Fishing for a Living

A few hardy entrepreneurs ply Minnesota's waters.

By Jason Abraham
Photography by Deborah Rose

Henry "Bud" Ramer is likely Minnesota's only remaining year-round, full-time commercial fisherman on the Mississippi River. At 67, Ramer continues to lead a crew of four part-time employees, who net thousands of pounds of carp, bigmouth buffalo, sheepshead, suckers, and catfish each year from the Mississippi River near Winona.

His fish market covers a half block in downtown Winona. Inside, there are walk-in freezers for storing fish, 6- by 10-foot ovens, and a room with power saws and stainless steel tables for processing and packing fish in ice. Up front there's a retail counter where customers buy fresh oysters, ocean fish, lobsters, and other seafood delicacies that Ramer orders from both coasts. Ramer's specialty-fresh-smoked carp from the Mississippi-is also a big seller.

Success like Ramer's is rare in commercial fishing, an industry known for long hours and wet, cold working conditions. Since the 1940s, most of Minnesota's commercial fishermen have given up trying to make ends meet by only fishing. The handful of entrepreneurs who continue to fish for a living make sacrifices to pay the bills. Some work a second job. Others have scaled back their expenses to accommodate the moderate income that commercial fishing provides.

Ramer attributes his good fortune to salesmanship and a constant search for new markets. "Any idiot can go out and catch a boatload of fish," Ramer says. "The real trick is finding someone who'll pay for them."

Some of Ramer's fish are transported live, to preserve freshness, in tanker trucks to New York and Chicago for ethnic markets.

He trucks much of his catch to the Twin Cities to small ethnic grocery stores, such as the Dragon Star Super Market in St. Paul. Ramer says he began selling to these markets in the 1980s simply by contacting a few store owners. The contacts grew to a network that now requires him to make 32 deliveries each week. That network is one of the main reasons he's still in business, Ramer says.

Chris Ku, an employee at Dragon Star, describes the store's fish customers: "White people, African-Americans, Asians. They all buy fish, and they all have their own recipes for them. Some like to fry catfish. Some dishes use carp and buffalo."

Bygone Fishing. When Ramer started fishing full time in 1964, about 50 commercial fishermen operated on the Mississippi River and the state's inland lakes. Another 150 operated on Lake Superior.

Today, 56 commercial fishermen hold licenses in Minnesota. In total, they catch and sell about 3 million pounds of fish each year, down from about 5 million pounds in the mid-1960s. The industry's heyday coincided with high unemployment during the Depression, which began with the 1929 stock market collapse. Though records from the 1930s are sketchy, the Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee listed more than 1,700 commercial operations in the five states along the river's upper stretch.

"Commercial fishing is extremely demanding work. The nets are heavy; the fishermen are always wet; and during the winter, it's very cold," says Roy Johannes, who coordinates commercial fishing operations for the Department of Natural Resources. "During the Depression, workers would get paid only if they caught fish, but it was a job. Plus workers could keep a fish or two to feed their families."

Mississippi River commercial fishermen suffered as consumer demand for carp, catfish, and other species began declining in the late 1970s, after health researchers warned that fatty fish carried contaminants, such as mercury and PCBs, that could harm human health.

High-Tech Miss. Ramer set himself apart in 1964 by taking out a $5,000 loan to become the first commercial fisherman in Minnesota to own sonar equipment. Commercial fishermen typically located fish by knowing a species' winter habitat and by dipping long poles beneath the ice and later checking them for fish slime.

Sonar still serves Ramer well today. In winter he uses it to locate schools of fish under the ice. He and his crew cut holes in the ice and use a remote-controlled underwater unit to pull hundreds of yards of nets through the water. Then they draw the nets, which have cork floats on top and lead weights on the bottom, around the fish. Crew members use hand-held dip nets to remove the trapped fish through a large hole in the ice above the net.

They immediately release any game fish, as required by their DNR-issued commercial fishing license. Fish that are abundant but of little interest to sport anglers-carp, bigmouth buffalo, sucker, and sheepshead (freshwater drum), to name a few-are packed into wooden boxes for processing. Fish that are to be shipped out of state are kept alive in ponds or tanks until they are loaded onto tanker trucks.

Catches range from a few hundred pounds to Ramer's best catch of all time, 1 million pounds, which occurred just upstream from Winona in 2001.

Summer fishing is simpler. Ramer and his crew set long, cylindrical hoop nets in Mississippi backwaters. Fish can swim into the nets' gaping 4-foot maw, but they can't get out. A typical hoop net can hold up to 200 pounds of fish.

Superior Catch. More than 400 commercial fishermen worked Lake Superior in the late 1930s. They caught herring, lake trout, chubs, and ciscoes. In the ensuing years, populations of commercial species steadily declined in the lake due to pollution from lakeshore industry, overfishing, and invasion of sea lamprey, which latch onto other fish to suck out nutrients.

