The weather has been extremely unpredictable, and so was the 2018 paddlefishing season on the Yellowstone and lower Missouri rivers.
According to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Region 7 fisheries manager Mike Backes, it took 15 harvest days to approach the 1,000 fish harvest target. Compare that to the 2017 season, which was fast and furious and closed in just over three days.
The 2018 harvest season opened May 15 and closed on June 8. Catch-and-release fishing just concluded. According to tallies, 714 paddlefish were processed at Intake fishing access site near Glendive, and Backes estimated that another 194 fish were caught elsewhere. The estimated harvest was 908 fish.
Of the fish processed at Intake, 470 were females (65.8 percent) and 244 were males.
“Other than getting another education from Mother Nature in river flows and resulting fish migrations, there were a couple of noteworthy topics,” Backes said. “Approximately one in 10 fish was a small male, potentially from the year 2011. Sixty-two fish were reported via the mandatory reporting phone number; of those, 21 had jaw tags, 19 were harvested from the Powder-Yellowstone river confluence, two were from the Tongue-Yellowstone river confluence, and only one was reported from the Missouri River. One tag return came from a fish tagged on the Missouri River upstream of Fort Peck Reservoir.”
At times angler participation was lower than expected. It was challenging to predict when paddlefish would be grouped at Intake Diversion Dam on their way upstream to spawn. A pulse in river levels typically increases paddlefish migrations, but there were such high volumes of water at times this season — and multiple river pulses due to rain and continuing snowmelt — that fish were much more spread out this season.
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