Fishy stories
Women fishing, around 1910.
Jos-Phydime Michaud, a farmer from Kamouraska, recounts an impressive catch made with Flavius Ouellet’s fish weirs:
I was 12 years old when I saw the largest school of herring ever. The semi-circular fish net contained twelve feet of fish. When we opened the hatch, the first dump truck filled up all by itself. About fifty cars must have been filled. Large catches became rarer after the war of 1914.
Canoeing in Kamouraska, around 1910.
According to Maurice Ouellet, large herring catches became scarce as of the 1960s. The weir fishery on Île aux Patins caught sturgeon, eel, sardines, smelt, shad, and striped bass (prior to its disappearance around 1954).
Jos-Phydime Michaud recounts that:
There could be up to a dozen sturgeon in the fishing grounds of Boss Ouellet when the tide was low. He could keep them alive for about twenty days by throwing them a bucketful of herring heads and livers. Ouellet sold quite a lot of sturgeon to hotels in the region. Everyone had to eat fish on Fridays. So, every Thursday, he would cut a sturgeon into large pieces, put them in his car, and cover them with an armful of seaweed to protect them from the sun. He did not collect sturgeon eggs, except in the 1930s when Americans asked him to. He sold them by the bucketful. They were delicious.
Flensing sturgeon in Kamouraska.
Flavius Ouellet tells the story about an enormous sturgeon that he had sold to the provincial fisheries department in 1914:
I caught a four-hundred-pound sturgeon that measured eleven feet from head to tail, so it was bigger than my dump truck. It was full of eggs, but since we didn’t know anything about the caviar market at the time, it was of no use to us.