Right now, somewhere in Sweden, caviar (lojrom) from Lake Superior herring roe (fish eggs) is being served in a restaurant or being spooned from a jar onto a cracker or potato slices as a snack. Scandinavians love caviar. Since their own roe stocks are depleted, they import roe from around the world—including our own Lake Superior herring roe. The other parts of the herring are used for fertilizer, aquarium feed and gefilte fish.

Thunder Bay’s Ron Gerow is one of about six Canadian commercial fishermen who ventures onto the Canadian waters of Lake Superior each fall to catch lake herring. He has been fishing Lake Superior since he was a kid and full-time since 1970. His family’s commercial fishing legacy goes back to the 1880s, when his great-grandfather arrived in Rossport from Toronto, and will stretch into the future with Ron’s sons.

The 2010 herring season will start around November 1 and end about a month later. Ron will fish every day about 10-12 hours, along with his two sons and Nipigon’s Rick Clasen (who has fished herring with Ron for 30 years). Ron’s 40-foot steel tug, the Marion G, will leave the dock around 6 a.m. each morning, headed for Point Magnet.

The Marion G wields floating net made with monofilament line and Japanese cork. Ron’s average seasonal catch is 94,000-96,000 tons of lake herring, approximately 3-5 tons per boatload.

“On a bad day, we’ll be unlucky and catch eight tons, which makes the boat too heavy,” Ron said, explaining that eight tons “means more work and buyers are not ready for the larger haul. But you can’t control the amount of fish catch.”

Once the fish nets are hauled up, the herring are “choked” out of the net, put in a fish box, topped with a few pounds of ice, weighed, and iced some more. Each box holds about 60 pounds of fish. The fish are loaded on the dock, covered with a tarp to which still more ice is added, and then brought by refrigerated trucks to the Dockside fish plant at Grand Marais for processing.

At Dockside, the spawn is processed and sent to Spirit Lake in Iowa for exporting to Sweden and Scandinavian countries. The herring flesh is deboned, frozen in a block and sent to the West Coast to make gefilte fish.

“Everything on the fish is used. There is no waste. All parts of the herring are in demand, not just the spawn,” said Ron. The guts are used for liquid fertilizer, the heads for aquarium feed.

Bob McKay, a retired long-time commercial fisherman from Thunder Bay, remembers the days in the mid-20th century when big steam fishing tugs with 6-8 men crews would catch 10-15 tons of herring a day and unload the catch on the platform of the old CPR dock at the Marina.

“The herring would be dumped on the platform and separated to lay them out to freeze. Around midnight, the fish would be rolled over to freeze on the other side. It was a big operation,” Bob recalled. “Most of the herring would be hauled to Duluth for mink feed.”