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Earlier most of the vendace catches in the inland waters were taken with seines and nets, now with trawls and seines. Trawling in the open lakes was adopted from the Bothnian Bay where vendace was trawled in open-water seasons. Trawling was introduced when the stocks were strong, but the catches decreased with the decline of the stocks in the beginning of the 1990s. Today the situation has started to improve again as the spawning stocks have been normal in recent years, with the exception of some lakes in Eastern Finland. Also the open-ended trapnets were adopted from the sea regions for summer fishing of vendace in the 1980s. Trapnets are well-suited for smaller lakes and do not require big investments like trawls. Although vendace move around a lot there are certain problems in catching them with gill nets. The problems are smaller in lakes where strong year classes are produced regularly. This is due to the selective fishing method of the gill nets. The fish smaller than the mesh size swim through, and the over-sized are not caught; this differs from trawls and trap nets where all the fish exceeding a certain size are caught. With no vendace in the lake corresponding to the mesh size of the gill net no fish are caught. A fisherman can either wait for the fish to grow, or buy gillnets of several mesh sizes, which is generally too expensive. This has decreased the importance of gillnet fishing, but it can still be used to complete the range of methods when the use of heavier gear would result in unreasonable expenses. Winter seining is still the most important fishing method on the large lakes in winter time. The technical development in the 1980s brought skidoos and tractors on the ice to replace manpower, and the size of the seining gangs could be reduced. It took no longer than a decade for the number of men to be reduced from five to three. With the help of today’s hi-tech devices a fisherman can even fish with seines all alone. The building of large water reservoirs in Lapland created a new fishing area, where the stocks are unstable and catches vary from year to year. Some years after the building, the reservoirs yielded good catches of pike and perch, and they also saw a period of big catches of burbot. The stocking of originally Siberian peled whitefish soon made it the most abundant species, with the best yearly catches close to half a million kilograms. The peled have disappeared, however, and been replaced by roach and ide, which the few remaining fishermen catch in addition to the scarce migrating whitefish. The abundance of a species at a certain time effects the fishing methods used. When the peled whitefish stocks abounded in the reservoirs, the fish did not grow large enough to be caught with gill nets, and trawls and trap nets were used instead. When the peled were fewer the average size grew and gillnets can be used again. Peled whitefish is the only profitable species to fish in the reservoirs. Measures have been taken to improve the living conditions of peled by an effective fishing of the scaly fish. The local fishermen have made efforts for a more efficient marketing of the under-exploited species. Seasons differ from year to year to a great extent, however, making the planning of organized fishing activities difficult as the risks of investments are always high. |
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