something fishy??

[JohnWester]

Here is something interesting that I have stumbled upon.  According the The Red Lake Net News (www.rlnn.com), they are looking for someone to manage their fish plant. (http://www.rlnn.com/ArtJan07/EMPFishPlantOperationsManRLFisheries.html) in the duties section of the add, it says, “Responsible for overall operation and management of the Red Lake Fisheries, a commercial fish processing facility with the capacity to process in excess of one million pounds of high quality fish annually,”. So this is just stating that the plant has the capability to produce  over 1 million pounds…  that doesn’t mean that they will. According to the agreement with the MN DNR, the band is allocated 500,000 pounds, and last year members took less than 40,000 pounds.
Now according to Doug Smith’s article in the red star (http://www.startribune.com/531/story/985631.html)

The band will process the walleyes by hand and sell the filets to businesses and individuals. Pemberton said the band is committed to preventing overharvest of the lake's walleyes, as occurred in the 1990s.

  also in Doug’s article, Al Pemberton is quoted as saying

"We're going to try it with hook and line," he said. It's also possible trap nets might be used, so fish could be selectively harvested.”

My question is this?  Are they going to process the fillets by hand in their fish plant that has the capacity of processing over 1 million pounds of fish?  And are they really going to catch their fish with a hook and line?  And who really is going to be monitoring how much fish they harvest for commercial purposes?

Might be interesting to watch how this develops this summer when they crank things up.  Something smells on the west side of red lake, and it quite literally might be fish.  Lots and lots of fish.