Today, lake trout populations are recovering as populations of sea lamprey have been controlled. North Shore commercial fishermen have asked the DNR to reinstate a small commercial harvest of lake trout in the coming years.

Twenty-five commercial fishermen are licensed for Lake Superior. They fish mostly herring, which they sell to North Shore restaurants and smokehouses during the summer.

Some Lake Superior herring goes to the East Coast, where it is used to make gefilte fish, a traditional Jewish dish. Each year Richard Eckel Fisheries in Grand Marais processes between 650,000 and 700,000 pounds of raw herring, most of which comes from Canadian commercial fishermen.

In the fall, herring are full of eggs and are sold for processing. The eggs, known as roe, are processed into caviar at Dockside Fish Market in Grand Marais. Although some of the caviar is sold locally, most is shipped to Scandinavia.

Other species of commercial fish on Lake Superior, such as whitefish, smelt, and chubs, are caught in very small numbers.

Stephen Dahl, president of the North Shore Commercial Fishing Association, began commercial fishing in 1984 at age 32. To get a commercial license, fishermen in Minnesota need three to five years of experience (or two years as an apprentice) and must own or have access to enough netting and a boat large enough for the job, says Johannes. Unlike many commercial fishermen, Dahl didn't come from a fishing family. Instead, he learned the trade as an apprentice.

The key to making a living fishing Lake Superior is to keep expenses low and lead a simple lifestyle, says Dahl. "I guess you could call my wife and me the antithetical family of today. We built our own home. What we can't build or make, we try to live without." Dahl supplements his fishing income by selling folk harps and langeleiks, a dulcimerlike traditional Norwegian musical instrument. He makes them in February and March, when ice keeps him from fishing the big lake.

Dahl's commercial license allows him to set 1,200 feet of net in four separate pieces. Each piece is 13 feet wide and hangs vertically in the water, anchored to the lake bottom and held 25 to 60 feet below the surface by a series of floats.

The net's 2-3/4 inch mesh is just large enough to entangle herring as they try to swim through. Although lake trout sometimes get caught, the mesh is too small to entangle larger salmon. By law, the nets must be set more than a quarter mile from shore to minimize inadvertent catches of salmon and steelhead, which tend to stay closer to shore. The distance also keeps recreational anglers from accidentally snagging nets in their fishing lines.

Using an 18-foot canoe-shaped boat called a skiff, Dahl checks the nets each day by lifting them across the bow of his boat. During the summer he sometimes catches as little as 2 pounds of herring. But during the fall, when herring are spawning, catches can be up to 400 pounds.

Inland Rough Fish. Inland commercial fishing, which consists mainly of netting carp, bigmouth buffalo, bullhead, and suckers from shallow prairie lakes in southern and western counties, has also declined, mostly in the past 25 years.

Starting in the 1930s, the DNR used its own crews and enlisted commercial fishermen to help control carp and other rough fish populations in those lakes by netting them. The DNR paid commercial fishermen for their catch, which was usually buried, although some fish were sold to processors in Iowa.

As a cost-saving measure, the DNR stopped purchasing fish in the late 1970s. Instead, the DNR opted to aerate lakes in winter so more game fish survived. Game fish helped control carp and other rough fish populations by feeding on their eggs and young.

"The inland commercial fishing industry was never very big to begin with," says Ken Seemann, secretary-treasurer and past president of the Inland Commercial Fishing Trade Association, "but it really declined in the last 25 years." Currently, 20 inland commercial anglers, including Seemann, fish only part time. "For most of us," he says, "it's a way to be outside and make a little money."

During the 1980s, the last commercial fishermen to harvest walleye on Canadian border lakes (including Rainy, Namakan, and Lake of the Woods) rolled up their nets after the DNR bought their licenses. In the late 1940s, to protect recreational angling, the DNR had started phasing out commercial walleye netting operations on the U.S. side by ending license sales to new netters.

Within a few years of closing in the United States, almost all commercial -walleye netting ceased on the Canadian side too. Today, five commercial anglers hold licenses to net whitefish, burbot, and suckers on the Minnesota side.

Fishing Futures. Future commercial fishing will likely benefit from more accurate sonar technology, stronger material for nets, and more comfortable boats. However, Johannes says he doubts commercial fishing in Minnesota will return to the heydays of the past.

Young people are not carrying on traditions that include commercial fish products such as herring and gefilte fish, Johannes says.

"There's been a cultural shift in the past 20 to 25 years. It's really been noticeable in commercial fishing," he says. "Future markets will likely be in supplying various ethnic groups in the United States and overseas markets."

Jason Abraham is contributing editor to the Conservation Volunteer and staff writer for the DNR divisions of Ecological Resources and Fish and Wildlife.