Day 1 of the 2019 sturgeon spearing season is in the books and what started as a cold morning turned into a pretty nice afternoon. Coming into the season, we were anticipating a full 16-day season on Lake Winnebago and a shortened season, likely 4-7 days, on the Upriver Lakes. After seeing today’s harvest, I think those forecasts were spot on. There were 97 fish registered from Lake Winnebago today with the northern registration stations of Stockbridge Harbor and Payne’s Point leading the way with 30 and 18 fish respectively. Our registration stations on the Upriver Lakes were a bit busier as 130 fish were registered. Indian Point and Critter’s were the two busiest stations registering 58 and 54 fish respectively. This season’s opening day harvest is strikingly similar to last season, where 83 fish were registered from Lake Winnebago on opening day and 130 fish were registered on the Upriver Lakes. Today’s harvest puts us at 4-5% of the harvest cap for each of the three categories of juvenile females, adult females and males, so it looks like spearers will have 15 more days to fish on Lake Winnebago. Today’s Upriver Lakes harvest reached 40% of the adult female cap and 30.4% of the male cap. More than 25% of the spearers have now tagged out so effort will decrease moving forward. At this point, I would guess that the Upriver Lakes season will last 5-7 days