Fishing Lic/Record Sales!

[Lee Borgersen]

  North Dakota Fishing Licenses Expect To Hit Record Sales!

3/27/15

RIVERDALE -- If a guy wanted to save money fishing, he’d buy a pail of walleye fingerlings from the folks at the Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery and raise them in a stock tank in the garage.

But if he’d rather spend the money for bait, tackle, beer, boat, gas, camping, spit seeds and a license to go fishing for the love of it, then he, too, can contribute to the $425 million the sport contributes to the state’s economy annually.

Greg Power, Game and Fish Department fisheries chief, said he’s expecting sales for the license year that ends Tuesday will be yet another record and a pretty hefty one at that.

“We’re in never-been-there-before territory,” said Power, adding that last year was phenomenal with 209,000 licenses sold.

This year’s total will be least 10 percent more, according to Power, who admits he’s being conservative.

“We’ve got a record number of lakes and a record population of fish,” he said.

Solid footing
The growth of the sport rests on an aggressive stocking program, which is where the National Fish Hatchery partnership plays a key role. It’s also based on the fact that North Dakota has more fishing waters than at any time in recent history.

Jerry Weigel, department’s fish production supervisor, said, last year, the department stocked 418 fishing waters, or lakes, compared to 168 lakes 15 years ago. That’s an increase of a quarter-million water surface acres.

It’s directly due to a sustained number of wet years, measured in rain and snowpack.

“These waters are lasting long enough and sticking around and becoming phenomenal fisheries,” Weigel said.

License sales in the dry years of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s plummeted faster than a lead sinker.

“Fishing and drought really don’t go together. Things are good as long as we have water," Power said.

Rob Holm, who manages the federal hatchery near Riverdale on the downstream side of Garrison Dam, concurs with that assessment.

“It’s measurable, and the fishing is the best it’s ever been,” Holm said.

This time of year, with ice houses pulled off the lakes and rivers still ice clogged, fishing is mostly about tuning up the boat and gear and making big plans for spring and beyond.

Planning ahead
Hatchery employees and Game and Fish are gearing up to make sure that all those plans have as good an outcome as possible.

Starting in a few weeks, rows of glass-tubed incubators will be filled with the spawning material for the state’s recreational fish. Once hatched, the tiny critters will go into tanks and ponds, and, by June and early July, they’ll have been released into hundreds of lakes and some river systems across the state.

For a variety of reasons, natural reproduction is either non-existent, or less than ideal, depending on the water system. This decades-old stocking program has been primarily responsible for transforming North Dakota into a topnotch, if not world-class, fishery for some species.

The stocking program is a cooperative one, with the State Game and Fish Department contributing about $285,000 annually to the cost of the hatchery’s year-round program, plus the department’s own resources to collect the spawning material and stock and manage the waters.

The hatchery rears salmon, trout, perch, walleye, blue gill, bass, black crappie, pike and muskies for the stocking program, along with some specialty species, including pallid sturgeon in a threatened species recovery program, shovelnose, burbot and paddlefish.

“It’s been pretty successful. We’re good at getting numbers,” Holm said.

That includes the roughly 10 million teeny tiny walleye that the State Game and Fish will take from the hatchery ponds in June and early July and splash into waters everywhere.

“Ten million is the most we can do, but, if we can do more, the state will take them,” Holm said.

That number of walleye is as amazing as it sounds.

“It’s unprecedented anywhere in North America and is the most anywhere in one state, the most of several states together, and it’s based on the hatchery capability,” said Weigel, adding that the department’s annual fish requests from the hatchery are starting to sound like a broken record.

“We’re making maximum requests that can set up a record request if the hatchery has ideal conditions,” Weigel said.

Weigel said, when what he calls “new waters” are stocked with fish, the department adds northern pike and walleye from the hatchery and yellow perch that it nets from existing waters and transfers over.

The hatchery is on the downstream side of Garrison Dam and Lake Sakakawea and fishermen who enjoy the big water owe a debt of gratitude to the cooperative program between the federal hatchery and Game and Fish.

Holm figures half of all fish in Lake Sakakawea were stocked by the hatchery and 100 percent in lower one-third were.

“There’s no natural reproduction down here (on the Riverdale-Pick City end). It’s too cold, too long,” he said.

Power said fishing in Lake Sakakawea this year should be good, if the numbers of smelt, a small forage fish, are any indication.

“The smelt in Lake Sakakawea is off the charts,” he said.

North Dakota stocking plans:
Walleye -- 10.2 million
Northern pike -- 1 million
Salmon (Lake Sakakawea only) -- 400,000
Black crappie -- 200,000
Large mouth bass -- 50,000
Rainbow trout -- 60,000
Muskies -- 6,000
Another 38,000 brown and cutthroat trout will be stocked into the Missouri River.