Fishing for predators a payoff in retirement

WENATCHEE – For 30 years, Bruce Arndt put in long, hot hours inside the Alcoa aluminum smelting plant near Malaga, Wash.

Today, his post-retirement routine includes an alarm clock sounding at the crack of dawn; launching a red jet boat when the Columbia River is as smooth as glass; and loading worms onto hooks with a couple of fishing buddies.

Did we mention he’s actually getting paid for this hard-luck life?

Arndt, 63, of Wenatchee, is the first to admit he’s living the dream of many retirees – earning money to fish – even if it’s only for the dreaded northern pikeminnow.

He and 16 others make up a team contracted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fish for pikeminnow in the Columbia River from Beebe Bridge to a little south of Rock Island Dam. Pikeminnow, formerly called squawfish, are voracious predators that feed on salmon smolt, as well as juvenile game fish like sturgeon, walleye, smallmouth bass and perch.

So how do they decide where to fish during their eight-hour shifts Monday through Friday?

“After a while, you just develop a sense for it,” said 12-year veteran pikeminnow catcher Darrel Schmidt, of East Wenatchee.

On Tuesday morning, Schmidt, who serves as the boat captain, watched silver flashes of 3-inch-long salmon smolt dance along the west shore of the river. Within four minutes of dropping their lines, Arndt and Schmidt had pikeminnows dangling from their hooks, and then unceremoniously tossed them into white buckets.

Last year, his crew of 17 caught 57,000 pikeminnows, a record number in the 16-year program.

But the dream job, which runs from the first week in May to the first week in October, does have some downsides, said Arndt, like scorching sun, heat, wind and rain.

And believe it or not, a couple of times a week, they have to do paperwork, where the fishermen measure and record data for every pikeminnow caught that day.

But the most heartbreaking part of the job is catching “nontarget” fish.

“I’d say 99 percent of the time, we’re catching pikeminnow,” Schmidt said. “We’ll catch thousands of them before we catch that one walleye. We have to just kiss ’em and let ’em go.”