By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
This year’s paddlefish season on the Yellowstone River was fast, furious and extremely short, as Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks announced Friday morning that they were nearing their harvest quota for the season and have determined to close the paddlefish harvest Saturday.
FWP Region 7 fisheries manager Mike Backes announced the paddlefish harvest season would close at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 20.
“They’re harvesting them at a faster rate today than they did Tuesday,” Backes said Friday morning. “So we’re going to be pretty close to the quota by the end of the day.”
As of 10 a.m. on Friday, Backes had counted 540 fish brought in to the Intake check station. The season quota is 1,000, though FWP typically shuts the harvest down as the count at Intake approaches 700 or so, as they estimate a certain number caught by anglers at other locations along the river are not directly reported to the check station.
Backes said that once the count at Intake hits about 700 fish, FWP will “do an instant closure at Intake,” something he expected to likely happen by the end of Friday. At that point, anglers had to go downstream of Intake, starting at the Cottonwood site, Backes said, to legally harvest a fish.
Anglers will still be able to snag for paddlefish at Intake after the harvest season closes, but only on a catch-and-release basis. The catch-and-release season will remain open until May 30. Catch-and release fishing for paddlefish can only be done at Intake.
Backes said the paddlefish season closing after only three full harvest days is “not quite” a record for the shortest season ever, but is “very close.”
He said this year’s short season is the result of a “perfect storm” of circumstances. To begin with, unlike most recent seasons which got off to a languid start due to low water, the Yellowstone has been a raging cauldron of muddy water for weeks, fed by near-record mountain snowpacks to the west. That meant that when the paddlefish season opened on Monday, the river was already well-above where it needs to be for paddlefish to begin their spawning run up it and the fish were already camped out at Intake en masse.
The other part of the equation, Backes said, is that a large class of female paddlefish are currently at their optimal breeding age.
“Now the females of the 1995 class are fully recruited, so it’s not completely surprising (to have a hefty harvest and short season this year),” Backes said.
Those “fully recruited” female paddlefish are also proving to be a boon for the Glendive Chamber of Commerce’s Yellowstone Caviar program.
“We had some really nice fish and really nice caviar coming through on Wednesday,” said Chamber of Commerce executive director Christine Whitlatch on Thursday. “I anticipate we’ll have a good quantity of caviar, and I think we’ll have better quality caviar this year. We’re seeing a lot of bigger females.”
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.