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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gst" data-source="post: 182259" data-attributes="member: 373">Used to do a fair bit of this back in the day when Jim Engel owned Dakota Divers in Minot. We were some of the first guys after it was made legal in the state Lots of fun.  Did a lot of diving with Jim. Some info for those thinkin about investing the couple thousand dollars thinking it is "shooting fish in a barrel". Water clarity is an issue though more times than not. Walleyes and Northerns are harder to find. Carp will come in by banging two rocks together underwater. Smallies are curious, we talked with a game warden about taking ice fishing poles down diving with us and he said it was not illegal.  Kinda fun swimming backwards watching a fish hit your bait. Drums are fun to chase and get the pearls out of.  Diving/spearfishing  in the tail race is the funnest. Closest feeling to flying I can think of. Took many walleye and ling out of there plus ALOT of lures. Back then (don;t know if it still is) you could spear fish at night. That is like shooting fish in a barrel if you can find them. Had a HUGE northern swim by and stuck a spear in his gill plate and he took off and jerked my gun out of my hand. The next day Jim was doing open water certs with my girl friend and another gal  and they came across a drag mark cutting across the lake bottom and followed it and found my spear gun after a couple hundred yards. Between Wolf Creek and the dam there used to be a huge submerged cotton wood that we called the Christmas tree. It would be loaded with lures and tackle every year. Once got a whole down rigger system off it. Had to pay attention, getting tangled up in fishing line under water is not a good idea. there is some deep spots in front of the dam. Used to do bounce dives there with people. We would camp at Wolf Creek and go out at night diving. Some times new divers would want to go with on the bounce dives. It is kinda spooky especially at night and a couple times had people kinda lose it. Not a good deal at 70 feet in total darkness. traveled up to Lac LaRonge one year to spear fish. Never found the monster pike we were looking for but did spear one after 4 days that was 21 lbs. But found a river that had literally thousands of different fish in it below a small damn. speared our limit on walleye and northerns. started cleaning them the horse/deer flies were so bad we put our scuba gear back on found a couple flat rocks and sat on the bottom of the river and cleaned them. For 4 or 5 years had a tradition of diving the tail race on New years eve.........back then only a couple guys had dry suits the rest of us just froze up i our wet suits. By the time the boat ride was done getting back to the trailer people had to help break the ice on your wet suits to get out of them.  Did a couple of winter night dives there too..........pretty stupid actually even with all the planning and precautions. anyways diving in ND and spear fishing is a blast with the right people. Advice..........have a good teacher like Jim was so stuff is second nature. Everywhere we traveled to dive we were complimented on our training. You can get in a bind before you know it sometimes and good training keeps you calm. Panic underwater is NOT a good thing. Had a couple close calls with people over the years we dove a lot.- - - Updated - - -Learned a lesson that you can NOT tell how far away a boat is by the sound under water. After that ALWAYS drug a dive flag even if it was a pain.</blockquote>

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