Brighton once had thriving fishing industry

[Spiel]

Brighton once had thriving fishing industry

 

 

Feb 09, 2010 - 05:17 PM

Guest column / John Martinello / www.northumberlandnews.com

 

 

On a windless Jan. 11, under a slate dome of overcast, I saw something I have never seen before.

 

While walking on the ice of Presqu'ile Bay, about midway between the line of ice-fishing huts and Salt Point, I heard a chainsaw buzzing in the west. I turned to the noise. As I approached, I saw a man cutting a hole through the ice and then shovelling water from the hole onto the ice.

 

As I got closer, I recognized Glen Quick doing something he has done for 58 years; since he was eight years old. Pulling hoop nets through ice; working the Bay. Turns out he was shovelling water onto the ice to better see through the ice to find the trap end of the hoop net. After spotting the trap end, chainsaw in hand, he bent down to his knees and in the slushy, cold water, cut another four foot by three foot hole in the ice. He then hooked his pike pole to the hoop and pulled it above the ice. Four large pike slashed the clear green water in a netted pool of much smaller perch, bullheads, a mudpuppy and a bowfin. I held the hoop while Mr. Quick scooped the fish from the trap into a plastic tote. The total catch; 30 or 40 pounds.

 

His job done, Mr. Quick lit a cigarette and told me of a time when there were three fish-houses, Quick's (at the end of Bay Street), Covell's (on the site of the Harbourview Cafe) and Snelgrove's (at the Ontario Street boat-launch), when 35, mostly Brighton-made, boats fished the waters of Presqu'ile Bay and Lake Ontario. This million-dollar local industry shipped fish, packed in ice cut from Brighton Bay, to New York City and Detroit and also shipped frozen eels to Europe.

 

During the Depression, this same fishery put bread on the table of desperate Brightonians. In winter, Mr. Quick's uncle, Grant Quick, paid fellow non-fishing Brightonians, two cents per pound for yellow perch caught through the ice. In summer, he paid his fellow Brightonians three cents per pound for pike caught from double-ended rowing skiffs trolling a spoon. If they weren't in Presqu'ile Bay, people would row as far as Weller's Bay hunting for pike.

 

Today, the Brighton commercial fishing industry is substantially dead; a slow death caused by a complex combination of factors, ranging from an inefficient sewage plant to cormorants, to invasions of zebra mussels and other non-native species. One or two boats work the Bay; the value of fish processed through Quick Fisheries reduced to, maybe, $120,000 per year.

 

As gloomy as the current state of the Brighton commercial fishing industry is, it tells us what can be, and has been, done in Brighton and that a clean and healthy Presqu'ile Bay could be the foundation for the sustainable, low-impact economic redevelopment of Brighton.