Fish Hatchery

Gore Bay Fish and Game Club

The Gore Bay and District Fish and Game Club (GBFGC) operates the Fish Hatchery at Gore Bay on Manitoulin Island. It's a community project sponsored by the GBFGC and partially funded by the Community Fisheries Improvement Program. The majority of the work has been done by volunteers from the GBFGC, with much help also coming from the Town of Gore Bay. Their objective is to raise and stock fish for improvement of the fishery around Manitoulin

The Building

The Fishery is housed in a very interesting building, located on the small peninsula of land that forms the northern edge of the harbour at Gore Bay. The building was originally erected in Toronto about one hundred years ago, where it most recently housed a creamery. In 1985, the town of Gore Bay acquired the building, disassembled it, trucked it to Manitoulin Island, and reassembled it on its current location. The Canadian government provided the funds, and the town of Gore Bay supplied the labor to accomplish the reconstruction.

The building uses very large wooden beams, the like of which you would have great difficulty finding now. The beams were once painted white in the creamery days, but they have all been scraped and sanded back to natural wood finish. You can appreciate their size in the picture at the left.

The People

Volunteers like Max Graham, 72 years old and formerly the manager of the Co-op, and Justin Robinson, 22 years old and looking for a full-time job, spend their time tending to the raising of thousands of Lake Trout. They had 83,000 little trout swimming in their dozen or so tanks when we stopped by in July of 1996. Every two hours they feed them fish meal imported from Oregon. The fish themselves are natives of Gore Bay, their eggs having been harvested from Rainbow Trout who try to spawn naturally in the creek at the bottom of the bay, or along the shore. If the fish aren't gaining weight, they sometime supplement the fish meal by adding a little ground beef liver to it!

They have also raised Chinook Salmon. They release them as three-inch long fingerlings, and four years later, they return as 25-pound adult fish, ready to spawn.

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This article first appeared in 1996.
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 by James W. Hebert. All rights reserved.
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Author: James W. Hebert