For more than three decades, Great Lakes fisherman Richard Boda has kept a handwritten logbook of his time on the water — a legacy to the son and daughter who would one day inherit the family business.
Jotted in a waterproof notepad each day and transferred to a spiral binder at night, the notes detail weather, net locations, fish catches and his love for family who often joined him aboard the Izzie Kate.
“My thinking was, they could refer back to things
if they ever got in a pinch — if they couldn’t find fish or they tried to figure out a new place to go,” said Boda, 56, a third-generation commercial fisherman and a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
“They could look at that book and say, ‘OK, my dad was here. This is what he did.’”
That was the hope. Instead, the book has become a diary of species collapse, a firsthand account of the decimation of whitefish that have fed Great Lakes denizens for millenia.
The logbook that begins with bounties in Lake Huron takes a turn in the early 2000s, when invasive mussels colonized the lake and hogged the food. In more recent years, it recounts how Boda began focusing on Lake Michigan, only for the crisis to follow him there. A passage this year details the day when he caught just 87 pounds, worth about $250.
“I basically got my gas money back, and that was about it,” Boda said.
The book could have been written by any of a few dozen fisherfolk remaining on the Great Lakes, trying to eke out a living from an ecosystem forever changed. Gross catches have declined 70% in 15 years in Lakes Michigan and Huron, where whitefish account for about 90 % of the commercial catch with a dockside value of roughly $5.8 million. The fish’s total economic impact is significantly higher, given its immense popularity with restaurant diners and Up North tourists.
It’s a crisis unlike anywhere else in the world, said Grantly Galland, project director for international fisheries with the Pew Charitable Trusts. Collapsing fisheries are common. But they’re almost always caused by overfishing.
That’s a simple fix: Dock the boats until stocks recover.
In the Great Lakes, blame lies with billions of invasive quagga and zebra mussels that have become the lower lakes’ dominant life form, siphoning nutrients and creating famine throughout the food chain.
There’s not much, if anything, fishermen can do to help.
“No amount of personal sacrifice is going to lead to future benefits,” Gallant said.
Some fishers have hung up their nets for good. Other holdouts work side jobs or clean, smoke and sell their whitefish directly to consumers to maximize profits. Tribal fishers with the right to target other species have often done so, while the state-regulated fishers lobby Michigan lawmakers for similar flexibility.
But it’s not clear whether any of it will be enough to keep these multi-generational businesses afloat if the whitefish keep disappearing.
“Something’s got to give,” said Scott Everett, legislative consultant for the Michigan Fish Producers Association, or the lower lakes fishing industry “is going to go away.”
At its heyday a century ago, tens of thousands of Michiganders worked in commercial fishing.
Overfishing tanked populations, leading to bitter battles over the remaining catch, stricter regulations and a much smaller industry by the time Boda took over his late grandfather’s license in 1991.
The survivors found steady income in a more tightly managed industry, subject to strict quotas and clear lines of delineation: Commercial operations, both state-regulated and tribal, split most of the whitefish catch, while sportfishers got most salmon and shared the lake trout with the tribes.
Lakes Michigan and Huron were the commercial industry’s lifeblood, accounting for about 80% of the state’s total catch with far lesser amounts coming from Lake Superior.
“We did pretty good for a long time,” said Boda, who lives in Brutus near Petoskey. Some years, he made as much as $100,000.
His sister and late brother sometimes fished alongside him.His 32-year-old son, Nate, began tagging along when he was so tiny he napped on a pile of life jackets and stood on a 5-gallon bucket to reach the Izzie Kate’s wheel.
Their view every day was sunrise through what Boda described as “the most beautiful office window.”
When the weather turned nasty or the fishing turned bad, Boda would pray to his grandfather, “help us out on the lake today.”
It always seemed to work until the mussels took over.
After arriving in the Great Lakes in the late 1980s and early 90s, invasive zebra and quagga mussels from eastern Europe soon took over. The small shellfish now carpet the bottom of lakes Michigan and Huron, gobbling plankton and algae that once supported a rich underwater food web.
Whitefish have been hit the hardest.
