Travis Keating was one of 10 anglers from North Dakota who caravanned to Northern Minnesota the weekend of April 16 for an annual friends fishing trip. With three trailered boats, they drove around three hours to reach the Rainy River, where they go every spring to target big lake sturgeon. Their final destination was the mouth of the Rainy, where it meets Lake of the Woods along the Minnesota-Ontario border.
“We fish it every year in April because the big sturgeon are staging at the river mouth for spawning,” Keating tells Outdoor Life. “And the catch-and-keep fishing seasons are still mostly closed, so there aren’t as many folks fishing as there are when walleye season starts. It’s a great time to be there.”
The fishing they do is strictly catch and release. And Keating says that over the past five years or so, they’ve learned a lot about catching big sturgeon in the springtime. That includes dealing with rough weather. After their first couple days of fishing, a cold front came through and slowed the action.
“The wind chill was below zero and the wind was awful. It was pretty rugged,” Keating says. “We still caught some fish, but most of them were small. Although we did catch and release a 29.5-inch walleye weighing about nine pounds.”
Conditions were still rough on April 18. That morning, Keating, his cousin Adam, and his buddy Brandon Klevgaard caught and released seven sturgeon, the biggest measuring between 40 and 66 inches long.
Later in the day, the fishermen were anchored in 25 feet of water, with current pushing their boat and the wind howling. They were using heavy rods and big reels spooled with 85-pound test braid and 6/0 circle hooks baited with earthworms.
The group wasn’t planning to fish that night, but Keating hooked a giant right at dusk. For the next hour, he battled the lake sturgeon, which stayed deep. A few times during the fight, they were able to watch the fish bulldogging below on their sonar screen. Finally, Keating got the massive sturgeon close to the boat while Klevgaard got ready with the landing net.
“We tried to net it, but it wouldn’t fit,” Keating explains. “So, I grabbed its tail and Brandon grabbed its fins and we hauled it into the boat like Hercules. It was a bare knuckles fight.”
The buddies took few photos of the sturgeon, since they chose to document the catch on video. As their footage shows, they taped the huge fish at 80 inches long with a 38-inch girth. According to the chart that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources uses to calculate weight, the fish weighed an estimated 165 pounds.
After taking measurements, they released the lake sturgeon back into the water. And the following day, Keating submitted a record application to the DNR along with the measurement video.
Read Next: White Sturgeon of ‘Legendary’ Proportions Could Have Rivaled the World Record
On Monday, the state recognized Keating’s fish as the new Minnesota catch-and-release record for lake sturgeon. It was just long enough to top the previous record — a 78-inch sturgeon caught from the St. Croix River in 2019.
“That night was pure chaos,” Keating says, “and I can’t wait to get back to try and top it.”