KNIFE RIVER, Minn. _ In a bobbing, 4-foot sea on Lake Superior, Josh Blankenheim stretched well beyond the front railing of Blackfin, the Minnesota DNR's work boat, to grab a tall buoy attached to a fishing net.
Within seconds of wrestling the instrument aboard, the vessel's motorized net puller revved loudly to retrieve a seine loaded with fat lake trout, 143 feet under. Blankenheim and two fellow biologists picked fish out of the net as fast as they could, heaving them into coded tubs to indicate location of catch.
"This is pretty amazing right here," said Chris Palvere, the boat's captain. "We're seeing a lot of fish."
Big, too. The net was rigged to catch fish ranging from 4 to 10 pounds, and plenty were longer than 2 feet. Over the course of more than three hours, the crew gathered 103 lake trout from three nets set in frigid, pristine water.
As another summer begins in Minnesota, North Shore fishing villages, local charter boat captains and individual anglers willing to launch into the oftentimes sudden-changing waters of Gitche Gumee are enjoying a lake trout revival of epic proportions. The turnaround _ 50 years in the making _ was capped less than a year ago when the Department of Natural Resources fully reopened the native species to commercial fishing.
"It's a great success story ... and it's completely sustainable," said Steve Dahl, one of two commercial fishermen permitted to take 250 lake trout a year from "MN-1" _ the Duluth-area fishing zone heavily fished by sport anglers.
So healthy is the wild lake trout fishery from Duluth to Grand Portage that catching a stocked lake trout has become uncommon. Those supplemental fish were critical to keeping the species alive after exploitation and invasive sea lamprey devastated "lakers" from eastern Lake Erie to Isle Royale.
Natural reproduction of the char family fish has recovered so well in Lake Superior that Minnesota completely halted its stocking program in 2015. In a recent haul made by the DNR for one of its annual studies, 93 percent of the catch was wild.
Now the DNR believes it would do more harm than good to manipulate the system with stocking or protective slot regulations. Licensed anglers are now free to possess three lake trout of any size.
"We restored the top predator fish (in the Minnesota waters of Lake Superior) and people are barely noticing," Minnesota fisheries chief Don Pereira said.
When he retires soon, Pereira will count the revival as one of the top fish-management accomplishments of his era _ achieved with cooperation from Canada, tribal authorities and states around the Great Lakes. If you're one of more than a million Minnesota residents a year who buys a state fishing license, your proceeds helped the cause.
"You hardly ever lose a top predator and get it back," said Cory Goldsworthy, DNR Lake Superior fisheries supervisor.
According to a DNR report issued last month, the overall lake trout catch rate in last year's spring assessment was 15.3 fish per 1,000 feet of net, an upward trend that appears to be gaining trajectory. In the northernmost zone known as "MN-3," last year's rate was the highest ever: 35 fish per 1,000 feet of net, the report said.
That compares to only two or three lake trout per 10,000 feet of net during the fishery's full collapse in the early 1960s. Now the lake trout bite on Lake Superior has gotten so good that experienced recreational anglers can typically catch their personal limit in a couple of hours of trolling or jigging from family fishing boats, Goldsworthy said. Two Harbors and the McQuade Small Craft Harbor in Duluth are popular launching spots.
