Great Lakes Article:

Erie anglers wonder where the fish went
By D'Arcy Egan
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Published November 14, 2005

Today: Lake Erie, once a must- visit spot for sport fishermen, has taken a downturn in recent years. Is commercial fishing to blame?

Yesterday: State wildlife officials spent two years documenting how commercial fishermen illegally caught and sold nearly $1 million of yellow perch.

A decade or two ago, sport fishermen around the country making a wintertime wish list always had Lake Erie perched on top.

Dreams would come true on the wide waters along the Ohio shoreline.

Trophy walleye and smallmouth bass could be caught when the Minnesota and Wisconsin lakes were still covered with ice. Large schools of tasty yellow perch were easy to find. There was a bonus of silvery steelhead trout throughout the summer.

But the sizzling summer of 2005 left fishermen struggling to catch the legendary bounty of Lake Erie.

Commercial fishermen blamed the unseasonably hot weather for their struggles.

Sport fishermen pointed a finger at the weather -- and at commercial fishermen, whose nets corral entire schools of fish while rods and reels can catch only one or two at a time.

The suspicions of sport anglers were realized this fall when Cuyahoga County prosecutors charged 14 commercial fishermen, two fishing companies and three fish wholesalers with racketeering. The charges involved the unreported harvest and sale of as much as 1 million pounds of yellow perch beyond legal quotas.

The charges brought to the forefront the argument over what is best for Lake Erie fishing, and who owns the stocks of walleye, perch, bass and trout.

Commercial fishermen complain they cannot make a good living on their woefully small portion of Ohio's annual yellow perch quota, determined each year by the Lake Erie Committee of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

They say the small quota provides incentive for some to break the law and not report what they catch.

In recent years, the Ohio Division of Wildlife has insisted sport anglers are its No. 1 customer, although license sales along the shoreline have slumped as the premier walleye fishing has declined over the last decade.

Sport fishermen say that if commercial fishing nets were magically gone from Lake Erie, the most amazing yellow perch and smallmouth bass lake in the world would return to greatness, and Lake Erie would again be the Walleye Capital of the World.

Sport catch rebounded after Ohio gill net ban

The amazing recovery of Lake Erie as an Ohio sport fishing paradise happened once before, and because of restrictions on commercial fishing. Could it happen again?

In 1984, state officials bought out Ohio's commercial fishing companies that used gill nets, leaving only trap net licensees in the water. The 39 gill net licenses cost $2.4 million, based on the size of the annual yellow perch catch and its value at 94 cents a pound.

Gill nets are recognized for their destructive nature. The monofilament mesh is designed to catch a certain size of fish by snaring the gills.

As nylon gill nets replaced the old-style linen or cotton common before the 1950s, the harvest of open-water species such as blue pike and whitefish soared -- and then crashed.

By 1960, the blue pike had become extinct.

The 1984 gill net ban signaled the beginning of a fishing bonanza on western Lake Erie. White bass, yellow perch and smallmouth bass were plentiful. The annual sport catch of walleye went from almost nonexistent in the early 1970s to more than 4 million fish from 1984 through 1989. The number of fishing guides skyrocketed from a dozen hardy skippers to more than 1,300 full- and part-time guides.

By the late 1990s, walleye and perch again became difficult for Ohio sport anglers to find and catch.

This year, sport fishermen will be hard-pressed to reel in more than a half-million walleye, and the daily limit for perch -- unlimited before 1995 -- was 30, the lowest ever.

Today, Ohio commercial fishermen use trap nets that sit on the lake bottom, the long "lead" guiding fish into a mesh box they can't escape. Fish less than 8½ inches must be returned to the lake.

It would be far more expensive to buy out the 24 trap net licenses than the gill net licenses were in 1984, said veteran commercial fisherman Frank Reynolds, 77, of Oregon, Ohio.

"A lot of the smaller guys would sell tomorrow," said Reynolds. "They're having a hard time making it right now."

Reynolds, whose son, Todd, 40, is also a commercial fisherman, owns 1½ trap net licenses. The ODOW gives him an annual quota of 172,000 pounds of yellow perch, a quota he expects will increase in 2006.

"If I was paid for three years of quota catches at the going rate of about $2.50 per pound, I'd sell tomorrow," said Frank Reynolds.

That would be a golden parachute of $1.29 million, and Reynolds could wrap up a career that has spanned four generations.

If all of the Ohio trap net license holders were bought out at those terms, it would take more than $20 million.

Ontario's gill nets get chunk of the blame

Even if Ohio's commercial industry disappeared, Ontario's $35 million commercial industry and its miles of gill nets would remain.

"There is not a good thing that can be said about a gill net," said well-known Minnesota fishing TV show host Al Lindner. "Gill nets are destructive because they do not discrimate. The incidental catch of bass and other game fish is also devastating to a fishery."

Linder was a regular on Lake Erie when he owned In-Fisherman magazine and the Professional Walleye Trail tournaments. He fondly remembers the fantastic walleye fishing of the 1980s and 1990s, when the walleye population peaked at more than 100 million fish. Today, the lakewide walleye population is estimated at 20 to 40 million.

"There was no other walleye lake in the world as good as Lake Erie at that time," Lindner said.

Glenn Lau, a well-known Western Lake Erie guide from Toledo in the late 1950s and 1960s, loudly fought against gill nets and for quality fisheries management. Now an award-winning cinematographer in Ocala, Fla., he still is a foe of gill nets, but thinks the Ohio trap net industry is a viable way to put fresh fish on the table.

Fish caught in gill nets die and in warm water begin to deteriorate. Fish caught in trap nets are hauled aboard alive and, Lau insists, simply taste better.

"Commercial fishermen should want quality fish, not an increase in the catch by being allowed to target smaller fish," said Lau. "An 8- or an 8 ½-inch perch is little more than a piece of skin with a little meat on it. Perch that are 9 inches in length are quality fish."

Quantity over quality on the Ontario side

The Ontario commercial industry has cared more about volume, using gill nets to catch yellow perch that are 8 inches long or even smaller, rather than let them grow to quality size.

The Ontario commercial industry has begun to look a little threadbare over the last few years, according to Peter Meisenheimer, executive director of the Ontario Commercial Fisheries Association. Quotas have been low and costs are rising. Once, 183 individuals had licenses to net Lake Erie fish. These days, a few major players have purchased many of those licenses, especially the processing houses wanting to assure a steady supply of fish.

Meisenheimer was insistent that the illegal commercial fishing alleged in Ohio could not occur in Ontario.

"We have the most tightly regulated fishery in the world," he said. "Our guys have paperwork to fill out every day. The degree of scrutiny is way ahead of anything you'll find in most commercial fisheries on this planet."

Don't tell that to sport anglers. They know that a gill net can fish day and night and all week long to catch the walleye and yellow perch that have been so hard to find on Lake Erie this season.

Now, the major question for the Ohio Division of Wildlife is how much damage the commercial trap netters have done to Ohio's yellow perch fishing by selling boxes of over-quota perch through the back door in the middle of the night.

The ODOW's job, if it wants to sell sport fishing licenses as it did in the 1980s, is to bring back the big schools of walleye and to protect the yellow perch. It would take intense management by the United States and Canada and teamwork among sport and commercial fishermen to make Lake Erie a great lake once again.

"Some level-headed people need to pull everyone together and come up with honest solutions to creating a quality fishery for both sport and commercial fishermen," Lau said. "Not what is good for the fishermen, but what is good for the fish."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

degan@plaind.com, 216-999-6136