Rog's Rod & Nimrod

As we approach late winter-early spring fishing in South Dakota, most anglers are thinking walleye. With this in mind, I will once again urge our Game, Fish, & Parks commissioners to protect our walleyes as Minnesota and Wisconsin does during the spawn. Without question, most local anglers feel the same way. Our walleye fishery isn’t what it used to be, and steps to protect it are long overdue.

Along these same lines, a 2019 change in regulations has further crippled our walleye fishery. Take a look at page 6 of the South Dakota Fishing Handbook 2019. To directly quote, “The fish possession limit is unlimited at a person’s domicile.” Up until this change, the possession limit was eight walleyes PERIOD!

Assuming for a moment that most SD anglers behaved in the past as I did, we knew full well that conservation officers were not going to show up at our front door with a search warrant and count the walleyes in our freezer. Granted, if a person were taking possession limits day after day, or two or three times on the same day, a search warrant would certainly be justifiable.

We knew the law, and we knew, more or less, how many walleyes were in our freezers. We obeyed the law with no thoughts of it being unreasonable. This new “unlimited” possession limit is counterproductive. I don’t believe it is going to affect those anglers who travel from Iowa or Minnesota. Their campers better adhere to the eight fish possession…..especially if enforcement is stepped up a notch.

Regarding my last statement, I would like to see our conservation officers get more aggressive on limit enforcement. I remember the good old days when Gregory County’s CO, Dennis Lengkeek, watched me through his binoculars as I pulled crappies from the Eide Dam. He once walked up behind me as I turkey hunted a draw north of Herrick that I thought no one knew about. Dennis was to our fish and game what Matt Dillon was to Dodge City. In my book, he’s a legend.

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Concerning the environment, our neighboring state of Minnesota and its Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness or BWCA bears watching. According to Minnesota’s conservation minded legislators, our federal Bureau of Land Management or BLM has not given Minnesotans enough time to register concerns about a ten-year mineral lease requested by Twin Metals Minnesota, a firm that wants to mine the area’s rich reserves of copper and nickel.

The mine isn’t within the BWCA’s boundaries, but its ore processing facility could be located within a quarter mile of Birch Lake whose waters flow into the BWCA. Water is a part of ore processing, and water purity, and where that water is going, is the issue. Hopefully this will become a win-win situation for both interests.

Last week, when I told my good friend, Art Jones, about my desire to fish Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, he told me about a friend who acquired deadly mercury poisoning by eating the fish he had caught on a NWT fishing trip. I presume the mercury was the bi-product of a mining operation, and I believe that such concerns once existed in our own Black Hills.

As you might recall from a previous column, I was anxious to put together a northern wilderness fishing trip. A dear friend was willing to be a partner for the Great Slave trip, but our wives weren’t happy about, and we honored their wishes. I’ve since been invited to participate in another northern adventure. My mining concerns have heightened as we will head to Saskatchewan’s Wollaston Lake in late June. Along with monster lake trout and northern pike, Wollaston holds walleyes as well as Arctic grayling. Wollaston is big – 883 square miles not counting islands! We plan to drive to Wollaston.

My mining concerns? The treated affluent from the Rabbit Lake Uranium Mine flows into Wollaston’s Hidden Bay on the southeast side of the lake. I hope for our sake that their “treated affluent” is safe.

See you next week.