Steve Rinella

I also talked to a guide that Pat Durkin and I –

or fished with when we did the fur hat ice fishing tour, JJ Malvitz.

And then the fish processor, Dan Lindahl, they're all in the same area, which is Green Bay.

Green Bay is like this really weird stronghold where the rest of the lakes have gone down something crazy from 2000 to 24.

They went from 1.6 million pounds in 2000, this is like commercial catch of whitefish, down to 200,000 in 2024.

Well, in that same time period, Green Bay has gone from 100,000 to 800,000.

It's gone up.

Well, Green Bay has a ton of rivers flowing into it.

The Fox, the Menominee.

And so that is providing those nutrients that we need.

So the fisheries biologist was like, yeah, we basically need to figure out how

to either produce that base level of the food web or how to, you know, keep the, you know, muscles from disrupting it.

But that's what those fish need.

You know, that being said, it's even in green Bay, it's like, there's, they're saying it's on the decline.

Um,

And again, I didn't know how bad it was.

But Dan was like, whitefish in Main Lake, Michigan are all but extinct.

So he is a commercial fisherman now.

He's only catching 20% of his quota.

J.J.