Salmon-Snagging Days Grow Short - The Washington Post

MARINETTE, Wis. -- The shorelines of the rugged Upper Great Lakes, brilliant these days as autumn winds whip the lakes into whitecaps, soon will lie deserted, their harbors quiet, the waters moving beneath immense floes of winter ice.

The big "lakers," ore carriers, grain vessels and rust-stained workaday bulk haulers of the inland seas are making late-season voyages before heading for sheltered moorings and piers to ride out the stormy months.

Pleasure boat owners are retreating as well, hauling craft clear of marinas and yacht basins, stowing them safely ashore beneath tarpaulins or nestled in cradles at lakeside.

But before the long snooze begins, the lakes are offering up one final glory: the annual fall spawning run of chinook salmon. Raised in Wisconsin fish hatcheries and released several years ago into Great Lakes tributaries, hundreds of thousands of them are returning to streams they think of as home, in a vain attempt to deposit their eggs before they die.

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Because dams on Wisconsin's Lake Michigan rivers block their way, the fish can never reach proper spawning grounds upstream. Shoals of chinook, also called king salmon, mill in the swift waters below the manmade barriers, their strength ebbing each day.

The October arrival of the fish in the shallow river mouths in turn attracts the people of this region to the banks to "snag" for salmon, which often weigh more than 20 pounds apiece after years of feasting offshore on alewives and other finny prey.

Snaggers use light casting rods to pitch weighted, three-pronged hooks far out into the rushing rivers, then reel them back in. Izaak Walton's ideal of using guile to hook unsuspecting fish has no place here.

Snaggers use no bait and no lures. The idea is simply to drag the hook into the fish's mouth, body or tail. So many spawning kings congregate in the streams and inlets that thousands are caught this way every year.

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"No sport to it at all," grumped a local resident who came out to watch snaggers by the Menominee River here one day recently.

A rough-hewn ritual, snagging seems likely to pass from the fall scene forever after this year. Michigan has banned the practice, and only a few Wisconsin counties still allow it. The state Department of Natural Resources has proposed new fishing rules that would outlaw the practice in 1987. Public hearings are set next month.

Bud Boehm, who runs MBK Sports Shop on Main Street in this city of 12,000, said, "Local people don't snag. It's not sport." Although he does a brisk business selling snagging gear, Boehm said, "I don't believe in that type of fishing."

Michael Hansen, the state's Great Lakes sport fisheries specialist, said, "I could never snag. It appalls me to watch it." Both men said snaggers have hurt their cause by not cleaning up after themselves. "There's a lot of mess," Boehm said.

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"No fly fisherman would leave a stream in the shape snaggers leave them," Hansen said.

But for many snaggers, it is not so much a question of sport as an agreeably straightforward way to help fill the larder. Although the twin cities of Menominee, Mich., and Marinette, Wis., which flank the Menominee River, are home to several large paper mills, factories and a shipyard, the local economies have been less than robust for some time.

"It's easy, and it's cheap. All it takes is time," said a snagger dressed in a woolen lumberjack and heavy rubber boots. "And we've got plenty of that."

On a cold afternoon here, about a dozen snaggers stood shoulder to shoulder on the Wisconsin side of the river, just below the Scott Paper Co. dam. Heavy rains had swollen the region's streams, and the water boiled through the sluice gates, booming from shore to shore.

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The men cast steadily into the swirling water. They talked quietly, nodding enthusiastically when someone snagged a brown trout and hauled it out. A few minutes later, a bewhiskered logger who had taken a day off from felling trees for the nearby paper mills snagged a fish that bent his rod double as it thrashed.

He worked the king to shore, pulled it up with help from a friend and lugged it to the bank, where he delivered several sharp blows to kill the 25-pounder. The hook had lodged in the salmon's body. "Gonna smoke it," the logger said.

"Plenty of people like salmon that way," said Marinette County Clerk Bob Harbick, a friendly Republican running unopposed for reelection. "But I like it the way my wife prepares it."

Bette Harbick, secretary of the Marinette County Parks Department, puts salmon up for the winter in Mason jars, a common practice here. After her husband skins and fillets the fish, she soaks them in brine overnight, then rinses the steaks, packs them in canning jars with a tablespoon each of olive oil and ketchup, and steams the sealed jars in a pressure cooker for 90 minutes.

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"In mid-winter, we have salmon patties or salmon loaf, and it's as tasty as anything you could want," her husband said.

But heavy Great Lakes pollution has loaded the fish with PCBs and other cancer-causing chemicals that concentrate in fatty tissue and skin. As a result, fishermen and snaggers said, they take care to prepare and preserve only lean salmon meat and seldom eat more than one meal a week of Great Lakes fish.

"That's right," Bob Harbick said, with a sigh. "Just once a week for Bette's salmon."

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