Paddlefish season draws snaggers to dam In pursuit of swimming fossils By Larry Myhre
Reprinted from the Sioux City Journal
YANKTON, S.D. – The allure of holding a prehistoric fish which swam 50 million years before the dinosaurs ruled the world is hard to resist for Mieke Slaba, Wagner, S.D.
Each year she looks forward to pursuing paddlefish below the Gavin’s Point Dam with her father Gary Howey of Hartington, Neb.
Of course they have to be lucky enough to draw one of the 1,600 paddlefish tags issued annually by Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks. This year they were.
Mieke is not alone in her quest for paddlefish. Snagging is so popular that special regulations had to be put in place years ago to protect this valuable resource.
Although the chance to catch a really big fish, Nebraska’s state record paddlefish weighs 93 pounds and was caught from the Gavin’s Point Dam tailwaters in 1998 by Kathy Reiman of Yankton, is undoubtedly one of the reasons. Another is that this fish is incredibly tasty, if you remove all the red meat from the fillets.
And in late fall, paddlefish congregate by the thousands below the dam, jammed up here during a prespawn migration urge eons old.
We joined Marlyn Wiebelhaus, of Wiebelhaus Guiding of Wynot, Neb., at the boat ramp on the Nebraska side of the river.
I was carrying the camera, Mieke and Gary would be doing the snagging and Marlyn would put us on the fish.
Which he did in short order.
Mieke connected first with a good fish. Too good as it turned out.
A slot limit protects the good spawners. All fish between 35 and 45 inches long, measured from the centerline of the fish lying flat from the eye to the fork of the tail must be returned. So her fish went back.
The regulations require the use of only one treble hook with a gap of 1/2 inch or less, so snagged fish can be released unharmed.
It didn’t take long for Mieke and Gary to fill their tags. There were other anglers on the river that day and it seemed no one had trouble filling their tag, even those fishing from shore.
Mieke is a middle school teacher at Wagner Community School. She’ll have a good fish story to tell her students and husband Matt who also teaches there.
And the fish that swam with the dinosaurs, still swims in the waters of the Missouri River.