A dwindling Minnesota fishing fleet chases the historic herring boom on Lake Superior

HOVLAND, MINN. – They slipped the boat into Lake Superior just before first light. The lake lapped in quiet rhythm on the shore. The sky was clear and the air finally had a bit of a chill. It looked like a promising morning for Eric Brisson and Tyler Smith.

Two of Minnesota's last commercial fishermen, Brisson and Smith are in their mid-30s, and have been catching or processing fish on Lake Superior for most of their lives. But the fishing had gone dry over the past several weeks. The blistering September — the hottest in Minnesota in more than a century — raised the lake's temperature to a relatively soupy 62 degrees at the start of October. That's far too hot for the herring that Brisson and Smith chase seven days a week.

"But it's been falling," Brisson said, pointing to the thermometer in the small boat's wheel house. The water temperature had dropped about 10 degrees in the past two days, maybe enough to get the small white fish, which grow to be about a pound and a half, active and moving again.

They know they are fishing on the cusp of a once-in-a-lifetime run of herring in Lake Superior.

After decades of decline, Superior's herring had a stunningly successful spawn in the spring of 2022. More hatchlings survived than in any other year since records began in the 1970s.

That super-generation of fish is only 2 years old, still too small for a gill net. But they have already been helping in another way.

They've been showing up in the body mass of the lake's big predators, trout and salmon. Minnesota's coho salmon record has already been broken three times this year, a promising sign that the fish are growing fatter and happier on the sudden abundance of young herring.

If that epic class of herring can survive another two years, they'll be too big for their predators' mouths. And so long as there are still people willing to catch them, the restaurants, grocery stores, fish markets and smokehouses along the North Shore and beyond could have an unprecedented bounty of the fresh, mild, versatile and beloved northern fish.

That single generation of herring could be enough to support the state's entire commercial fishing industry for the next 15 years, fishery experts say.

On the water, in the calm of the early morning, Brisson approached the first net of the day. He was more circumspect about what could happen with herring. He's seen the small ones swimming through his nets all year. And he's been pulling up bigger trout than normal.

"But a lot can happen in two years," he said. "And it's a big lake."

The world's biggest, in fact.

Cold and deep, Lake Superior has never been as productive a fishery as the other Great Lakes, where warmer, shallower waters are more conducive to aquatic life. But its lake trout, and especially its herring, have almost always been strong enough to support fishing operations since Minnesota became a state.

Long gone are the days where hundreds of herring and trout boats would launch each morning from Duluth to Grand Portage.

Now there are only 25 licensed commercial fishing operations in the state. And many of those license holders don't earn enough to fish full time.

Brisson and Smith are an exception.

It was still dark when they pulled up the first of their four gill nets. It was set 18 feet deep in about 50 feet of water off the shore of Hovland, north of Grand Marais. On their best days, they can fill more than 20 boxes that hold 80 pounds each of herring. Lately they had only been filling two or three.

Brisson slid one empty box to Smith's feet and put another at his own.

The two started North Superior Fishery together in 2019, operating out of Grand Marais. Genial and quick to laugh, Brisson is the one who picks up the phone.

His grandparents Fern and Lloyd Hendrickson fished Superior every day that they could, well into their 80s. Brisson grew up in the industry, then worked several jobs outside of it before coming back to the lake to apprentice as a commercial fisherman under his uncle for a few years before taking over full-time.

Smith, focused and driven, was hired on his first commercial boat at 14. He's been doing it ever since.

To make it work, they both put in grueling hours, and they've had to get creative.

They set their nets as early as the weather will allow, usually in mid-April. Dead fish don't keep. So they make sure they can get out to those nets seven days a week, rarely taking a day off until the fishing dries up or they can't handle the cold anymore, usually in December or January.

Right as the net touched the boat, the blue back of a 12-inch herring poked through.

"There's a nice fish," Brisson said. He plucked it out of the net and tossed it into the box.

They pulled the rest of the 400-foot net across the bow of the boat, grabbing, twisting, pulling, yanking the fish one by one. Their fingers moved as fast as any guitar player to the steady rocking of the waves.

The two seem to survive a schedule with no days off for 9 months a year through sheer efficiency. From the moment their boat hits the water before sunrise until the last fish is cleaned, there are no wasted movements, and few wasted words.

