(Nick Lowrey/Capital Journal)[h=3]Sampson[/h] Gordy Sampson caught a 24.53-pound Chinook salmon on Lake Oahe Friday. Several anglers have reported catching fish over 20 pounds this summer, breathing new life into what was once the lake’s second most popular fishery.
Posted: Sunday, August 16, 2015 10:39 pm | Updated: 9:04 am, Mon Aug 17, 2015.
By Nick Lowrey Nick.lowrey@capjournal.com | 0 comments
Five minutes.
That’s all it took for Gordy Sampson to hook into the biggest salmon of his life. And at 24.53 pounds, it may well be the biggest Chinook salmon anyone in South Dakota has ever caught too.
“We just got on the water,” Sampson said at Carl’s Bait Shop in Fort Pierre after getting his fish weighed on the shop’s certified scales. “It was just unreal, we weren’t fishing more than five minutes.”
It is the size of the fish being caught and not the numbers driving anglers to make the journey to the Pierre and Fort Pierre area. Some drive hundreds of miles. They’re hoping to tap into ideal conditions on the lake – strong lake herring numbers and Lake Oahe having all four year classes of salmon again – in order to catch their own wall-hanger.
On Friday morning about 20 boats could be seen trolling with down riggers in front of the Oahe dam. The numbers on the license plates at the West Shore boat ramp showed anglers had come from as far as Sioux Falls for the chance to catch big salmon.
Two of those anglers were Jeff and Greg Daniel of Sioux Falls. They were launching their boat at about 11 a.m.
“We’re just hoping to catch a big fish,” Jeff said.
Steve Rounds, who owns the resort at the Oahe Downstream Recreation Area, said he’s definitely not seeing the same number of anglers that he did prior to the 2011 flood. The flood nearly wiped out Lake Oahe’s salmon population. Between 8 percent and 10 percent of Rounds’ business disappeared, he said.
“You’d see 60 to 70 boats a day in 2010,” Rounds said.
For the past four years Rounds has been struggling to make up the difference. Now, though the numbers aren’t back to where they were, the publicity generated by the sheer size of the fish being caught is bringing some of that business back.
“We’re getting a lot of calls out of Nebraska and Iowa,” Rounds said.
Dan Miller, who owns Carl’s Bait Shop, said anglers started catching salmon about July 18. That was the day Dale Falon pulled in a 20-pound fish. Since then, Miller said, he’s weighed at least 12 salmon over 15 pounds and about six that were just shy of that mark.
“It could last another six weeks depending on the water temperatures,” he said.
That’s good news for his business. Miller said his last shipment of salmon tackle came in Monday, but by 10 a.m. Friday, he was sold out.
“It’s another dimension (to the lake) that we lost after the flood,” he said of Lake Oahe’s salmon fishery.
Rounds said he tells the anglers who call about salmon the truth – there aren’t a whole lot of salmon being caught, but the ones that are caught are pretty big.
“It looked like it was six feet long in the water,” Sampson said of his fish.
Sampson said he may have spotted his big Chinook on the boat’s sonar before he caught it. Samson said he saw a big dot on the sonar screen and told his fishing partner, Jerry Nissen of Brookings, who owns the boat the pair was fishing from, “that’s a 24-pounder.”
Nissen backed him up at the West Shore boat ramp after the fish was weighed. He said it took Samson about 15 minutes to wrestle the brute to the boat.
“I was letting my guest catch the first fish,” Nissen said.
Nissen also happens to be Sampson’s taxidermist. He’d made the trip out to Highmore to drop off a dandy white tailed deer mount for Samson. And Nissen invited Sampson out to fish for the day because he didn’t have another partner.
The fish was nearly lost when it proved too big for the net.
Nissen said he took home four fish two weeks ago weighing a total of about 74 pounds. He caught a 21-pound salmon then and plans to mount it. Nissen said he’ll be mounting Sampson’s catch too.
The fish was caught in about 70 feet of water, Sampson said, on a plug and flasher rig near the face of Oahe Dam.
Fisheries Program Administrator Geno Adams will have to review the weight and the paperwork filed as part of the state’s record keeping process before Sampson’s salmon can be officially declared a state record. That will likely happen this week, fisheries biologist Bob Hanten said Friday. Hanten oversees Lake Oahe’s salmon program
