Thirteen year old Connor of Circle Pines, MN was fishing with…oh, heck…Connor tells the story better.
Quote:
Ok so I was with my dad and his boss by the Hudson swing bridge using a Texas rig and braided line with a night crawler on the hook. We were anchored in about 5 feet and casting into 25 feet or so.
All the sudden I got a nibble and thought a sheephead was taking it but then it started to run. It ran for about 5 minutes but then it stopped and I began reeling in again.
It ran one more time but this time when I was reeling it in it jumped 1 foot out of the water and that’s when we saw it was a sturgeon.
I got it in the net then realized there was a tag on it’s fin we scratched off the goo on the tag and it read ” mn dnr 87995″ that’s when I started shaking and got some pictures we didn’t get the weight or girth but we checked an online conversion chart. I saw that my very first sturgeon was not only 47″ long and 19 lbs but that it was my biggest fish of my life!
Thanks for leaving the tag in the fish Connor! That’s going to give the DNR more and more information on our St Croix Lake Sturgeon over the years. Who knows, you might catch her again someday!
Here’s the DNR info:
This fish was originally tagged on October 1, 2010. At that time the fish was 1117 mm long (43.98″) and weighed 6668 grams (14.7 lbs). It also had a girth of 368 mm (14.49″). The length-versus-weight ratio of this fish was about 8 percent below average for Lake Sturgeon in the St. Croix River . Yours is the first reported recapture of this fish since its initial tagging. According to the information you provided on your catch, this fish had relocated approximately 5.7 miles from the original capture site! The length that you reported for this fish is a little above what we would expect for after this amount of time (+3 inches), but is within reason given the difference in methods of measurement used by biologists and anglers. Our work to date has found that growth for Lake Sturgeon in the Lower St. Croix River is relatively slow and they increase in length at an average rate of 1.1 inches per year.
Congratulations Connor!
For some reason I think there will be more to come in the future 
