I'm very fortunate. I brought my kids here today: my daughter, Leigha Purdy, and my son, Josiah Purdy, the next generation of our fishery, I hope.
I'm a little nervous. I'm sorry. I'll probably just read this.
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak here this afternoon. My name is Tim Purdy. I'm a fourth-generation commercial fisherman. My main concern here today is to fix things so that this young lady and this young man here beside me, the fifth generation, will have the opportunity to fish if he or she so chooses.
My family started fishing in Sarnia Bay in 1900. With a pair of hoop nets and a dream to feed his family, my great-grandfather started commercial fishing. In the 1920s they moved to Blackwell Side Road and fished with flat-bottom boats using the very labour-intensive pond nets.
In 1950 my grandfather moved the business to its current location on St. Clair River, at the mouth of Lake Huron. Currently we operate two types of fishing that makes us a very unique fishery on the Great Lakes. We fish trap nets for approximately nine months of the year, and we also gill net for about ten months of the year. Having two types of fishery allows us to cater to a very special market. With the live entrapment gear of trap nets we can target specific species of fish and keep the quality very high, and this allows us the advantage of marketing the very best fish. The gill nets are primarily fished during the cold water months. Again, being able to fish almost all winter long gives us an advantage over some of the other fisheries out there.
Over the last 112 years of fishing, our family has had to face many hardships in the industry, and most of them are due to invasive species.
In the early 1950s the sea lamprey moved into the Great Lakes and by 1960 pretty much wiped out the lake herring and lake trout populations. This was the main catch back then of the fishing fleet. The fishermen were forced to fish for other species, and in doing so, had to educate the public on what fish was good to eat. The industry started fishing sturgeon, pickerel, and perch.
In the mid-1950s the alewife showed up, and this started another obstacle for the fishermen. Where they would prove to be a food source for the salmon, they were very detrimental to the pickerel and perch stocks. Just in the last six years, with the alewife almost totally gone in Lake Huron, we've seen our pickerel and perch stocks rebound, and they are very healthy.
In 1970 we had to deal with mercury poison, and that closed a big part of our fishery for a lot of the 1970s. I know this is not an outside species that came into the lake, but I mention it to show you how we've made many changes in our fishery to adapt. By the late seventies, we were able to fish pickerel again, but again it took us some time to educate the public.
In the early 1980s our biggest problem was the sport fishery. The local club was formed and a hatchery was started. We had to once again educate the public that we were here to fish a sustainable resource. It was the perception that we caught everything and killed everything.
We took many sport fishermen, Ministry of National Resources employees, as well as many politicians on our boats and showed them and educated them that we can exist together. Today some of our best allies come from our local Bluewater Anglers club. We have a mutual respect for our local club members and we have learned we can both co-exist. In many cases, when a fight comes, we're on the same side when something's wrong and it's going to hurt our fishery.
By the late 1980s and the early nineties the zebra mussel was on the scene. I for one didn't think it was going to have a big impact on our fishery, and was I wrong. In over 100 years of fishing I don't think that one species or organism has had a bigger effect on our industry than the zebra mussel. They have cleaned up the lake by filtering the lake.
The whitefish, which is our biggest catch on Lake Huron, used to eat plankton. With the zebra mussel coming on the scene and filtering the water, the plankton the whitefish ate disappeared. The fish stock went through a big change and the species had to adapt to a new food source. They now eat zebra mussels. It's the most available food source for them. Basically, they're on the bottom of the lake from one end of the lake to the other.
The zebra mussels have also affected the water clarity in the lake. Thirty years ago, on a good day, you could see bottom in 10 feet of water. This spring, you could see bottom in over 75 feet of water. This is nice if you are a sport diver, but it's not nice if you are trying to operate a commercial fishery for whitefish and pickerel. Pickerel like the cloudy water. Over the last 20 years, we have had to make big changes to our pickerel fishery.
In 2005, viral hemorrhagic septicemia, also known as VHS, was found in Lake St. Clair and in Lake Huron in 2006.
I talked earlier about our uniqueness as a fishery. At one time we had a very large live fishery. In the spring, once the fishery in Lake Erie opened up for pickerel in May, we would start to sell live fish to keep our fish off the dead market. In 2007, due to this disease, VHS, we lost all our live fishery. A lot of those fish were sold into the States to rod and gun clubs, as well as pay to fish ponds. We were the only fishery on the Great Lakes that was set up to sell live pickerel, live catfish, and the truly unique live sturgeon.
I have shared a few of the circumstances that have affected my family over the last century. In telling you all these problems, l'm afraid the biggest and baddest is yet to come. I feel that we had a chance 10 years ago to stop the next predator that will come into our lake system. Unfortunately, it was up against a very powerful lobby group in the shipping industry.
If that river in Chicago was filled in and the Asian carp were stopped where they were 10 years ago, we would have high hopes for the future for sport and commercial fishing on the Great Lakes. I know l'm speaking rather blunt, but it's hard not to be totally frustrated when people know there is a problem coming and they decide to have a study. Then we must have another study to make sure the answers from the first study were right. Ten years later, we hear stories about the electric barrier, and do we really know how effective it is? The people doing these studies are working on options, but are they really worried if their freighter can't access the Mississippi River from the north?
l'm sitting before you here today as a very frustrated man who operates a family commercial fishery, and I have serious concerns about whether my daughter or my son will have a future in fishing. The time to act has past, so any more delays, from my viewpoint, are very hard to handle.
In closing, I would like to take this opportunity to personally invite every one of you to come to Sarnia. I would like to show you around our fishery, and perhaps get you on a fish boat, where you can see a live commercial fishery. Come sit at our dockside eatery, share a secret family recipe, eat some pickerel, and enjoy some Lake Huron whitefish. We can discuss how to keep our waterways safe from these monsters that are coming. Please come and see this beautiful sustainable fishery. If we can keep those Asian carp and snakehead out, it will be a fishery that will be around for many more generations to come.
Thank you.