New documentary on Port Dover fishery reels in viewers

Daryl Granger got seasick to spare his audience.

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The documentarian spent five months filming the men and women who crossed Lake Erie with Port Dover’s commercial fishing fleet, capturing the reality of life on the water from below and high above the waves.

“They want the catch. So do I,” Granger said. “I want the catch of the good footage.”

The result is a two-hour documentary called, “Netting the Waters” that Granger sees as a tribute to an industry that defines Port Dover but largely operates out of sight.

“It’s the appreciation of the work that they do,” Granger said of the motivation behind his debut film.

“A lot of people don’t know what happens. You’re going to see everything that’s involved in this without getting seasick or smelling like fish.”

The film only got made, Granger said, because the “very tight-knit” group of commercial fishermen welcomed him on board, namely captains George Gibson of the Eau Clipper and George A, who goes gillnetting for pickerel and perch, and Joe Zimba of the Donna F, who trawls the lake for smelt.

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The story is one of risk, suspense and heartache, with a perspective on commercial fishing never before seen by the public, or the crews themselves.

Drone footage shows the thousands scale of nets that run of feet long and the insulation of working in the middle of the lake.

The documentary takes viewers below and high above the ways to see Port Dover’s commercial fishery from every angle.

Especially dramatic, Granger said, were storms that whipped up without warning, enveloping the boats in fog or “pitch black.”

“Those waves, some of them are higher than the boat,” he said. “But these guys are used to it. It doesn’t faze them.”

To capture Erie’s “dramatic depths,” Granger mounted cameras on life preservers and welded a rig to the ship’s metal doors that lower to the seabed when trawling for smelt.

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“I had cameras at 132 feet (deep), and you could see the fish go in the net. It’s stunning,” said Granger, who left cameras in the nets overnight to surreptitiously film the catch.

“Sometimes those didn’t come back,” he said. “I’ve lost four cameras. But that’s what it takes to get the stuff I was able to get.”

Seagulls serve as early food critics, flocking to a bountiful smelt harvest but shying away from shad, a scaly “junk fish” of no commercial value.

Optimists at heart

Fishing tugs set sail at “five sharp,” so Granger got to the harbor at 3:30 am to rig his cameras.

On the water, he piloted his drone while battling interference from wind, waves and seagulls.

“It was like I ran a marathon,” he laughed.

While the documentary shows the entire process of getting fish from lake to market, “it’s not always a good catch,” Granger said.

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Sometimes the ship’s radar system picks up what the captain thinks is smelt, and the crew might spend hours placing and then pulling up a net only to find it full of shad, a scaly “junk fish” with no commercial value.

But fishermen are optimists at heart.

“They have to be,” Granger said, recalling one voyage to collect gillnets — which trap the fish by the gills and are picked up hours after being placed — that started bleakly for the crew.

“They pulled a thousand feet of net. They got two fish,” he said.

But the next net was “the gold mine,” with hundreds of jumbo perch sliding onto the deck.

“It’s a crapshoot,” Granger said. “You don’t know.”

World’s largest fleet

Granger, who owns RoseLe Studio in Simcoe, financed the film himself — with help from sponsors — and handled every element of production, spending 100 hours in the editing room and writing and performing the voice-over narration.

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The documentary includes historical photographs and footage courtesy of the Port Dover Harbor Museum, where Granger plans to donate his raw footage for public access.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Port Dover boasted the world’s largest freshwater fishing fleet, with 70 boats powering out to sea every morning.

But overfishing caused populations to plummet, prompting the provincial government to institute a quota system that limits what each captain can catch per season.

Today, the lakeside town of Wheatley in Chatham-Kent boasts the bigger fleet, along with the processing plant that receives most of the catch from Dover — nearly all of which is frozen and shipped overseas.

Most fish is processed in Chatham-Kent, but some is cleaned, filleted and sold at the Pleasant Port Fish Co., the last place in Port Dover to find locally caught perch and pickerel.

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Granger filmed inside that plant, and in the ministry office in Dover where fishermen must file a daily catch report before they can unload that day’s haul.

Of the dozen places in town residents could once buy fresh fish, only one remains, and Dover current’s fleet of eight fishing tugs more closely resembles the five boats that first set out to fish Lake Erie in 1874.

Gibbons said the industry’s future will depend not on the fish, but the fishermen.

While on the lake, fish are kept cool in totes packed with ice.

“We’re harvesting the lake responsibly,” he said, crediting provincial oversight of the fish population.

But with most captains in their 60s, “lack of manpower” is a challenge.

“We do have young kids on the boat, but there’s not enough of them,” Gibbons said.

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The documentary includes a roll call of the commercial fishermen who lost their lives on the lake over the decades, the most recent being Michael Smith, a crewman on the Donna F who drowned in March 2020.

Zimba calls the day Smith went overboard without explaining “my worst day” as a captain.

New respect

“Netting the Waters” premiered on Monday to a standing ovation from the sold-out crowd at the Strand, an independent cinema in Simcoe.

Granger thanked Gibbons and Zimba, saying the two captains “put up with me for months.”

“Daryl really was a pain in the butt,” a smiling Gibbons replied.

“But he did come up with a pretty good documentary, I think. It was well worth the trouble he put us through.”

Tickets for the Nov. 4, 11 and 25 screenings are still available at the theater box office for $20 each.

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In an interview, Granger recalled standing on the pier as a kid, watching the fishing tugs disappear past the horizon and wondering how those on board spent their days.

He hopes his audiences leave with new respect for the time and effort it takes to get fresh fish on restaurant menus — even if the filmmaker himself won’t be joining them for a perch platter after the show.

“I don’t even like fish,” he laughed. “I tell (the captains) that all the time: ‘as soon as I get off the boat, I’m going home to have a big steak.’”

JP Antonacci is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based at the Hamilton Spectator. The initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

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