Manitoulin Island commercial fisheries battle zebra mussels, wind

A couple of commercial fisheries on Manitoulin Island say they're trying new things to cope with environmental changes.

Denise Purvis with Purvis Fisheries in Silver Water says it's been windier than normal for the past couple of years. And that wind — combined with the devastation caused by the invasive zebra mussel — ends up clogging the nets with slime instead of fish.

“And what it does is, we leave the gear in and the wind ... fills the nets right full and we can hardly get them off the bottom, whereas before we didn't have that problem,” Purvis said.

“We can fish through the wind days cause the boats here are big enough that ... even if it's fairly rough they can go out in it. But now it just wrecks all the gear.”

Purvis catches sturgeon, herring, whitefish, and lake trout. The fish is sold all over Ontario, Quebec and the United States.

The company is also processing farmed fish as a way to keep employees busy year round, he added. The province has granted the company money to buy an ice machine to enable increased production.

Herbert Fisheries based in Killarney has also found fishing hampered by wind and invasive species.

“The zebra mussels cleaned the lake up so much and now there's more algae growing, and there's just different organisms growing, and it gets in the webbing and it's just so heavy, like grass, and moss and slime, it'll take the web right out of the line,” said Ross Herbert of Herbert Fisheries.

He said he is also trying different nets to avoid losing them in poor conditions. Herbert catches perch and pickerel and sells the fish in the Greater Sudbury region.

Herbert says he expects to see companies turn more to the processing of fish to supplement their earnings, as well as aquaculture.