Little Bay de Noc Fishing Reports

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal

Chicago - Michigan attorney Michael McCann had some business in downtown Chicago this spring and he did what a lot of business travelers do when in town with company money. He hit a pricey seafood restaurant. He could have gone for Atlantic yellowfin tuna for $31.99 or wild Alaskan salmon for $39.99. But the 60-year-old opted for the $12.99 Lake Michigan fried smelt platter. He relished the notion of ordering the only thing on the menu that actually came from the Great Lake on the edge of town, even if it isn't a species native to the lake.

McCann doesn't sail on the lake, doesn't fish on the lake and can't remember the last time he swam in the lake.

That makes these crispy index finger-sized fish - and what else is left of the lake's commercial fishery - so important.

"I tell folks that a good part of the reason (people) care about the Gulf oil spill is that they care about the oysters, the shrimp, etcetera - it's a connection," says John Janssen, a fisheries biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Great Lakes WATER Institute. "For the Great Lakes, that's a connection we're throwing away."

We've thrown it away with decades of carelessness toward the world's largest freshwater system.

While Lake Michigan's commercial fishery has survived overfishing, industrial pollution and lakeshore development, the last commercially fished species are jeopardized by an onslaught of destructive invaders, many of which have arrived as stowaways aboard ocean freighters since the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The lake's commercial fishery used to sustain thousands of Wisconsin workers, but the number of commercial operators on Lake Michigan has plummeted to a handful of families in recent decades, most of whom come from long lines of commercial fishermen.

And the whole industry is largely hitched to a single struggling species.

Aside from the brief spring smelt run, a viable population of yellow perch on lower Green Bay and a chub population that has all but disappeared in the last three years, whitefish are the last commercial stock left.

Only five years ago fishermen fretted that whitefish, too, were about to go down the drain.

The reason is the whitefish's primary food source, a tiny shrimplike creature, has been decimated with the arrival of zebra and quagga mussels in the late 1980s.

But then the whitefish, a fish built to root about in the muck and between the rocks on the lake bottom, started doing something the struggling fishermen didn't expect.

They got off the bottom of the lake and started fighting back.

It was the early 1980s and Ken Koyen, 58 , was out with his dad fishing the waters off their home on Washington Island at the tip of the Door Peninsula when the two hauled from their nets something profoundly bizarre - a whitefish with an alewife hanging out of its mouth.

Whitefish didn't evolve to feast on other fish. They don't even have teeth.

So for an old man who'd spent his life lifting untold thousands of fish from the depths of the lake, seeing a whitefish going after another fish was odd indeed - like watching a man gnaw on a log.

"He said, 'Look at that! Look at that!'" Koyen recalls his dad yelling over the rumble of engine. "He actually stopped the lift."

Today this is all Ken Koyen sees.

Whitefish, the fourth-generation commercial fisherman says, now often hit his nets with nothing but alewives, gobies, smelt and mussels in their stomachs. All are invasive species.

Koyen swears he is watching evolution in real-time. He says he regularly sees fish with the corners of their mouths torn - a feature he figures is giving them a competitive advantage over fellow whitefish that can't crack their mouths open wide enough to gobble another fish whole.

He says the whitefish that have figured out how to make a living off the lake's invaders are doing just fine; he's counted as many as 22 alewives in the stomach of one whitefish, and he says they appear to be getting healthier.

"They're fat," he says. "They're round."

Five years ago, Koyen thought he was on his way out of business: "Honestly, I thought whitefish were done, and I thought I was done."

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist Scott Hansen notes that the average size of a 7-year-old whitefish dropped from about 4.5 pounds in the mid-1990s to just over a pound in 2007, but the fish have shown an uptick in the past few years, climbing to about a pound and a half.

He says the changeover in diet is the likely reason and calls the fish a remarkably "plastic" species. Still, he's not convinced that the whitefish are necessarily chasing schooling fish. He says another possible explanation is the whitefish have adapted to eat dead fish that have sunk to the lake bottom, or they're chasing down stray ailing fish that make an easy meal. But that, he acknowledges, does not explain why sportsmen are now also catching whitefish with rod and reel.

