FOOD: Net Profits

In the chill hours before dawn, hundreds of steam and motor boats crept out over the star-sprinkled swells of the upper Great Lakes. They chugged past dim, pine-spiked shores until the sky greyed into day and the wheelmen could pick out the flag-topped buoys that marked their submerged nets. The craft drifted silently to a stop in the icy, crystal water.

Gnarled hands reached over the side, began to pull up the first of the “gang” nets, each “gang” made up of 24 gill nets 4 ft. wide and 300 ft. long, which may extend for a mile and a half. Motors of the automatic net lifters began to cough. With thousands of lake herring trapped by their gills in the 2½-in. meshes, the nets poured into the boats for two hours a glistening stream of thousands of pounds of fish. Nets cleared, lunch eaten and new nets set, the fishing fleet turned homeward, from Duluth to Munising, Mich.

Netted Fish. Thus last week, as it has for so many Novembers, the Great Lakes annual herring run began. But this year’s catch meant more than another dish for the U.S. dinner table. In point of total tonnage, the small lake herring (9 to 15 in. long, 5 to 7 oz. in weight) is the biggest single catch taken annually from the teeming Great Lakes waters, which are the biggest single source of fresh-water fish in America. This year, despite the manpower shortage and a run almost two weeks late in starting, lake fishermen hope to lift 17 to 19 million Ib. from the shallow inshore waters where the herring come in to spawn. Such a catch, well under 1940’s 22,480,000 Ib., would be worth more than $600,000 these days, well over 1940’s $486,256.

To about 5,000 North-country fishermen and wholesale-house workers (who process, ice and ship fish) that is important money. To a protein-hungry America, the catch is an important dietary item. Two million pounds will go to the Army; chain food stores will get millions more. What is left will be frozen, salted or smoked.

Nettled Men. To meet the mounting demand, the fishermen will work every day through the month-long run; during spells of bad weather, which delays clearing the nets, many a fisherman will work from before dawn until midnight. This year they will labor anxiously. Reason: recently OPA pegged the price of herring before the run at about 3¢ a pound. Fishermen snorted like Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, threatened to hang up their nets. OPA relented, reclassified some of them as wholesalers entitled to 7¢ a pound. This week, as rumors of further changes ran through the villages fringing Lakes Superior and Michigan, fishermen kept one eye on Superior’s net-ripping, boat-smashing winter weather, the other on OPA’s profit-smashing directives.