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Anglers struggle with rain, cold during walleye tourney

The weather didn’t keep some fish from biting. On Saturday afternoon, one angler waited as tournament staff weighed the northern pike he caught.

LAKE SHETEK — If you tried striking up a conversation with the people in line to have their catches weighed, you’d get a pretty strong consensus of what conditions were like out on Lake Shetek on Saturday. The key words were “cold” and “wet.”

“It was a grind,” said Tanner Greve, one of the participants in this year’s Lake Shetek Walleye Tournament. “We got out there at 7 this morning, and it pretty much rained the whole day.”

The good part was that Greve’s team did have some fish to show for it at the end of the day — Greve was holding a plastic bag containing walleyes for the tournament scale.

With a steady rain coming down most of the day, wind, and temperatures in the 40s, conditions weren’t the most comfortable for anglers. But they didn’t keep people off the lake. Organizers said a total of 57 boats were registered for Saturday’s fishing tournament. The event helps raise funds for the Shetek Area Sportsmen’s Association. Past projects the group has completed include the construction of a sanitary fish cleaning station at Lake Shetek.

Tournament participants had some mixed results when it came to fishing in Saturday’s rain and wind. Brandon Gunnink and Jordan Gunnink, of Edgerton, S.D., said they hadn’t gotten many bites. The weather could’ve been part of the challenge, making the walleyes less active, Jordan Gunnink said. “But, you gotta try.”

Meanwhile, some tournament participants had better catches, bringing in both walleye and northern pike to the weighing station at Key Largo. Boats were ranked based on the total weight of up to four walleye.

Teammates Brent Mortenson and Mike Gustafson said they had fished in the Shetek walleye tournament for the past three years. By now, they said, they had figured out a system for fishing, and the spots they would go to. But even experience could be challenged by conditions like Saturday’s.

“A couple hours into it, I think both of us were thinking, ‘I wouldn’t mind if we called it a day,'” Gustafson said. “But it warmed up a little when we caught a couple fish.”

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