I heard yesterday, on the way up, that they've also caught two very large walleye, the largest they've caught in a number of years also.
Personally, I think as long as the alewife are gone, the salmon fishery are going to stay small fish. What we've noticed with the lake trout is that with the alewife gone, the lake trout have changed their diets. Now they're eating minnows, smelt, small whitefish. We see them eating a lot of silver bass, a lot of small perch.
So the lake trout have changed their diets totally, and I think that is probably what will happen with the salmon. At one point the alewife was their predominant food source. I think over time, once they change their diets and they get used to it, they'll come back. I think they'll get big again.
I know when the whitefish changed their diets from the plankton that they used to eat—it's called diporeia—and switched to zebra mussels, we noticed a lot of small fish for about six to eight years. All we could catch were the small ones.
We were complaining to the Ministry of Natural Resources about this. We were concerned about this. Our size limit for trap-net whitefish was 17 inches. Back in the nineties, a 17- or 18-inch whitefish would be about a four-year-old fish. Four or five years ago, it was a seven- or eight-year-old fish. When they switched their diets, they grew a lot slower.