The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has canceled one of its iconic winter fishing events due to a lack of ice.
The Black Lake sturgeon season will not happen this year, the department announced Friday, a day before it was scheduled to open.
The ice alone is not strong or consistent enough to support the gear ice anglers haul onto the lake, said Tim Cwalinski, supervisor of the DNR fisheries division’s Lake Huron management unit.
“It’s variable,” he said. “In some places you might have six, seven inches of ice, but it’s not necessarily hard ice. It’s soft, honeycombed. In some places, three, four inches.
“When you have variable ice conditions like that and you have the personnel you want on the ice to monitor the fishery, we don’t want to put our people at risk.”
This is the first time the DNR has been cancelled.
The season of Black Lake sturgeon is short, no more than five days. It’s usually shortened when fishermen reach the state’s harvest quota, which this year is six fish.
Sturgeon are remarkably long-lived – the average lifespan is 55 years but some live for over a century. They can reach three to six feet in length and can weigh 100 or more pounds.
They are also dramatically overfished. Before European settlement, fish were abundant in the Great Lakes, but widespread commercial fishing and habitat destruction decimated their numbers. The current lake sturgeon population is about 1% of what it was historically.
The DNR and five tribal governments in the Great Lakes basin manage sturgeon populations, Cwalinski said. They concluded that this is a sustainable harvest of no more than 1.2% of the lake’s adult population, which this year is not quite 1,200.
That means 14 total fish can be harvested this year, of which seven are the DNR’s share. The department deducts one fish from its annual quota if a fish is caught between the time the sixth fish is reported and the department declares the season over.
Without enough ice, it will be difficult to ensure fishermen don’t exceed the quota, Cwalinski said.
“We just can’t,” he said. “We can’t risk having a high yield, potentially exceeding that quota. We have to be responsible for managing that quota because we’re not the only agency that manages sturgeon in Black Lake.”
It’s too early to say whether canceling the 2024 season will affect the 2025 harvest quota, the DNR said.
This story will be updated.
