Sturgeon Speared On Lake Winnebago Is Record-Setting (Kind Of)

A long fish has come out of sturgeon spearing season in Wisconsin.

Kyle Jenkins speared an 84.5-inch-long, or 7.04 feet, sturgeon Tuesday on Lake Winnebago. The 143.7-pound fish was registered Tuesday at Jerry’s Bar in Oshkosh.

While the female sturgeon is the longest sturgeon on record to be harvested, it only weighed 143.7 pounds, so Jenkins isn’t breaking any official records because those are tracked by weight, said Ryan Koenigs, the Winnebago System Sturgeon biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

“It’s one of the longer fish we’ve ever had registered during the spear fishery,” Koenigs said. “It’s not even in the Top 10 in terms of weight.”

Tuesday’s sturgeon barely “inched” out a sturgeon killed in 2010 on Lake Winnebago that measured 84.2 inches. However, Koenigs said, the 2010 fish weighed 212.2 pounds and still holds the modern day record because it’s the heaviest sturgeon ever harvested and registered, according to records dating back to the 1970s.

Koenigs said he knows there are longer sturgeon in Wisconsin. He said the DNR has tagged at least one sturgeon that measured at 87.6 inches, or 7.3 feet, and weighed 240 pounds. It was caught and released in the Wolf River near Shawano in 2012.

“We’ve known through our assessments in the last five to 10 years that there are 80-plus fish out there and a number of them have been speared in recent seasons,” Koenigs said.

While the catch is a good story for Jenkins, it may seem a bit melancholy for some.

Koenigs said the fish could be older than any human on the planet.

“I’d probably estimate its age between 80 and 120 years old. I know that’s a big range, but the point is that this was a very large, very old fish,” Koenigs said.

The sturgeon spearing season on the Upper Lakes closed Tuesday, and the season on Lake Winnebago will continue until Sunday, Feb. 25 or until the harvest caps are reached.