Back Cast

I was visiting with someone between pitches at a minor league baseball game last summer, an avid angler who, if talk around his office holds true, puts in more hours on the water than most.

The guy fishes a lot. It’s a big part of who he is. While he’s like the bulk of North Dakota anglers in his focus – walleye, walleye, walleye – what separated him during our short conversation was his awareness of why, in large part, he’d had such a killer spring and early summer on the water.

This conversation stood out compared to the many I’ve had with anglers in my 20 years at Game and Fish because it felt understood that my role was to listen, be the middleman, and deliver a message to those responsible.

I’ve spent my career – from a weekly newspaper to bigger dailies before landing here – working in institutions that are easy targets. I learned from a veteran newspaperman when I was just getting my feet wet in the field that if I didn’t develop a thick skin to the reproach of the many critics I’d hear from over time, then I should look for different work.

It was good advice.

Yet, that’s not to say that all the dispatches over the years, written or spoken, have been critical. Far from it. Which brings me back to my angler who, in short, said that while he understood Mother Nature’s hand in the quality and quantity of fishing waters across the state’s landscape, he believed much of the credit, especially in the 70-plus new prairie walleye lakes dotting central and eastern North Dakota that weren’t around 20 years ago, should land squarely on those Department fisheries biologists who manage the waters.

I don’t think people fully understand that, just take it for granted, he said. The fishing on many of these prairie lakes, he added, has been so good it’s pretty clear the biologists managing and developing these waters certainly know what they’re doing.

Message delivered.

Certainly, I’m a Game and Fish Department homer, but will never apologize for it because, more than anything, the compassion for the resources Department personnel carry waist-deep into North Dakota waters or into the field is admirably honest.

As I write this on the first day of spring, it feels like anything but. The weather folks announced a hazardous weather outlook starting tomorrow that includes another 2-4 inches of snow.

That’s good news if you’re a proponent of records as this additional accumulation will either nudge us here in Bismarck up against the snow total record or put us over the top.

I’m not certain of which and it doesn’t matter at this point.

Considering this issue of North Dakota OUTDOORS is dedicated to wetting a line, we know with certainty that the open water fishing season, that carrot dangling at the end of a really long stick, will someday arrive, just not tomorrow, or next week.

If you wander through the many pages in this issue dedicated to providing some insight to the active managed fisheries scattered across the landscape, I can tell you there are something like 450 or so.

That’s a lot. The most in our state’s history, which is the type of record I can get behind.