This morning I get up, post election, post Door County and I think: fish. We ate whitefish in Door County at a traditional fish boil and talked with the grandkids about Lake Michigan fish. I tell them that a fisherman once told me that Lake Michigan is so polluted that eating one Lake Michigan fish per year would be a safe limit. They were aghast. Then I came home and read the Sunday Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and learned from a front page story by Dan Egan that we don’t have to worry about how many to eat since soon there won’t be any much fishing going on there anyway.
Dan Anderson, a gray haired fisherman who’s been fishing Lake Michigan a long time and says that he can catch more fish in Alaska in a day than he can in Lake Michigan in a year. “The lake left me.” he says, “it’s gone.” And says David Lodge, a biologist, “The decline of the (commercial) fishery going on right now in Lake Michigan and Huron doesn’t have anything to do with overfishing” … ”Now it’s changes in the food web that appear to be driven by invasive mussels.”
And it seems the culprit isn’t the zebra mussel but rather, the quagga mussel brought in my ships across the Atlantic that has suddenly gone viral. “Today, they smother the bottom of the lake almost from shore to shore and their numbers are estimated at 900 trillion.” It boggles the mind!
And so Dan and his father Alvin, who started fishing when he was eight years old, won’t be bringing their boat back to Milwaukee this winter, but will stay in Alaska where they can catch more fish in a day than in a year in Lake Michigan. There are still whitefish off Door County but their size has shrunk dramatically. Apparently, they eat the invasive mussels and like Dan and his father, are doing what it takes to survive, even if as Dan says, they’re not the fish they used to be.
As for me, I contemplate another eat local challenge coming up at the end of the month, and I think it gets harder to find enough to eat. Thank God for vegetables!
(read the entire story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, front page, Sunday, August 14,2011)