For years now, their offspring have been dying of starvation and sunburn soon after hatching, leaving the lakes with a thinning population of aging adults. Stocks are now on the brink of collapse in much of the lower lakes, except for spots like the Saginaw Bay and Lower Green Bay, where nutrient-laden farm runoff offsets the mussels’ impact.
Nowadays, Boda struggles to clear $40,000 in income. If his grandfather was alive, “he probably would be like, ‘Pack it up,’” Boda said.
State and tribal regulators have ratcheted down allowable harvests in hopes of slowing the decline, but they admit it won’t make much difference. So long as mussels dominate the lakes (and so far, nobody has figured out how to suppress them) the fish will struggle to reproduce until they eventually die of old age.
The scarcity has led to tense debates about how to respond. Unlike other threats to the lakes — sea lamprey and invasive carp — critics say mussel control research is underfunded. It has received about $14 million in federal funding since 2010. The effort to keep carp out of the Great Lakes, meanwhile, costs $1.2 billion.
Efforts to stock whitefish — the main target of commercial fishers — are small and led primarily by tribes. Meanwhile, Michigan and other states spend millions to support recreational anglers by stocking salmon and the federal government spends millions more on a stocking program meant to recover lake trout.
Scientists say those fish don’t pose an existential threat to whitefish like mussels, but that’s cold comfort to fishers who fear the predators are outcompeting whitefish in lakes that can no longer support vast quantities of them all.
As whitefish populations continue to decline, commercial fishing advocates have set their sights on wringing more profit out of fewer fish.
The Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors & Premiers is working to develop markets for the skin, bones and guts — potentially profitable bits of carcass that are currently thrown away.
Iceland did the same with cod. John Schmidt, who leads the effort, said there’s potential for whitefish-based pet food, fishmeal, fish oil and even collagen products. But so far, small-scale experiments such as a Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa Indians program that turns fish waste into fertilizer are not putting money back in fisherfolks’ pockets.
In the meantime, fishing families survive by adapting.
Some weld and wire their own boats to keep costs down. Others have set their sights on vertical integration. Rather than selling it wholesale at $2 or $3 a pound, they clean and prepare their own fish patties, pâtés and fried filets, then spend the weekends hawking at farmers markets or food trucks.
Longtime tribal fisherman Bill Fowler has stayed in business by swapping whitefish for the stocked lake trout.
“If we didn’t have a market for trout, we’d be in big trouble,” Fowler said.
But trout brings in a much lower price per pound. And state regulations prohibit non-tribal fishers from targeting trout, leaving them with even fewer options to stay afloat.
“Ten years from now, there won’t be anybody left fishing,” predicted Joel Petersen, a fourth generation state-regulated fisherman who operates out of Muskegon and Leland. “The quotas are just too small to make a living.”
The trade group representing state-regulated fishers has spent years lobbying lawmakers for access to other species, contending it’s senseless to throw back bycatch that may not survive the trauma of being hauled to the surface.
But the effort faces opposition from recreational anglers who argue lake trout populations are too fragile to withstand more fishing pressure.
Given that the mussel-infested lakes are incapable of producing as many fish overall, perhaps commercial fishing “is an industry that needs to die,” said Dennis Eade, executive director of the Michigan Steelhead and Salmon Fishermen’s Association.
“Who’s making buggy whips anymore?” he added.
Richard Boda gets frustrated with the politics of it all. He just wishes the lakes would rebound so his kids could make a living fishing.
“I’ll probably be the last of us,” he acknowledged. “It makes you want to cry.”
After more than two decades as his dad’s first mate, Nate Boda decided this year to go fulltime at the ski resort where he’s worked seasonally for the past several winters. He was tired of traveling farther from shore each year, only to bring back fewer fish. And with a son of his own now, he needed a consistent paycheck.
“I’m not going to sit here and say we don’t have good days,” Nate Boda said. “But they’re few and far between compared to what they used to be.”
His 27-year-old sister, Alicia O’Neil, has started fishing with their dad instead. If circumstances were different, she said, she’d keep at it for the rest of her life. But the way things are going for the whitefish, she doubts that’s possible.
This summer, Richard Boda put the Izzie Kate up for sale.
His fishing days aren’t over, he said, but if he one day finds himself fishing alone, he’ll need a smaller boat.
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This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
