Fishing trip yields curious discovery

For the second time in two weeks, Roger and I made ourselves comfortable behind his boat’s windshield and motored downriver. It wasn’t cold, but the early-morning hour was cool enough that a jacket and hat were warranted. Then again, when you’re follicly challenged, a hat is always warranted.

Our goal again was Placer Cover, where we hoped to take advantage of the final trout plant on the Nevada side of Lake Mohave by catching a marauding striped bass or two. On our previous outing, Roger reeled in an 8-pound striper, while I managed only two weed fish and a rather large rock that swallowed my LA Slider. He was after fish that weighed in at the double-digit mark. I just wanted to catch something with fins.

We began our fishing efforts where Roger caught and released the 8-pounder two weeks before, but no one was home. Except for the odd rock and a few submerged bushes, even the fish finder wasn’t finding much of anything. So it didn’t take long for us to move once the fish stocking barge arrived at Placer Cove.

While anglers along the shore caught limits of freshly stocked rainbow trout, we beat the water with trout-imitating swimbaits and eventually everything else we had in our tackle boxes. We even tried drifting anchovies and shad, but we still came up empty. So we pulled out the downriggers and tried trolling, again working our way through assorted baits. That too proved unproductive, so we went back to casting and worked our way along the shoreline. A couple of hours later, our luck suddenly seemed to change.

As we slowly worked our way along some steep rock faces, the fish finder began sounding. The beeps indicating a marked fish came so fast that I thought something was wrong with the finder. Roger glanced at the screen, and it was covered with digital fish icons representing a large school of fish directly below the boat. They were at depths ranging from almost 30 to 76 feet and stacked in a well-defined column that measured about 20 yards across. On the screen, the gathering had a definitive beginning and an end.

We cast lures, drifted anchovies and even did some jigging, but by the time we opted to move on we still had nothing for our efforts. A short while later, along another steep cliff face, the fish finder sounded again. Below us again was a well-defined column of fish in deep water. With optimism renewed, we went to work again, but the result was the same as before.

Roger and I couldn’t help but wonder whether the fish we marked were striped bass or something else, so I described our experience to my friend Mike Burrell, a fisheries biologist who works on Lake Mohave. He was intrigued and suggested the fish columns we found could be razorback suckers, an endangered fish that is native to the Colorado River system.

It will take more research to determine whether the fish, in fact, were razorbacks, but Burrell said if that proves to be the case, our discovery might shed important light on the status of razorbacks in Lake Mohave.

While Roger and I would rather have caught a few striped bass, perhaps the discovery of these fish columns can assist the biologist types with their management efforts of the Lake Mohave fishery.

Time will tell.

Freelance writer Doug Nielsen is a conservation educator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. His “In the Outdoors” column, published Thursday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NDOW. Any opinions he states in his column are his own. He can be reached at intheoutdoorslv@gmail.com.