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Gustafson Family Collection
Herring Chokers
My father's boat, the 35-foot Tulip, had a very shallow draft and was powered by a Buick car engine.
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Cornucopia Historic Green Shed Museum
Herring Chokers
Tourists in Cornucopia, Wisconsin, stand beside a net reel where the cotton netting could be dried and then returned to the boxes at their feet.
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Courtesy Harvey Hadland
Herring Chokers
The men inside a steel fishing boat are picking fish out of their nets. The round device is a net lifter, which pulls the net in through the open doorway.
I grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in Port Wing, Wisconsin, one of the small towns along the southwest shore of Lake Superior with a commercial fishing fleet that was critical to our local economy.
Lake trout, whitefish and herring were the most important species sought by the men who worked the waters from early spring until ice and cold stopped them by late December. But the herring run, which generally started in early to mid-November, determined the make-or-break at the end of the fishing season.
In our town – as well as in Cornucopia, Bayfield and other small coastal towns – people could make extra money by either working on the boats or, more commonly, “choking” or “picking” herring in the fish houses on shore. Herring were so abundant during the run that the fishermen didn’t take time to remove them from the fish-laden gillnets hauled on board. But before hauling up nets set the day before, the fishermen first set a new “gang” of nets at the fishing site.
This herring horn of plenty lasted only about three weeks. Needless to say, November and December could be quite cold and stormy, and some years temperatures dipped low enough to form a lot of ice. Fishing boats might have to break through packed ice blown into shore. With the short time to fish, the men took the boats out daily, regardless of the weather.
Once the old gang of nets had been lifted, the boats now weighing from 5 to 12 tons heavier, returned to the docks. Often the return trip was against blowing winds, built up during the day, that flung waves over the decks and roofs, sometimes coating the cabin and windows in ice.
Boats brought their loaded nets into town harbors. In large heated sheds, the nets were spread along tables. Local men, women and teenagers worked the fish from the mesh and placed them in bushel baskets or boxes on the floor. They had to grab the herring behind the head (hence the term “herring choking”) and either work it forward through the mesh hole or work the mesh off the gills to back the head out.
This had to be done with as little damage as possible to the fish and to the net. It was fairly miserable work. The fish and nets were ice cold and the mesh filled fingers with cuts or the herring bones punctured flesh.
Pay was calculated per bushel of herring and, as I recall, came to about 50 cents a bushel. Each person had his or her own basket and much of the town’s population was down at the docks working. High school students could get work permits to miss school in years of a really big herring run.
Most boats back then were wooden. To protect the hull planks from getting torn by ice, they were covered with sheet metal nailed from the gunnels (upper edge) to the keel (the bottom). Many had a steel strip bolted to the bow stem and a pair of steel plates bolted to each side, extending a couple of feet just at the waterline.
Most autumns, the wave action broke up the ice and didn’t cause too much trouble. Spring could be a different story. After herring season, boats were left to freeze into the harbor ice, parked away from docks and immobile all winter. By late April, fishermen would try to break through the harbor ice to open water.
Boats would ram, full throttle, through the heavy ice, sometimes riding up out of the water to let the boat’s weight break ice. Forward, back up and then charging again, the boats might gain only a few feet at each try, but it would be a few feet closer to an income. Once in mostly open water, the boats could move along at a near normal speed.
Some years, the harbor ice was so thick that they used dynamite to shatter it and force their way out.
Returning to harbor meant “bucking ice” again, though sometimes the wind packed the ice so thickly that it trapped the boats. The men carried enough supplies to stay aboard – often several days – until the wind shifted and freed the boat.
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Courtesy Harvey Hadland
Herring Chokers
The Vagabond.
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Courtesy Harvey Hadland
Herring Chokers
Roamer.
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Courtesy Harvey Hadland
Herring Chokers
Julie Ann
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Courtesy Bill Gustafson
Herring Chokers
Quarry Point can be seen behind the Bark Point, a boat that resembled Tulip.
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Gustafson Family Collection
Herring Chokers
The fishing boat Tulip came to its end pulled up on the shores.
