Fishermen of Lake Erie are facing trouble with the ever changing laws. They can’t drag up Lake Erie whitefish. The laws on nets were changed and whitefish aren’t perch. They don’t follow the lines into the net traps that the new law mandates. To catch whitefish, he says, you need gill nets and gill nets are banned. He has $100,000 worth of them moldering in storage and the whitefish prowl the lake untouched.
According to local fisherman whitefish rarely bite on a lure and swim at different levels from the perch. He blames the ban on a test of wills between the handful of commercial fishermen and recreational fishermen. One side needed large hauls. The other feared the lake was being emptied.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania introduced a $3 stamp on Lake Erie fishing licenses to compensate commercial fishermen for their losses, according to a Fish and Boat Commission spokesman. The special fee ended five years later. Since then, Erie’s commercial fishing industry has become an artifact — a business down to its last boat.
People flock to Presque Isle, the spit of sand, trees and swamp that arcs off the shore into Lake Erie. They come to the bayfront at Dobbins Landing to eat seafood and watch the orange sun quench itself in the water to the west. People here are hardworking, ethnic, patriotic and just now, it seems, reacquiring their relationship to the shallowest and once most polluted of the Great Lakes.
Jacob Rouch, vice president for development at the chamber of commerce, said that down on the waterfront it’s a lovely location but you can only access it from three angles. That fourth angle, the lake, is Erie’s reason for being. Settlers came here to harvest fish and explore the north by water.
