Where have all the fishermen gone?

This piece took second place for enterprise story in the 2011 Minnesota Associated Press Sports Association Awards for dailies with a circulation under 20,000.

At the end of a long, straight driveway at the top of a hill on the east side of town sits a nondescript split-level house. A wooden patio leads to a sunroom, which opens to a carpeted stairway that rises to an oblong, wooden kitchen table.

This is where Dan Gare is trying to save the Rice County Sportfishing Association.

You may remember Gare as the board member who wrote a letter to the editor to the Daily News in April, stressing the organization’s dwindling membership and the vital place it holds in the local fishing scene.

This is his cause.

Gare grew up in Faribault, learning fishing and hunting at the side of his father, Dennis.

“I remember fishing in the boat trawling with a cane pole,” he reminisced. “That’s what we did.”
By the time he was 18, Gare was a member of the Rice County Sportfishing Association, an organization thought up in the Buckham Memorial Library in the 1980s. For years, membership sat at more than 300. Banquets were packed with members and their family. Fishermen young and old demonstrated their allegiance to the sport by paying small yearly dues and generously penning checks at the annual banquet and raffle.

That has all changed.

“We’ve lost so much over the years,” said Jim Schwartz, RCSFA president and member for more than 20 years.

Membership now sits below 200. Before this year’s banquet — held April 29 — the board, which is two members short of being full, seriously considered the harrowing thought that if enough money wasn’t raised, the club would shut down, effective this year.

“That’s how low our funds were,” Gare said.

The banquet, with the help of donations from area businesses, managed to raise approximately $7,000, enough to sustain the group for another year, but still down from $8,000 the previous year. The RCSFA will need to raise enough money at next year’s banquet to sustain it for 2012.

Otherwise?

“We won’t have the club anymore,” Gare said bluntly.

It all begs one question: Where have all the fishermen gone?

•••

The answer, well, it isn’t so simple. It seems to be a combination of economy and culture.

The first answer, inevitably, is money.

“There’s been a lot of negatives because of the economy,” Gare said. “It’s hard for people to spend that little extra.”

“The money issue, I suppose,” Schwartz said when asked why membership is down. “We had pull tabs and a gambling license, when we gave that license up, then membership kind of dropped down.”

Yet, a year’s membership in the RCSFA is just $20. A ticket to the banquet is $25, less than dinner for two at a restaurant. Are people really balking over $20?

The real answer may lie in a lost generation of fishermen. Gare and Schwartz agreed that membership among the under-30 crowd is nearly non-existent.

“We aren’t really targeting the right people there, I suppose,” Schwartz admitted. “Dan will be helping with that. He’s good and he wants to get it going and get a better club going.”

“The age of the average fisherman is 50-something years old. There’s no kids fishing anymore,” Gare said, noting that out of the 170 attendees at their banquet, only about five were children.

“They’re all playing video games and whatnot.”

Gare’s son, Hunter, is 12 years old and loves fishing with his dad, grampa and 8-year-old sister, Piper. His face light up as he reminisced about catching a 21.5-inch walleye.

“I remember going over the big waves in the boat and that was fun,” he said. “You just hope that it doesn’t break the line or do anything to your hook.”

Do most of his friends fish?

“Some of them do, but most of them don’t,” he said.

So what would he tell his classmates who spend their days cooped up with their Playstation 3 on the living room floor?

Without a second of hesitation, he answered, “You’re wasting your own time.”

When Daily News reporter Joseph Lindberg hung out at local bait shops on the fishing season opener last Sunday, he found empty piers and vacant shorelines.

“Worst I’ve seen in 66 years in the bait business,” Andy Nagel of Nagel’s LIve Bait said. “It’s just really bad this year so far.”

It must be universal then. Is fishing as a sport must be losing its luster? Yes and no.

•••

The nearest fishing organization is the Minnesota Darkhouse and Angling Association’s Southern Lakes division, based out of Waterville.

It’s president, Erv Halstead, said membership has dropped from 600 to 471 in the last couple of years. But he said it’s not due to age or finances.

“It all depends on what the DNR (Department of Natural Resources) is doing,” he said. “When they tried the toolbox deal here, we went way up in a hurry. They tried to put muskies in Lake Tonka so we picked up members.”

Strangely, he noted that the group’s younger population is on the rise.

“We’ve been picking up younger members,” he said.

Membership in the MDAA costs just $10 a year — although it will be $15 next year — so the lower cost may help entice higher membership. The group had enough money to hand out $2,000 in college scholarships this year.

So if the MDAA is chugging along, why is the RCSFA close to shuttering its doors?

Maybe people don’t know what the RCSFA does? Or maybe their incorrect assumptions about its funding keep them from joining?

•••

Dan Gare did not waver about what the largest misconception about the RCSFA is.

“A lot of people think that we get breaks from the state,” he said. “When I went around to get donations, people said, ‘Well you guys get a chip in from the state already.’ We don’t. Everything we raise at the banquet, that’s what we use to pay for stuff.”

And that stuff amounts to quite a bit.

“Our club is about keeping our rivers and lakes clean and teaching kids the great sport of fishing,” Schwartz said.

The association sponsors the annual kids fishing tournament at King Hill dam on Saturday morning during Faribault’s Heritage Days; a free event for area youth that offers a t-shirt, bait and a rod and reel or tackle box for first and second place catches.

“We’ve even seen that go down,” Gare said. “A lot of kids aren’t doing that anymore.”

The association also supplies and services portable toilets at public accesses on Rice County lakes, picks up garbage at access points, sponsors three or four professional fishing seminars, donates fishing videos and books to the Buckham library, purchases and displays signs urging catch and release, supports land acquisition projects for limiting development and promoting hunting and fishing, works with the DNR on lake accesses and water quality and hosts a club member tournament at Robert’s Lake.

The group has also contributed to Boy Scout fishing tournaments, the stocking of hundreds of thousands of walleye fingerlings in Rice County lakes, hatching jars for the Waterville Fish Hatchery, float suits used by the Rice County Sheriff’s Department for rescues, fishing piers and docks on area lakes and the Cannon River and fish cribs in Cannon Lake.

“We donated a lot of money to a lot of different organizations,” Schwartz said. “We’ve helped out with water clarity and we’ve helped build those piers and docks.”

“I’ve never seen anything negative about the club or what it’s done,” Gare said. “We don’t get any state aid. Everything we get and raise stays in the county.”

Whatever the reasons for sagging membership — a struggling economy, a lost generation, an ill-informed public — Gare’s primary focus truly isn’t saving this specific club. He’s fighting for fishing. He’s fighting for that first time the line goes taught, the water ripples and the pole arcs toward the water.

“I love watching that reaction to their first fish,” he said. “It’s great. You know they’re hooked once they catch that fish.”