A St. Laurent commercial fisherman recently had two nets’ worth of walleye stolen.
Merrill Bruce has been commercial fishing since he was young, his dad showing him and his brothers the family trade. He relates commercial fishing to farming — it’s in the blood. Since he was 21, Bruce has had his own outfit, and he doesn’t plan on changing that any time soon.
Every morning, Bruce wakes up at 5:30 a.m. He brews a pot of coffee while he makes his lunch for the day, loads up his truck and sets out to be on the ice before 7:30 a.m. Then, for the rest of the day, Bruce sets and lifts his nets, having 75 in the water at any given time. When the fishing is good, Bruce is on the water seven days a week.
Right now, Bruce and his crew are setting nets closer to shore. They’ve only been out there for a couple weeks, having got a late start due to a slow freeze of the lake. Depending on how many fish he’s catching, he’ll go out further and further until his season ends in March, likely being 20 miles out on the lake by then.
During the warmer months, Bruce has worked in the oil and gas industry all across the country — he can only fish during the ice fishing season. That means he can only work from November to March every year, and commercial fishing is his family’s main source of income right now. So, when he went to check his nets last weekend and found two ripped apart and empty of fish, Bruce was worried.
Setting a net isn’t easy work. You start by chopping a series of holes into the ice, each lined up perpendicular to the water’s current so the river will flow through it and allow the nets to intercept the fish. Then, you tie a long cord to a wooden pole. One person will push the pole with the cord through the first hole into the water and feed it through to the next hole, where their partner will grab it and pull it through — like a needle and thread.
You then detach the cord from the pole and attach it to the net as one person feeds the net through the last hole, completely stretching it under the ice. On both ends, the top and bottom of the net are tied to vertical poles that get driven into the bottom of the water.
Bruce sets his nets in gangs of four, meaning if you don’t pull one out correctly, you’ll end up pulling them all. That’s exactly what happened when whoever took his fish pulled his nets up. They pulled two out of the water and left the other two in, but the damage had been done. The two on top of the ice froze to it and ripped apart from the two in the water. Now, two of Bruce’s nets are garbage, each one costing him around $180. And he had to spend a good part of a day just trying to get the other two nets out of the water.
Bruce guesses this will cost him $1,000. That includes the nets and the stolen fish, but not his time. And now that those two nets aren’t usable, this will cost him in the long run because those nets aren’t catching him fish.
“I don’t think they realize what kind of damage they can do,” said Bruce. “The work you put in and then to have this happen.”
This is the first time Bruce has had his fish stolen and nets destroyed, but he’s heard of it happening to other commercial fisherman in the area. He guesses anglers fished where his nets were and pulled them up, but he has no answers and likely never will.
“It’s our livelihood,” said Bruce. “Our season is from Nov. 1 to the end of March. We respect [anglers] so I’d like the same courtesy.”
When passing anglers on the ice, Bruce will help them out or throw them a fish or two if they’re having a slow day.
As Bruce starts setting nets further away from shore, the threat from anglers will diminish, but that won’t be until the lake freezes more and more. For now, he’s giving his number out to anyone he sees on the ice, spreading awareness of what happened and asking anyone to call him if they see some suspicious or new anglers who may not know to be aware.
