Saving the Saint-Laurent fascines | Heir to an almost lost know-how

(Saint-Irénée) Julie Gauthier is the woman behind Pêcheries Charlevoix and one of the very few artisans who still fish with weirs, as was once done in the St. Lawrence. In 1871, there were 1,369 fixed fisheries in Quebec. Today, only three families keep this age-old technique alive, which was added to Quebec’s intangible heritage last year.

At low tide, day or night, Julie Gauthier puts on her waders to inspect the contents of her fascine. She is one of the guardians of an ancestral know-how passed down from generation to generation, and kept alive by a family from Bas-Saint-Laurent and two from Charlevoix, including his own, located in L’Anse-au-Sac, in the municipality of Saint-Irénée.

Julie Gauthier grew up on the banks of a salty river. It’s also where she returned to settle after studying architecture and psychology at Université Laval – she then worked for 13 years in Quebec City as a landscaping contractor. She felt “river sickness,” then a deep desire to save this family tradition “that couldn’t die,” she explains. “When I moved to Quebec City, I realized how unusual and little-known it was.”

When her uncle threw away the net, she and her cousin Jonathan Bélanger took up the torch with the support of the extended family who volunteer when the need arises. Seven of the houses located on the road that connects the shore to the Pêcheries Charlevoix facilities are occupied by her father’s brothers and aunts. Cousins ​​also live in the area, the fisherwoman points out as she drives her pickup truck toward the beach.

Thousand-year-old know-how

On every continent, with a few variations, we find traces of this technique that allows fish to be caught using the same ingenious principle of exploiting the coming and going of the tides. In Canada, the oldest traces of fish traps were found in Lake Simcoe, Ontario, and date back 5,000 years. In the tidal zones of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay, accounts by explorers and missionaries from New France attest to the presence of these fishing devices used by First Nations and French settlers.

The fascine is installed from the beginning of April to the end of October in the foreshore, in the area where the coastline remains partially covered at low tide. Between posts, the nets – formerly made of a tangle of branches, like a wicker basket – trace a course whose finish line is a cage.

At high tide, the fish enter the funnel-shaped opening and swim along the walls to a pool that holds them captive when the tide recedes. The fisherman then only has to collect the fish that swim at his feet.

The fisherwoman sorts her catches, one by one, according to the needs of the moment and what is allowed to be caught at that time of year. Some fish are kept, others are released; all are identified to feed the provincial data on fish in the St. Lawrence.

Living to the rhythm of the tides

Seven days a week, seven months a year, Julie Gauthier’s daily life is punctuated by the lunar cycles. More than a job, weir fishing is a way of life, she says. When the tides come in at night, the pace is intense.

With the fascine, it fishes for rainbow smelt, tomcod, lake whitefish and herring. It also catches sturgeon, caught with gillnets. However, the main product of Pêcheries Charlevoix is ​​traditionally capelin, this small silver fish with fatty and tasty flesh, expected every spring in L’Anse-au-Sac, where it usually shows up in large numbers during spawning time.

This year, the harvest is meager, as was the case last year. There was a time when the fisherwoman’s father and uncle caught between 30 and 50 tons of capelin, meeting the demand with beach seining, a net fishing technique carried out by rowboat on the coast, using the artisanal method. This catch was then sold wholesale to animal food producers. “Today, when we manage to collect 10 tons, we are happy!” notes the fisherwoman.

To compensate for the slow season, Pêcheries Charlevoix equipped itself with a processing kitchen in 2020 and opened its shop, which allows it to diversify its offer and promote the resource with fewer catches. Once prepared, the fish are sold frozen or canned – smoked, marinated, in broths or rillettes. In her spare time, the craftswoman also makes jewelry from sturgeon scutes, whose composition is reminiscent of walrus ivory.

Valuing tradition

To this day, Julie Gauthier remains the only full-time employee of Pêcheries Charlevoix, due to a lack of resources to do more with the constraints imposed by a heavy bureaucracy. The permits, which are difficult to obtain, do not take into account the specificities of her activities and their conditions have not been reviewed since the 1970s. However, the flow of species in the estuary is not frozen in time, she argues.

“This year again, we were forced to throw the herring back into the water because the fishing date had not yet officially started. Will it show up again within the permitted dates? We don’t know. I can’t make up for it with beach seining either, since my permit was refused due to my lack of experience at sea. All that just to go and catch a few fish in a rowboat near the shore… It makes no sense!”

To breathe new life into traditional ancestral fisheries, she is demanding special treatment from Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Despite the vagaries of the profession, the one who has been granted the status of master of living tradition persists, invested with her mission to preserve her know-how and to make a living from it. “In our history of Quebec, we hear about the fur trade, wood and salmon fishing, but never about weir fishing. Yet it was essential to our development. As long as I have the opportunity, I will continue to promote this heritage that we should not let fade away.”