As soon as one of their boxes was full, the other slid an empty one to his feet. When one guided the net back down into the water, the other hustled to stack away the boxes of fish.

It's easy to get lost in the rhythm, Brisson said.

The sun was fully up by the time they cleared the second net, which was as full as the first. Brisson looked up to see a red sky all around. The trees on the bluffs were bright and near their peak fall colors.

They sell their catch to the grocery stores and restaurants around Grand Marais and Tofte, including the Bluefin Bay resort that Brisson's grandparents once supplied. They recently started shipping herring overnight to Brookies Fish Market in St. Louis Park in the Twin Cities.

Locals also have figured out where they clean their fish each morning and will often show up to buy a herring that was swimming an hour earlier.

The two swore they would never start a food truck, but then they saw one for sale in town.

They ran some numbers and decided to try it this spring and summer, Brisson said. They sold fish sandwiches, trout nuggets, fries and deep-fried herring fish cakes through to the end of September. Not knowing what to expect, they picked a number — how many sales they would need to make that first summer for it to be worthwhile to keep the food truck going.

"We hit that number in the second week," Brisson said.

The North Superior Fishery food truck will be back next spring.

On the water, they motored to the third net and spent about 15 minutes clearing it. The last net took the same time. They had filled eight boxes, a solid day, and zipped back to the dock. They loaded the truck and were headed back to Grand Marais by 7:30 a.m.

In town, the rest of their crew waited for them in the basement of the Fisherman's Daughter at Dockside Fish Market. Smith's brother, Zachary, who mans the food truck when it's open, and Shele Toftey, who had owned the market upstairs with her husband for 20 years, had already set up and sprayed down four large wooden cutting boards.

It was Toftey who first hired Tyler Smith when he was a teenager to work on their boat.

"And now I work for him," she said, smiling, as all four stood sharpening their knives.

Brisson grabbed the first fish and in a single knife stroke sliced off one perfect fillet. With a second stroke he deboned it and passed it to Toftey. She dunked the fillet in water, flipped it and, in an expert stroke of her own, sliced off the skin and laid it in a tub. The Smith brothers did the same on their end of the table.

They filleted each fish in less than 6 seconds.

A tall man with a brace on his calf walked through the door.

"Danno, I got your fish in the fridge," Toftey told him.

"Okey doke," he said, grabbing a seat. "Same as before? Ten bucks? Who gets it?"

"Just set it on the counter."

Dan talked to them about the storm the night before, and a local crackdown on cyclists rolling through stop signs, then he asked them, as if mesmerized by the quickness of their knives, if they had ever stopped to calculate how many fish they cleaned each season.

"No," Smith laughed. "But it'd be interesting to know."

If eight boxes a day were a rough average, given the slow September and the expected pick-up in November, then the four of them catch and clean about 512 fish a day. They fish roughly 280 days a year, putting their total at a little more than 143,000 herring every season.

As they cleaned the fish, Toftey told Brisson of the orders that had come in.

"Twenty one pounds for the — " she started.

"Yep, for the church," Brisson finished. "They need 21 pounds."

Parker Slanga, one of the owners of the Fisherman's Daughter restaurant upstairs, came into the basement and checked on the catch. Focused on the fish processing, no one seemed to notice.

"Is this the silent treatment?" he said, looking over the fish.

"What did you say, Park?" Brisson asked.

"It's too quiet in here," Slanga said, walking back upstairs. "It's weirding me out a little bit."

Just as they finished with the last of the fish and started spraying down the tables, a woman from the church walked through the door, and Toftey handed her a 21-pound tub.

"I'll give you the tub and — " Toftey said.

"And yep, I'll bring it back when I come in a couple weeks," Tina McKeever finished.

The church needed the fish for an annual event, she said.

"You don't know how much they love these things," she told the crew. "They just love them."

Toftey neatly stacked the rest of the tubs on a cart, to be packaged and driven to restaurants and stores along the North Shore.

A ray of sun shone through a window on the rows of fish, fresh and glistening, and lit up the bounty in a way that so many Renaissance paintings tried to capture.

Earlier in the year, Brisson and Smith would have immediately started cooking for the food truck.

But with that part of the job over for the season, they put their knives back in the holders on the wall. The two men would be back at the docks before first light, hoping for colder water and full nets.