Paul Smith really likes to fish and is more than ready to make a living at it. But sometimes, the winds of fortune blow strangely.
Just last year:
- His boat sank
- The wheel flew off his food trailer (while he was driving!)
- His backup boat needed a new engine
- His own truck blew its transfer case
So of course, Smith is upping the game. He’s rewriting his business plan and setting new goals, including catching 100,000 pounds of Lake Superior whitefish in a single year, a 60% increase over his usual harvest.
Smith, a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, is the only one in his tribe to use trap nets. The nets keep the fish alive until they’re retrieved, swimming around the “pod,” or “house” at the end of his leads. “Picture a minnow trap the size of a house,” Smith says. He had grown up fishing with gill nets and didn’t anticipate how different the fishing would be with trap nets, but he’s a quick study. “Now I have one to two nets in deeper water (more than 100 feet) and the rest in shallow.” He typically harvests the fish from the nets on a weekly basis, keeping an eye on the costs each time he takes a boat out.
“Last season it was $300 per trip for labor and $150 per trip for fuel and that was for a trip where everything went smoothly,” Smith says.
Northern Initiatives has been with Smith, from helping him buy his boat in 2023, to helping him after it sank. Traditional banks considered First Catch a startup and wouldn’t loan money to Smith. Funds from a revolving Community Loan Fund and an SBA microloan helped him purchase the Norska, a 40-foot 1950 beauty ready for trap netting.
After the Norska sank, Commercial Lender Sam Lanctot and Business Coach Jody Lindberg helped Smith navigate the insurance maze until he received a settlement that paid for retrieval and cleanup, but not repairs. Lindberg also helped extensively with Smith’s food truck plans – he’s going to keep an abbreviated schedule for 2025, mainly at powwows and other tribal events so he can continue to grow the fishing business.
Right now, he has contracts and commitments with fisheries that he’s filling by buying other people’s fish, but his big dream is to become a contractor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative promotes Indigenous health through food, much of it served in schools, and gives tribal nations and communities the ability to feed their people on their own terms. No one has bid on the contract for whitefish for the last three years.