I often recall the boats that regularly fished out of Port Wing when I was a child – the Eric, the Margaret and the Roamer, fished by the Johnson brothers. All were massive 40- to 50-foot, deep-draft wooden boats with heavy Kallenberg diesel engines. Even from my folks’ farm well inland, you could hear their distinctive “kaplung kaplung” early on still mornings as those 400 rpm diesels faithfully pushed the boats out on the lake.
There were other boats, too: RVH and Hocks, steel boats with Caterpillar diesels owned by Bing Anderson and his brothers. The Carlson Brothers, a 40-foot wooden boat, was owned by Bob Carlson, powered with a Graymarine gasoline engine.
These boats had work decks fully enclosed by a “house” that ran from bow to stern, where rear doors opened so nets could be let out as the boats ran forward. Doors along the sides opened to pull nets in by a mechanical lifter and to facilitate loading and unloading of nets, fish and crew. The pilothouse was a raised portion of the main house with portholes. It was located either amidships or more commonly at the rear or stern. With this design, in heavy weather, most of the force of the waves was spent by the time water or ice hit the pilothouse windows, so they didn’t get broken and visibility remained pretty good for the skipper.
Most of these boats were built in the 1930s or 1940s and represented an evolution of fishing boat design that started with open sailboats in the 1800s, then eventually progressed to a shallow-draft, partially enclosed deck design, powered with automobile gasoline engines. The early boats were usually less than 30 feet long and were used when the harbors were more primitive and the fishing done closer to shore rather than out across the open lake.
The larger boats that I remember ran regularly to Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands or to Minnesota’s North Shore and could deal with lots of weather.
So, too, in theory, could the mostly sturdy, smaller boat bought by my father, my uncle and their buddy. But the lake and the weather have a way of making a sure thing into an uncertain future.
My dad, Bill Gustafson, worked for commercial fishermen out of Port Wing before he went into the service in World War II. After the war he, his younger brother Marvin, and a friend, Ted Bodeen, decided to go into the fishing business. This was about 1946, and they were all in their early 20s. All had grown up in Port Wing and spent time on the lake. Marvin had just finished a hitch in the Navy, sailing on Liberty ships in the South Pacific. They pooled their cash and managed to buy an older commercial boat named Tulip.
The 35-foot Tulip had a very shallow draft and was powered by a Buick car engine. The boat had a full house over the work deck, but the steering station was in front. The steering wheel was mounted so that the skipper could stand or sit just behind a square window to steer. I never heard just when the boat had been built, but it was pretty old when they bought it in 1946. The cypress planking was sound, Dad said, but the oak ribs were rotting. The boat had a hand-operated pitcher pump as its only bilge pump and they carried no compass or any navigational gear.
The would-be commercial fishermen used Tulip a little that first summer, and by fall they were preparing to fish herring in it. They had work done on the engine, including on the timing chain, and the next day they went out to set herring nets.
Unlike a larger boat, Tulip couldn’t run too far out of Port Wing, so the trio ran east to set nets between Port Wing and Herbster.
Port Wing harbor lies in the bottom of a shallow curve a few miles wide along the south shore of Lake Superior. To the west was an area we called Quarry Point, a low sandstone rock headland from which brownstone for buildings was quarried in the 1900s. To the east was what we called Newquist Point, an area of 100-foot-high clay banks with heavy forests at the top and a narrow beach at the foot.
The day that my dad, my uncle and their buddy went out to catch herring, the weather was good, but earlier it had been cold enough to make a fair amount of ice blown against the shore by a northeast wind. But, Dad would say later, they started out in fine weather with calm seas as they headed out to set the nets for their first try at this fall fishery. Things were going just fine when somewhere off the Newquist point the engine suddenly quit.
It was still early, with calm water and lots of daylight. They began to work on the engine. Though none of the three was a real mechanic, and with a limited set of tools, they finally determined that the timing chain had broken. They also discovered that a nail that they found was about the right fit to replace the broken pin. Without knowing how to time the engine, they put it together and tried to start it. Nothing. They took the engine apart again, moved the chain a couple of cogs, reassembled it … and again it failed to start.
