Fishing These Waters — a stop on M-22 North.
Since we passed the fishing shanties, let me say what commercial fishing on this lake actually involved, because it was among the harder ways to make a living in America.
The boats went out in all weather from about ice-out to freeze-up. The classic Great Lakes fishing tug is a small, heavily built vessel almost completely enclosed — a steel box with a wheelhouse — and that design is not for comfort. It is because these seas break short and steep and come clean over the boat, and an open deck in November would kill you.
The work was hauling nets by hand in freezing spray, picking fish out one at a time, and running for harbor when the glass dropped. Families did it for generations and a good many of them lost somebody to it.
The fishery itself has been through upheaval. Sea lamprey — an eel-like parasite that arrived through the shipping canals — devastated the lake trout in the mid-twentieth century and very nearly finished the commercial industry. It is now held down by ongoing chemical treatment of the spawning streams, permanently. That control programme has never stopped and never can.
So a handful of working operations survive, mostly family-held, mostly small, fishing whitefish. When you buy smoked whitefish on a dock up here, it is not a heritage re-enactment. Somebody went out and got it.