By Kathleen Schmitt Kline
I’ve been thinking lately about how grateful I am to Andy Horn. Six years ago, I headed up to Lake Winnebago for the first time to learn about sturgeon spearing, and Andy was kind enough to let me spend the opening day of the season with him in his shanty. I didn’t know much about sturgeon when I first started working with Fred Binkowski (UW Sea Grant aquaculture specialist and senior scientist at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences) and Ron Bruch (Upper Fox-Wolf Fisheries Work Unit Supervisor at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and a member of our UW Sea Grant advisory committee for outreach and education) on the book People of the Sturgeon: Wisconsin’s Love Affair with an Ancient. Andy gave me my first glimpse at just what lay in store for me.
I had met Andy briefly at a Sturgeon For Tomorrow banquet a few months earlier. Sturgeon For Tomorrow is a nonprofit group with over 3,000 members, many of them spearers, and every year their five chapters host banquets to raise money for sturgeon research and poaching prevention. Andy seemed like a nice guy, but as I pulled into the Pipe Express gas station on the east side of Lake Winnebago at 5:30 a.m., I started wondering what we could talk about for six hours in a dark shack several miles out in the middle of Lake Winnebago.
As I shuffled inside the gas station, I found out that Pipe Express is more than just a gas station during sturgeon season. The place was teeming with folks eating breakfast and topping off their thermoses with coffee. I think Andy might have been surprised at how many layers of clothing I was wearing. I get cold really easily, and the thought of spending six hours out on the ice made me take all precautions. I wore long underwear, a fleece jacket and pants all underneath my gigantic winter parka, with snowpants to boot. I was stiff and clumsy sitting down on the back of Andy’s ATV as we prepared to drive out to his shanty.
I had no idea that just about all ice shanties are heated. Andy had gone out even earlier that morning to turn on the stove to warm the place up, so by the time we walked in, I had to scramble to remove several of my layers before I got dizzy. Sturgeon shanties come in all shapes and sizes, but many of them, like Andy’s, are just big enough for the hole (which can’t be any bigger than 48 square feet) and space for a chair or two in front of the door. That said, removing those bulky layers required a lot of concentration so as not to fall in the hole. After I had accomplished that, the two of us just sat and looked in the water and talked.
I had brought a pad of paper to take notes, but I think I hardly wrote down a thing. Sitting in a sturgeon shanty, the only light an eerie greenish hue coming up from the water in the hole, is absolutely mesmerizing. You never want to take your eyes off the hole for fear of missing the few seconds when a sturgeon might happen to appear. I was amazed at how quickly six hours passed. We talked about past seasons and different types of decoys, and Andy checked in via cell phone with his friends scattered around the lake. One of his friends stopped by on his ATV with a Bloody Mary delivery around 9 a.m. Delicious. After six hours looking into that sturgeon hole, we never saw a thing. And it didn’t matter.
I’m very grateful to Andy for letting me share his solitude that day. It was a wonderful introduction to sturgeon spearing, and it also gave me a terrific conversation starter for later that day. I was supposed to meet someone for coffee that day, and I had to call him from the road to ask if we could meet a bit later because I had been sitting in an ice shanty all morning on Lake Winnebago. It didn’t seem to rattle him at all, even though it was our first date, and that made me think he was definitely a keeper. He was—I married him a year later.