Anyone who has been around boats with inboard engines knows how difficult it is to work on them. There is limited space, poor lighting, and the engine is near the bottom of the boat so the mechanic has to either lie down or nearly stand on his head. Still, with Tulip drifting calmly, the work, though time consuming, wasn’t too difficult, at first.
Conditions changed as the day wore on. A strong southwest wind began to blow offshore, moving Tulip toward the open lake with the next stop either Canada or Minnesota. The trio tried to put out the anchor, but Tulip had broken down in water too deep for the length of the chain. With the increasing wind, it was imperative that they either get under way or anchor up.
They took the half-inch manila line for anchoring nets and ran it the length of the boat four times. Tying a knot in each end of this quadrupled line, they fastened it to the anchor chain. After repeating this several times, they had enough reinforced line tied to the anchor to reach bottom. It held.
By this time, it was getting dark and the wind had picked up enough to move the ice off the shore. Waves caused Tulip to surge up and down quite violently, fighting the anchor line. The boat shuddered as the bow slammed against the ice cakes tossed by waves at its hull and either a wave or an ice chunk broke the pilothouse window.
For their third try at the engine, they worked by the glow of a single flashlight. With the boat pitching and rolling, they reassembled the engine again. This time it started. As the engine ran, a click-click-click sounded as the bent nail hit the timing cover with each revolution. Afraid that the nail might not hold, they didn’t dare run the engine more than just enough to make headway. Or they would have made headway, except that now they couldn’t free the anchor.
The weather continued to deteriorate. A heavy cloud cover joined the relentless wind followed by patches of fog blown past the boat, reducing visibility to near zero.
One of the three produced a pocket compass. They knew that if they went southeast, they’d reach the sandy beach near Newquist Point. But they still couldn’t get the anchor up and they didn’t dare run the wounded engine hard enough to pull it free. If the boat remained anchored, could it withstand the pounding from the wind and ice all night?
After discussing options, the crew of three voted and the count was 3-0 in favor of cutting the anchor line and beaching the boat directly ahead on shore. If the engine quit after the anchor line was cut, the boat and its crew would be at the mercy of the merciless wind and waves.
Once freed from the anchor and with the engine just above an idle, Tulip tossed and rolled toward the shore. None of them knew how far, exactly, it was to land, so they kept as direct a course as possible – according to the hand-held compass – in the undulating waves and ice until one of them spotted a pine tree on the cliff high above them, outlined against the moon through a break in the clouds. They were nearly right against the high clay banks.
The wind was blowing them mostly toward land, and with the steady clicking of the nail beating out the revolutions of the engine, they decided to risk heading Tulip toward Port Wing. The old boat made it the several miles home without quitting. Going around the jetty to enter the harbor was a little nerve-wracking because it exposed them to being blown offshore, but Tulip made it to the dock, safe and secure.
Dad said that they later had the engine properly fixed, but they didn’t take Tulip out again that season. They did fish from Tulip the next summer, but the sea lamprey already had begun to kill off the lake trout, decimating both the fishery and the fishing industry. Trout was a main moneymaker for a little boat like Tulip, so they pulled it up on the shore that fall and salvaged the engine and machinery.
I rode on Tulip twice when it was operating, and I used to play around it whenever I could on shore until it was burned, sometime about 1956.
The commercial fisheries declined drastically, but a few of the Wisconsin shore commercial fishing operations continue. They survived thanks to fishing cisco, whitefish and, for a time, herring. The boats now are mostly steel, equipped with radios, radar, GPS and powered by modern diesel engines.
But leaving port, they still cut the familiar profile of a covered work deck with a pilothouse aft … and they still challenge storms and ice as they head out to fish each day in late fall before Lake Superior decides to close the season.
Jerry Gustafson lives in Alaska, where he taught high school chemistry and physics, logged and now builds homes around Fairbanks. He has a 100-ton Master’s Captain license. In 1990, he built a 36-foot halibut boat then fished out of Valdez and operated a charter fishing business for 10 years.