Standing on the riprap above, I watched for signs of life in a channel separating a large backwater from the Illinois River. With midday sunlight directly overhead, viewing conditions were good to a couple of feet down, considering the turbid water. I caught a sizable flash in my periphery. Then more flashes—figures appearing in a split second and disappearing just as fast. It was like missing the spot in the sky while trying to catch a bursting meteor during a Leonid shower.
Concentrating on one spot and hoping for an encore was my best chance at a good look. Soon I realized they were longnose gar displaying group behavior common to this species. I couldn’t tell how many there were, seeing about 5 to 10 fish at a time. Probably 30 or more in the pod. I’d heard of longnose groups approaching 100-plus fish.
These were good-sized specimens, most about 21⁄2 to 3 feet long. Their quick porpoising rolls indicated to me that they were feeding, perhaps on small juvenile fish. A few gar broke the surface, most likely to gulp air, but mostly it looked like they were snatching prey from the water column.
Unfortunately I didn’t have my fishing gear along; I was scouting the area to study the importance of backwaters to riverine fishes back when I was doing fisheries research. Even if I had my gear, I probably wouldn’t have the best tackle to catch longnose, recalling that hookless entanglement lures were most effective on their long toothy snouts. But if I worked at it and my hook found flesh and not bone, I could probably catch one on a smaller in-line spinner or minnowbait, or on a live minnow presented under a float. They’d tangle in the right fly, for sure.
I watched intently until the activity slowed. How great it would be to hit it at the right place and time with the proper gear. Even so, it was an impressive display. I stepped back in time wondering if these fish, which haven’t changed much in 50 million years, were behaving no differently from their ancestors that swam in rivers during the Cretaceous Period, when duckbilled dinosaurs roamed the banks.
Scouting for Gar
Five of the seven gar species (family Lepisosteidae) existing worldwide are in U.S. waters. Second in size to the alligator gar—the largest gar—is the longnose, which is widely distributed from the Mississippi basin eastward, from Quebec to the southern Atlantic and Gulf Coast basins in the U.S. The world record longnose is a 50.5-pounder caught from the Trinity River in Texas. Five state records top 40 pounds.
Longnose inhabit lakes, reservoirs, and rivers over a wide distribution but few anglers target them. John Gaulke, who guides for multiple species on New York’s Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario, is a longnose gar addict. “Gar are one of the best kept secrets in angling. They’re criminally underfished, so anglers in search of large numbers of big fish can easily find it gar fishing. They hammer lures with a primal aggressiveness only matched by a few species. They’re common—typically running from 30 to 37 inches long—in the northern portions of Cayuga Lake and in Lake Ontario bays and larger tributaries. Cross Lake and Sodus Bay are both capable of producing 45-inch fish,” he says.
