Brothers break Red River custom

There were times when my brother Wayne and I wondered if we could hack our way through a jungle of circumstances barring the way to my annual visit to his home in Drayton, N.D.

It took us until the last full week of September to arrange a trip that traditionally took place during the full moon in August.

My drive north struck another blow at tradition. I’ve always driven straight  through on any road trip of 1,000 or  fewer miles. Wayne’s house is about 840 miles from mine and all but 60 miles is on four-lane highways.

If I eat fast food in the truck, the journey’s an easy 13-hour drive or just a smidgen over 12 hours if I really push it.

This year I left home a few minutes before 5 p.m.  Tuesday. I stopped at a rest area just south of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and slept for four hours.

An hour or so before dawn, I stopped in another rest area somewhere in South Dakota, because I was tired of driving through continuous pea soup fog and nearly continuous road construction.

I was the only person at the rest area when I awoke at 8:45 a.m. The fog — but not the construction barricades — had disappeared.

I pulled into my “reserved” parking spot behind Wayne’s garage at 1:30 p.m., well rested and raring to go catch some fish.

For Wayne and I, fish and giant channel cats had always been synonymous. With the exception of fishing for goldeye to use for bait, we’d never seriously fished the Red River of the North for anything other than trophy (over 10-pound) channel cats.

Much to my surprise, Wayne suggested we leave his catfish boat on its trailer until the following morning, so we could spend a couple of hours fishing for sauger in the Drayton Dam tailrace. He assured me we’d have fun, because the fall sauger run was operating at full throttle.

My imagination, influenced no doubt by spending 13, albeit noncontiguous, hours staring through a windshield, conjured up some truly strange pictures of what a herd of sauger might look like galloping across the river bottom with their fins striking sparks on the rocks.

I stuffed my shirt pockets with eighth-ounce jigs and 2-inch chartreuse curly tail grubs, tossed a light spinning rod, a chain stringer and a pair of hip boots into the back of Wayne’s pickup and climbed into the cab.

The Drayton Dam is a low-head concrete structure with a bank-to-bank uncontrolled spillway. When the river is at what passes for its normal level, the dam provides both highly oxygenated water and an effective barrier for migrating fish.

During my stay, there was sufficient flow over the dam to create some interesting cross currents and eddies while still being relatively safe for thigh-deep wading. In other words, the river looked perfect.

I caught a 14-inch sauger on my first cast. I told Wayne a Louisiana saltwater guide had once told me that catching a fish on the first cast was bad luck.

I needn’t have worried. I caught six sauger before breaking my string by losing a fish. My total tally during a scant hour and a half of fishing time was 51 sauger and one walleye, out of which I kept a three-fish daily limit.

Trips of similar length the following two afternoons proved our initial experience was no fluke.

In a little less than four and a half hours of fishing time over the three-day period, we landed 362 sauger that weighed an estimated 263 pounds. Now that’s what I call being surrounded by sauger!

The sauger fishing saved the trip because the channel cat fishing was the poorest we’ve ever experienced.

Wayne managed to manhandle one 22.5-pounder close enough to the boat for me to net, but our next biggest cat weighed only 17 pounds.

My theory for our lack of success is that the big channel cats were gorging themselves on sauger and, therefore, were uninterested in other food sources.

To the best of my knowledge, no place in Missouri yields sauger fishing anything like what we experienced.

However, sauger are present in both the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Expect to find them schooled near locks and dams, wing dikes and tributary mouths later this fall when the main rivers’ water temperature falls into the low 60s.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll find yourself surrounded by sauger.