Fishing for cash

Added bounty creates competitive stir in Mack Days tourney

It's 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and the only occupants of the boat-launch parking lot in Somers are a few itinerant seagulls.

But in a few minutes, the rigs start to roll in. There are the big, fancy boats and trailers, and then there are simple aluminum craft, battered and weather-beaten.

It's a bustle of activity that takes all of about 45 minutes to complete, and when it's done there's only one boat left in the parking lot - one lone fisherman waiting for his son to arrive.

A fellow fisherman walks up and gives another angler a bit of good-natured ribbing: "I'm going to beat you today!" says the man, holding a small dog in his arms, before ambling off to his waiting boat - and the possibility of some serious cash.

These men and women are competing in the spring Mack Days fishing tournament, an event held in spring and fall on Flathead Lake and designed to reduce the number of nonnative lake trout in Flathead Lake. This year the tournament has posted some big cash draws.

To help lure anglers to the event, organizers from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes increased the bounty this year, doling out more than $20,000 in cash to the top places. Anglers who finish in the top 10 will share in $10,500 of the $22,000 in prize money. Whoever catches the most fish wins $1,500, second place is worth $1,400, $1,300 goes to third place, with money being paid to 10th place, which is worth $600.

In addition, somewhere out in Flathead Lake is a fish - nicknamed "Lucky" - swimming around that's worth $35,000 to entrants of the tournament. It hasn't been caught yet.

The tribal authorities and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks tagged 78 fish and released them before the tournament. Of those fish, 58 could bring in $100 if caught and turned in, and 20 fish could net $500 each. If "Lucky" is among the first 20 tagged fish to be turned in, that angler wins $35,000. Only two of the $100 fish have been turned in so far.

WHILE THIS bounty of cash has led to a record number of entries - nearly 850 - the added cash has drawn some confusion and anger among fellow anglers.

One angler who was atop the leader board early in the tournament lost his top ranking because of confusion over how to turn in fish. Anglers are supposed to turn in only fish that they caught themselves; however, because of confusion over the rules, one boat turned in fish that were caught by more than one angler.

It's put a bad taste in Stanley Ross' mouth. Ross, who currently is ranked third in the tournament, said the tournament "used to be a pretty friendly thing. Now that they've changed some of the rules around, it's pretty competitive and there's a lot of trash talk."

And that's bad news for tournament organizers, who want to keep the top anglers in the tournament. After all, it's those anglers who catch the bulk of the lake trout and help fulfill the management goal of reducing lake-trout populations. Anglers in the tournament caught 4,467 lake trout in the first two weeks, many of which are headed for local food banks.

Last year's tournament format was based on a lottery system, where anglers received one raffle ticket for each fish they caught. The more fish you caught, the better your chances were of winning prizes. But with gambling being restricted on the Indian reservation due to a lack of a compact between the state and tribes, which governs the southern half of Flathead Lake, Mack Days organizers abandoned the lottery system.

FISHING WAS hot the first two weeks of the tourney, but that's changed. It's been dead slow recently, with some anglers not boating a fish during the day. The concentrations of anglers might be one reason that fishing has slowed down in the last two weeks of the tournament, veteran angler Dick Zimmer said. Boaters are tending to congregate when they see fellow anglers catching fish.

"The anglers concentrate in only a few places and the fish just get lure weary," Zimmer said. "People have to find new places."

Most of the anglers on Saturday morning were headed for the delta area of the Flathead River, where the murky water of the river mixes with the clear, green water of Flathead Lake. It's here, along this visible border, that anglers anchor out and jig for lake trout in anywhere from 30 to 85 feet.

One thing that has helped the tournament this year was the increase in lake trout limits, from 20 to 50 fish. That increase, Zimmer said, "changes the whole format. A guy can have a good day and catch up, while one guy can have a bad day and lose ground. The old limit was not a real good indicator of a fisherman's skill."

The largest lake trout caught in the tournament so far was a 20-pounder caught by Dave Hobeck the first day of the event.

Zimmer, too, wants to see the tournament get away from the current format of simply paying cash to the top anglers who catch the most fish, and he wants to see it go back to a lottery-type system.

"Every time there was a prize for numbers of fish, it seemed like it was questionable," Zimmer said.

The recent episode of anglers inadvertently pooling their fish was "not a very pleasant situation," he added.

MACK DAYS was instituted six years ago as part of the Flathead Lake management plan adopted by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The management plan was put in place to help reduce nonnative fish species and to help boost native fisheries.

It wasn't just the need to increase native species that initiated the management plan. Flathead Lake had gone through a profound ecological change in 1981, when mysis shrimp appeared in the lake. In 1968, FWP had introduced the opossum shrimp (Mysis relicta) into Ashley, Swan and Whitefish lakes. The shrimp were intended as a forage food for kokanee, after seeing favorable salmon growth in Kootenay Lake, British Columbia. Mysis drifted from the lakes downstream into Flathead Lake by 1981 and their numbers increased rapidly to a peak of 130 shrimp per square meter by 1986, state figures indicate.

Rather than providing forage for kokanee, however, the shrimp became a favorite food of lake trout and lake whitefish. Mysis also competed with kokanee and cutthroat trout for zooplankton, a favored food. The result was an abrupt decline in the number of kokanee, cutthroat, and bull trout, and an increase in lake trout and lake whitefish. The mysis population has since leveled off.

The major sport-fish species in Flathead Lake are westslope cutthroat trout, bull trout, lake trout, lake whitefish and yellow perch. The major sport fish in the river are cutthroat trout, bull trout, rainbow trout, Lake Superior whitefish and mountain whitefish. Populations of largemouth bass, yellow perch and northern pike are scattered among sloughs along the Flathead River between the lake and Columbia Falls. Of these species, only westslope cutthroat, bull trout, and mountain whitefish are native to this area. Bull trout are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Lake whitefish were introduced as a food source in Flathead Lake in 1890, lake trout in

1905, yellow perch in 1910 and kokanee salmon in 1916. By the 1920s, kokanee and perch dominated the sport fishery, according to FWP. Kokanee salmon occupied as much as 77 to 97 percent of the fish harvest through the mid 1980s, an FWP report says.

The management plan and its implementation are shared by the tribes and the state, but the bulk of the management budget is paid for by the tribes through Kerr Dam mitigation funds.

Cash - not science - is likely on the minds of most anglers fishing in Mack Days tournament.

And winning cash means fine-tuning their techniques. For Ross, his technique is fairly simple. He doesn't troll for fish this time of year, since the fish are fairly shallow in spring, and instead opts for a jig setup. After locating the fish on sonar, he anchors out. Then, he'll use a jig right on the bottom of the lake, colored in white or green. About 24 inches above the jig he places a hook tipped with sucker meat. Depending on the day, one or the other hook gets the fish.

"Sometimes they want some color and sometimes they don't," he said.

Ross, who caught the world rainbow trout record in 1991 in the Kootenai River, said the fishing on Flathead Lake was good the first two weeks of the tournament, but lunar phases have slowed the fishing down.

"The moon has been all wrong, but I expect the next weekend to be good," he said.

Results through the first three weeks of Mack Days:

Adult Anglers

Marty Noyd Missoula 195

Paul Haines Ronan 181

3 Stan Ross Kalispell 162

4 Tim Shattuck, Kalispell 147

5 Doug White Missoula 146

6 Roger Davis Missoula 146

7 Jeff Merritt Missoula 141

8 Dutch Turner Kalispell 125

9 Dean Vaughn Charlo 123

10 Paul Soukup Ronan 119