by: DDDon

If you like fishing for sturgeon, the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River that separates Oregon and Washington is probably a heaven for it. It's very hard to catch sturgeon on the Sacramento river, California. If you caught a big one in California, it'd become a legend and you can brag about it for months. In Oregon, you can have at least one a day (the legal limit is one a day though) and with luck, a giant one.

The sturgeons in the pictures are considered small, some I had to release it b/c they're shorter than the minimum length of 42 inches. One of the sturgeons we got is big enough to fit snuggly in the bathtub and weighs about 30 pounds. There was a guy near our spot, chain smoking and always reading a bible while waiting, kind of odd. He got the biggest one, took him about 15' to get the fish to the shore, I helped him haul the beast up. It was about 58 inches, almost 5 feet!! and I bet it's 50 pounds heavy!! Sweating from head to toe, he admired his catch and looked up, praying: "Thank you Lord" several times.

In case you don't know yet, caviar comes from sturgeon's eggs. Sturgeon itself is no less special, I've seen shops having them for at least 8 dollars a pound. During my 3 days fishing there, we only ate sturgeon for dinner, breakfast (cha'o) and sometimes lunch. You can make goi? ca' sturgeon, ca' chie^n, canh chua dda^`u ca' sturgeon, ca' sturgeon nu+o+'ng vi? cuo^'n ba'nh tra'ng, canh khoai mo^n vo+'i sturgeon, etc... Its meat is delicous, very dense, not loose like ca' bo^ng lau. Sturgeons are like shark, the body has no bones, thus it's easy to prepare and cook.

Hope you don't get too jealous :-).

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