William Carlson

• Leland, Michigan, 1999

“Our family struggled in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. We switched our fishing techniques to fishing chubs. There wasn’t a lot of money in fishing chubs, but it was a life….”

“We can catch whitefish and chubs here, I’m talking about the state commercial licensed fishery; the Indian fishery can catch anything they want….”

“I thought the salmon was a great introduction, not just for the quality of the lake, but it was an economic boom to so many of the communities along the lake that were suffering because the commercial fishery had pretty much collapsed or been put out of business.”

Joy Lang

• Leland, Michigan, 1999

“I don’t know how many — probably five times that I recall that they came along and said you know, you can’t use the gill nets any longer because they killed all species of fish that were caught in the nets. Therefore, they put us out of business.”

Here in the state of Michigan, the commercial fisheries in this particular area can only take chubs and whitefish and there aren’t many fishermen left….”

Dennis Hickey

• Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin, 1999

“… there was a lot of conflict with, maybe 15 years ago, with sport and charter fishermen particularly the charter fishermen because they felt if there were any commercial fishermen that they would fish the lake out and they were the new commercial fishery and that was gonna be the cat’s meow. And now in the last five years they’re going down the tubes.”

“If we don’t like a law or something, we go to Madison and we work on changing it. Actually there’s only about, oh I’d say 10 or 15 commercial fishermen in the state that do a lot of the work regarding the regulations and everything.”

Donald Voight

• Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, 1999

“What I don’t like when the chubs are spawning, they let you fish — now they’ve opened it up. That’s just like having deer season open year around.”

“Well, the state of Michigan put us out of chub fishing, so we moved back to Gills Rock. Then we fished whitefish. And, of course, my health went so I go out of it and my boys took over. They’re still fishing.”

Elaine Johnson

• Sister Bay, Wisconsin, 1999

“Well, just like it was in Michigan and all of the states. The Departments of Natural Resources up and down the beaches, they felt that the sports people gave the best money back to the state….”

Ken Koyen

• Washington Island, Wisconsin, 1999

“I remember a meeting with the DNR came up and they wanted to plant German browns which aren’t native to these waters. One of the fishermen that knew what he was talking about got up and stood up and he says, don’t put anything in the lake that isn’t there already.”

Donald Stiller

• Little Suamico, Wisconsin, 1999

“Well, of course, the lamprey had a great effect on the fishery at one time because it almost cleaned out the lake trout….”

Neil Teski

• Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, 1999

“I think things have cleaned up quite a bit compared to what it used to be. I don’t see a sea lamprey disaster like in the 50s.”

“I got a college education but I’m not back to that anymore…to me everything I’ve done to this point has been to keep my fishing industry going. All my capital, you know, goes back into the rig….”

“I think that there was a lot of misunderstanding on both sides and I think that over the years it’s been relatively — I mean, I can sit down with — and the rest of us can sit down with the top sport fishing guys in the state and we can talk. We don’t necessarily agree….”

Paul Goodman

• Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, 1999

“We had our own associations up here like Northwest Wisconsin Commercial Fishing Association, things like that, and in that fish — in that association you had larger fishermen, smaller fishermen, and there was a few fishermen trying to come in here from other states like Michigan all of sudden there was, you know, you’d see a few other fishermen trying to get in the area. And there were people in our organizations that were looking at how to keep them from coming in this area, how to limit entry, you know, because they didn’t want competition and, you know, the more competition you have the more your prices could go down.”