The king of fish is back on our doorstep

[Spiel]

The king of fish is back on our doorstep

 

 

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

John Macfie / North Star

 

 

The Big Sound winter fishery for lake trout is both an old and a new tradition.

 

The ancestors of the Wausauksing people chopped holes in the ice to lure trout within spearing distance with imitation minnows.

 

European settlers adapted the practice to their own use by employing a baited hook and line in place of the spear, and ice fishing on the Big Sound gradually blossomed into a premier recreational pursuit among Parry Sounders.

 

In Georgian Bay proper, lake trout, coupled with whitefish, once supported a robust commercial fishery. Large-scale fishing began in the 1860s, when railways reached Georgian Bay, providing access to markets.

 

In the early decades of the 20th century, annual harvest of Georgian Bay trout averaged around two million pounds.

 

Then, from the early 1940s to the late 1950s, it plunged from 1.5 million pounds to zero.

 

The blood-sucking sea lamprey, a new arrival in the upper Great Lakes, got, and probably deserved, most of the blame.

 

Even within the confines of the Big Sound, off-limits to commercial fishing and seemingly less exposed to the parasitic sea lamprey, the trout population collapsed to the point where trying to catch one on hook and line, summer or winter, became a largely futile proposition.

 

Now, the Big Sound lake trout sport fishery is back — hedged in by stringent harvesting regulations, but back. Along the way, the king of Georgian Bay fish got more than a little help from its friends in environmental agencies.

 

Early on the scene were federal fisheries scientists, who developed and instituted an effective sea lamprey control program throughout the upper Great Lakes.

 

In 1978, in a last-ditch effort to save a vanishing strain of lake trout, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources started live trapping some of the handful of trout remaining in the Big Sound, in order to collect and culture their eggs.

 

The objective was two-pronged: to “archive” the threatened Georgian Bay gene pool by introducing progeny into a northern lake for future reference, if necessary, and secondly, to hatchery-raise fingerlings and release them back into the Big Sound.

 

As it turned out, that northern refugium of Georgian Bay genetic stock eventually did need to be tapped - when eggs from that source were employed after a viral disease turned up in Lake Huron fish, to develop a disease-free strain of Big Sound stock.

 

Annual plantings of hatchery-raised native stock, coupled with a clampdown on exploitation, worked. Over time, the Big Sound trout population became self-sustaining, and stocking of hatchery-cultured fish was discontinued.

 

A dog’s breakfast of finely tuned regulations — catch-and-release-seasons, harvest seasons, catch and size limits, and zones of year-round closure — control the fishery, but that’s what it has taken to restore it.

 

And today’s sport fisherman is happy to pay the price for his pleasure. One of the photographs (n/a) shown here, and taken in 1938, is symbolic of a Georgian Bay trout fishery that was about to collapse.

 

Although George McDevitt was working for the Stalker commercial fishery at the time, he caught the 62-pound monster he is holding while trolling a homemade lure cut from a tobacco tin.

 

According to George’s nephew Jamie Thornton, they sometimes trolled with hook and line as the tug steamed back to the Mink Islands from lifting nets. When the fish bit, George thought he was hooked on a sunken log. Rather than lose his gear he towed it all the way to the dock before discovering what he really had.

[bountyhunter]

Well said.