North Dakota

Tim the person I fished with in Ohio, spends almost a month each year hunting pheasants in North Dakota. He stays in Hettinger which is just north of the South Dakota line and not real far from Montana. Tim told me the Past Time Bar and Grill in Hettinger is one of the best steak houses in the country. It is owned by Tom Shirek who is also Hettinger's post master and a fisherman and I should ask him to take me fishing in North Dakota. I asked. He said yes. We signed a contract. Actually it wasn't that simple. I asked him to fish for Northern Pike and he asked, "Why? Why not Walleye or Chinook Salmon?" I said, "Because Northern is the state fish." He said, "Well, if you insist. The best time to do that is in the spring time, so I sent him a contract for the first weekend after Labor day.

The fishing project was put in jeopardy a week before I had to leave for North Dakota when I went to the bank for a loan and they turned me down because of numbers. My bank had been sold to a larger corporation. My loan officer had moved on to another small bank and I hadn't yet moved along with him. The new loan officers wore uniforms and looked at numbers instead of personal banking history. What looks bad to these guys is when your income graph curve resembles the movement of a yo yo, walking the dog. Anyway I didn't get the loan and It took me a couple of days to remember the unused credit card in the file cabinet.

I went fishing in North Dakota. I drove there on state and county back roads passing on coming cars every 10 or 20 minutes with the drivers waving at me as if we were old friends. The fields were full of sunflowers slightly past their prime. Their yellow petals were starting to wither and their heads pointed not toward the sun, but toward the ground.

I had forgotten to get cash from the credit card and the banks weren't open past 3:00 like they are in other states on Fridays. I rolled into Lake Sacajawea state park on the shore of Lake Sacajawea without any money. The gate keeper took a Minnesota personal check and directed me to the camp site right next to Tom Shirek. Tom and his cousin from Bismarck, who was camped on the other side of me and I went out for a steak and a couple of beers at “The Best Bar and Steak House by a Dam Site”.

In the morning before we went out fishing he asked me why I wanted to fish in September for Northerns when he had told me spring was the best time? I told him I hadn't taken good notes during our telephone conversation and I had forgotten what he had said soon after I had hung up the phone. He said he too suffers from CRS. I bite on that one and found out it was acronym for "can't remember shit". I told him I had chosen Lake Sacajawea because it appeared on the map to be the closest body of water to Hettinger. Better maps show other lakes closer to Hettinger, but Tom said, “It would have been his choice”, so I was at least at the right place.

We headed to the boat landing to start our first day of fishing. On the way to the boat landing Tom told me a story about one time there were a bunch of boaters fishing for Salmon not too far from shore, Tom and some other guys were on a cliff on the shoreline hitting golf balls out near the boats. Whenever a ball hit the water the fishermen would think it was a fish breaking the surface and they would move their boats close to where the ball landed.

The first day we fished the shoreline of the mainland and several islands. We didn't have any hits for several hours. I had the idea that Northern would rather see the bait coming into shore instead of going away from shore, so I asked Tom if I could be dropped on a island for a short time while he went out to fish for walleyes. I was only there for less than five minutes when I caught a two and a half to three pound Northern. I waved him back in and he took my picture with the fish and I got back into the boat and said, “Since I've caught a Northern, we can fish for something else”. Tom agreed since this wasn't the time of year to be fishing for Northern anyway. He decided to fish for Smallmouth Bass along the rocks on the dam. We cast several types of plugs, but didn't have any hits.

Next we went fishing for Chinook Salmon. The way we fished for Salmon was with down-riggers. A down-rigger is a heavy metal ball I would guess to be a couple pounds at least which is hooked to a metal cable. There is a clip on the ball which hooks to the fishing line from the fishing pole several feet from the fishing lure. When a fish takes the lure it creates more tension on the clamp than it can handle and the line pulls away from the down-rigger. I hooked and landed a four pound Chinook. Shortly thereafter Tom made too tight of a turn and one of the down-rigger cables was cut off by the motor prop. That ended our Chinook fishing.

Our next venture was Walleye. The river has been down for four or five years because of a drought. That has affected the fish population. For one thing the Walleye are having problems finding places to spawn. Therefore most of the Walleye currently in the lake are hatchery born and then stocked. In order to keep fish in the lake, there is a size limit of fourteen inches or larger. That disqualified the two Walleye we caught.

Then we went back to fishing for Northern. We fished for several more hours. It was getting near sunset when Tom caught his Northern, estimated to be over ten pounds; a very nice fish.

Back at the camp site Tom cooked both the Salmon and the Northern Pike. I was looking forward to eating the Salmon, but to our surprise the Northern tasted much better than the Salmon.

On the second day we took the boat below the Garrison dam. We went as close as we could to the dam and then we drifted back downstream trolling and casting for whatever we could get. I caught the nicest Sucker I've ever caught and that was all. We spent about two and a half hours there going past the "DO NOT GO PAST THIS SIGN" sign several times. We didn't know there was a game warden up the hill with binoculars, writing down boat licenses so he could give tickets to the boaters as they loaded their boats on their trailers. When we got back to the campground we talked to a couple of different guys who had received tickets. We were not sure how we got out without getting a ticket, but we were lucky.

I left Sunday afternoon to drive back to Minnesota. I was somewhere north of Jamestown on a back road when my clutch went out. I rolled the pickup truck to the side of the road and jumped out with my camera and after raising the hood so someone might stop to give me a ride I started taking photographs of the miles and miles of sunflowers. Lots of people stopped and asked if they could help. I eventually was offered a ride to the nearest town where I called a towing company in Jamestown.

I stayed over night in Jamestown and walked all over town killing time for the whole next day as my clutch was being fixed. I thought about Tom back in Hettinger, where he was probably making sure the mail was being sorted and delivered.