But more remarkable, Hansen says, is the sheer number of whitefish in the northern part of Lake Michigan and in Green Bay. He says annual surveys of the area reveal the fish are colonizing areas where they had long ago disappeared, like the Menominee River on the western side of Lake Michigan's Green Bay.

"We're lucky when you consider all the crazy stuff going on . . . that these fish can thrive," he says. "Their condition is still down but their numbers are way up."

Even with the dramatically diminished size of the fish, the annual harvest of whitefish from Wisconsin's Lake Michigan waters over the last 20 years has been around 1.5 million pounds, and it continues to hold around that level.

Just back on land after hauling in 1,600 pounds of whitefish in the waters off Sturgeon Bay on a June morning, commercial fisherman Charlie Henriksen sips a diet cola and talks about the amazing and unexpected recovery of the whitefish.

Henriksen, 58, is "absolutely" convinced the species is adapting on the fly to cope with the changes in the lake.

"What we're seeing with the whitefish, well, they might just be the most adaptable fish in nature," he says. "They're more adaptable than some people I know."

Henriksen says their change in diet means they are being found in new places and at such strange depths that he has essentially had to learn to fish for them all over again, as if they were a different species altogether.

He can't imagine describing the changes to the old-timers who taught him the trade.

"If I told them where I was fishing and what I was catching, they'd shake their heads and say, 'No way, Charlie, stop the B.S.,'" he says. "I mean, that's how much it's changed."

Ken Koyen is sort of like a whitefish.

He does whatever it takes to remain on an island his ancestors settled on in the 1800s. Beyond being the last full-time commercial fisherman on an island that was once full of them, he has a restaurant. In that restaurant he serves the whitefish that he catches, along with burbot, otherwise known as lawyers, an obscure native species that isn't even regulated as a commercial stock. It's long been considered a Great Lakes trash fish. Koyen markets it as a local delicacy.

Behind his restaurant is an 835-acre organic farm on which he raises wheat for Capital Brewery's Island Wheat Ale. He also grows potatoes for a boutique brand of potato chips. In June he milled an old oak tree a friend had given him and turned it into an outdoor bar that will serve as a smoking annex to his restaurant.

Koyen fishes year-round and almost always alone.

He's doing whatever it takes to hang on, but he may be the last of his line.

Asked if someone - anyone - from the island will take over fishing once his dad quits, his 30-year-old son, Jesse, doesn't pause before giving a one-word answer: "Nope."

Charlie Henriksen has also struggled mightily to stay afloat. A few years ago times got so tough he had to sell his house and two of his boats. He spent the winter of 2008 in the Gulf of Mexico, where he piloted a supply boat for the oil industry.

"I felt terrible for my son," he says. "It was his sophomore year in high school, and I missed a lot of stuff."

But he didn't think he had a choice: "I was thinking, you know, that I was going under."

Then the whitefish started to hang on in a manner he did not expect. Today he describes his scaled-back fishing and wholesale operation as a "neat little niche" of a business that he wouldn't mind passing on to his son someday.

But he has no idea if his son will follow in his wake.

There are a lot of Lake Michigan fishermen wondering that these days.

Milwaukee's last full-time commercial fisherman, Dan Anderson, doubts his two older kids would consider getting into the family business.

But then there is his youngest, 10-year-old Calvin. He's constantly begging to go out with his dad.

"He's actually an asset on the boat at this point. He's pretty darn good," Dan Anderson says.

"He's got the curse."

But it's doubtful Calvin will grow up a Lake Michigan fisherman like his dad, and his dad's dad.

Dan is planning to move his family to Alaska within a year.

Calvin's grandfather Alvin was fishing Lake Michigan full time in summers by the time he was Calvin's age.

Unlike what is happening in the north, he's watched the whitefish on the southern part of the lake dwindle to the point that they are no longer a viable commercial stock. And he's seen the chub numbers shrink and swell over his eight decades.

But he's never seen anything like the recent crash in chubs, and he doesn't think any of his ancestors did either.

"I don't think anybody from back then would imagine this could happen," he says.

He says if the fish don't come back in a decade or so, the fishermen never will.

"There won't be anybody here to fish them," he says. "Who's going to fish them?"