20 miles from my apartment. We get to the river around 6, maybe 6:30 and it is still quite light out. Since it needs to be dark out before you can spear fish, we went out to find wood for a fire...I like fires! John, the teacher I went with, also dropped a fishing line in to kill some time until the sun set. He caught a very nice grayling the old fashion way (actually, if you think about it...spearing them is probably the old fashion way, so he caught the grayling the new-fashion way)Once the sun set, we got into the water. I do not believe spearfishing is legal in MN, so some readers may not know how it works...here's the deal:

To spear whitefish, you wait until it's dark, grab a lantern, put on a pair of waders, and walk through the river looking for fish to impale. I believe the fish are attracted to the light from the lantern, but even if they are not, it would be impossible to see them without the light...so a lantern is mandatory. We made this a two man job...I was the lantern holder for the evening. It was pretty amazing. We would walk through the river shinning the light down looking for anything that moved. The water is VERY clear up here. At the deepest point, I was up to almost my chest in the water and I could still see the bottom without a problem. The first fish we saw were in the shallow stuff (knee deep.) We were walking around seeing several fish, but they were all pretty small. John took a few stabs at them, but they were slipping in between the forks of the spear (the spear looks kind of like a small trident, but it has four or five points instead of three.) We were not the only ones on the river that night. We noticed that the other people fishing were in deeper water, staying in one place and waiting for the fish to come to them...so we gave that a try. We found a place that looked good and waited for only three to four minutes before we saw something very large swim up to us and them away very quickly. We knew we were in the right place. A few minutes later, another nice sized fish swam close to us. I shinned the light in the direction and John took aim. "Got him!" We pulled the fish out of the water...a nice 15" humpback whitefish! John took a few few more shots at other fish and got one more. Here a couple pictures John took:


(The grayling and the two whitefish...funny how the one white fish is not a whitefish, that is the grayling)

This one is taken without a flash. It is quite blurry, but you can get a better look at the lanterns from the other fishers:

After a while, our feet started getting cold so we decided to call it a night. On the way home we stopped at a place called Hilltop for some coffee and pie. The pie was AMAZING!!

The night was very fun...it was so fun that we might be going back out on Wednesday for round two. We just got dumped on with about 5 inches of snow today, so we'll see if we are still up for another night of fishing.

Have a great week everyone!
~Mr. Lockwood