by Hugh E. Bishop

A Lifetime of Fishing

His eyes dance and a smile comes frequently as Walter Sve talks about his roots - roots that are nearly as tenacious as those of the cedars clinging to cliffs in forests near the mouth of Split Rock River on Minnesota’s north shore of Lake Superior. And if you want to talk to the 79-year-old about his life story during the day from May to November, you’re probably going to have to go out fishing.

“I’m on the lake every day,” he says.

Walter’s family story is one of generations of commercial fishing on Lake Superior. The trade started with his maternal grandfather and now continues with his sons. Often this summer, Walter has fished with Eric, who has a commercial fishing license, and Steve, who returned to Minnesota from Denver and is undertaking the required two-year apprenticeship to get a commercial license.

But the story that Walter likes to tell begins with his parents.

“Dad made time payments to buy 54 acres here from a logging company, and he and my mother moved upstairs over his 14-by-18- foot fish house down on the shore after they got married,” Walter says.

“Dad couldn’t even stand up in there, and it was only supposed to be for a while, but there never was much money for commercial fishermen. The Depression made it even worse, so there were four of us kids by the time they could afford to build the big house in 1936. We were really getting crowded in that little attic over the fish house.”

Like a number of other early settlers, Walter’s parents, Ragnvald and Ragnhild, had learned a lesson from Emil Edisen’s pioneering Campers’ Home cabin resort in nearby Castle Danger. They rented out two summer cabins that they’d built, calling the business Split Rock Cabins, which eventually grew to nine rental cabins. Meanwhile Ragnvald continued lifting his nets to earn whatever he could in the fishing trade and, occasionally, joking about his wife’s name - “Dad always said he had to come all the way from Norway to find a wife with as goofy a name as his!”

In 1944, 16-year-old Walter joined his father fishing and also served as a guide on one of three charter boats that the Sves operated for trout anglers until the lamprey invasion killed the trout population in the mid-1950s.

When fishing was slow, Walter got work at the DM&IR railroad car shop in Two Harbors, working the 3 p.m. to 11 a.m. shift so that he could fish during the day. Two jobs is also something of a family tradition. His parents kept tourist cabins, which first Walter and now Eric took over, and his grandfather worked at the ore docks while fishing.

Walter remembers getting 2 cents to 2.5 cents a pound for herring. Today, Walter and son Eric, the youngest of his four children, are two of only a handful of licensed commercial fishermen still plying their craft in Minnesota waters. These days, they receive up to 50 cents per pound or $3.50 per filet.

About 25 people are still licensed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for commercial fishing on Lake Superior. In the months of May and September, Walter hires on with the DNR to catch trout for research studies.

Commercial fishing certainly is not what it once was.

“Even after the lamprey pretty well killed off the trout, we were still netting herring, but that all ended after Reserve Mining Company (at Silver Bay) started dumping their tailings into the lake in 1955,” Walter says.

Disposal of waste-rock tailings created controversies, but fishermen had no doubts about the resulting murky water’s effect on herring.

“Herring don’t like dirty water. I had to go as much as 7 miles out to find clean water.”

The company stopped dumping tailings by the early 1980s and five years later the water had cleared enough so herring ventured back near shore, Walter says.

Meanwhile by 1961, with his fishing career at a standstill and after the DM&IR shop closed, Walter took a job as carpenter with a local contractor. Between working on the resort and his job, he was fairly landlocked for 30 years. In that interval, Walter and his late wife, Carol, took over the resort in 1974 and built the 10th and final cabin. By the time of his “retirement” in 1991, when he turned the place over to Eric (who now, of course, works those two jobs to keep fishing), Walter found that the herring had returned in enough numbers so that fishing was good again. He also discovered that there are folks who can hardly wait to turn the herring that he and Eric catch into a delectable meal of fresh fillets or a mound of tantalizing fishcakes.

“We brought in 230 pounds of fish the day the wind was dying down after the big storm (in late November 2001). There were still good-sized waves, but I’ve just never been scared on the lake. Of course, you do have to have some common sense about when to go out.”

Walter admits that he can’t handle cold like he could years ago, but he’s glad to again be picking his nets in the early morning on water.

Some things are a little easier. The new nets, now made of monofilament instead of cotton and linen, are hardier and need less maintenance.

“With the old nets, you had to take them in once a month and then restore in preservative.”

But as for the fishing technique - putting in the nets and then returning to pluck herring from them - that hasn’t changed.

“We do it the same way we’ve always done.”

And for a long time, no doubt, Walter Sve always will go out to fish.

This issue’s Journal writer:
Hugh Bishop is no stranger to the readers of Lake Superior Magazine. He worked 11 years for the magazine before retiring in 2005. He has written several books for the magazine’s publishers. The most recently released was Haunted Minnesota.