Quinte Fishing

I read a nice article on www.thefishingnews.com today from the Belleville Intell.

It focused on gill nets and is a great read. I highly suggest taking a peek at this.

My hat is off to MNR for finally doing something remotely proactive (netting season is nearing the end). Instead of simply point fingers, the article simply stated that gill nets are doing a heck of a lot of damage. I do wish that it would have talked a bit more about white netters doing illegal gill nets....... This is a positive step.
Tight Lines
Don Stokes

Mr. Stokes:

Thanks for the reference to the Intelligencer article. However, your particular arrangement of words in your post brings into question whom you perceive to be the culprit for unequitable walleye harvests in the BOQ. Perhaps you need to be reminded that the Lake Ontario Management Unit report for 2001 indicates that on a biomass basis, the Aboriginal fisheries harvested 84.9% of the total annual BOQ walleye biomass while recreational fishermen and commercial fishermen accounted for the remainder.

To no ones surprise, according to the Intelligencer article, "…Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte Chief R. Donald Maracle denies any notion that Tyendinaga natives are overexploiting walleye in the Bay of Quinte…". The Mohawk band council contends that gill-netting by natives is responsible for taking between six and eight per cent of the walleye harvest from the bay, annually.

How can anyone realistically expect progress towards proper harvest management of the BOQ walleye fishery when such a dichotomy exists. Obviously, hard facts are what is required to ascertain where the truth lies.

Jerry Ouellette, Minister of MNR was quoted as saying "…this is a fishery for which we have little information, but we suspect that it currently accounts for the largest portion of the harvest, exceeding the second largest fishery (open water angling) by more than two-fold...”.

So, as Minister, why doesn't Jerry Ouellette direct such hard data be collected?

Have the MNR and Ouellette actually done anything for the BOQ? The Intelligencer reported that Ouellette said in an attempt to gather more solid figures about the impacts of native gill-netting, he personally invited Tyendinaga Mohawks to sit on a new advisory committee struck to find ways to bolster the walleye fishing (the smoke and mirror approach) but the invitation was turned down by Mohawk leaders. As well, according to the Intelligencer article, MNR officials said the data (Aboriginal gill net harvesting estimates) prompted them to impose a slot limit between 19 and 25 inches on "recreational fishing" of walleye in 2002 to protect the fishery. A scientifically logical approach. NOT!!

Change is required! A new government? A new MNR minister? And the complete Mohawk community on the Tyendinaga Reserve needs to become a proactive partner in the management of BOQ walleye fishery rather than allow a few gill netters to abuse this resource.