The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
When Jim Churchill entered the commercial fishing industry, it wasn't exactly a match made in heaven. "I was not a good commercial fisherman," he says. "It wasn't from a lack of effort. It's like anything else, if you're a good mechanic, it comes easy. But you get other guys that really want to be a mechanic and screw everything up. Well, that's me and commercial fishing." Rather than give up entirely, Churchill simply readjusted. If he couldn't actually catch the fish, at least he could help bring them to market. Today, 30 years after casting his first line, he owns and operates Churchill Fisheries, a fish processing and packaging plant overlooking Amisk Lake in Denare Beach. It's no secret that northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba offer some of the best fishing in Canada. It's not as well known that many of those fish reach restaurant tables and grocer's freezers across North America and beyond. Each year, Churchill buys, packages and sometimes processes tens of thousands of pike, pickerel, whitefish and even lowly mullets, also known as suckers. Some are sold locally and within Saskatchewan. The vast majority, however, get shipped to the Winnipeg-based Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation, a federal Crown corporation that is an important player in the international fish market. From there, the gilled vertebrates are enjoyed by diners throughout Canada, the United States, and overseas destinations such as Sweden, Finland, France and the continent of Asia. Of course it all starts on a lake. Dozens of anglers, mostly aboriginals, from Denare Beach, Pelican Narrows, Deschambault Lake, Sandy Bay and Pukatawagan sell their catches to Churchill. Unlike the massive, well-manned vessels deployed by larger fisheries, Churchill's crews hit the water in pairs using 16-foot Lund boats. In the winter, they converge on the Denare Beach area with their ice shacks. As much as two-thirds of the up-to 750,000 pounds of fish brought in each year come from the lakes around Pelican Narrows. That's too much fish to truck into Denare Beach, so Churchill rents a packing facility on the reserve. In both Pelican Narrows and Denare Beach, Churchill prides himself on the efficiency of his operation. "Within 48 hours of it being swimming, (a fish) is in the freezer frozen, and that's our biggest attraction for the fish Ð the quality," he says. "A lot of processors will keep fish for four or five days on the shelf as fresh fish and then freeze it after. Well, you don't get the same quality." See 'Filleters' on pg. Continued from pg. What Churchill doesn't ship off to Winnipeg he has processed in Denare Beach by a proficient team of ladies who have mastered the art of filleting. "Go see a regular sport fisherman filleting fish, and then watch these ladies and you'll see why the ladies work here and that guy isn't," says Phill Robinson, a Denare Beach resident who was impressed following a visit to the plant. Aside from Churchill's three decades in the industry, the plant benefits from the deftness of long-time filleter Christina Custer. She started filleting at age 12 at the original Denare Beach fish plant, which closed in the 1960s. "It's the only thing I can do for working, and I like doing it," says Custer, who has worked for Churchill for most of the 11 years he has been open. The combination of a hefty public appetite for fish (visit the Rotary Club's Seafood Night for an example) and rich fish stocks would appear to give Churchill a guaranteed winning business formula. But make no mistake: he encounters his share of hurdles. "Some years you have a real late freeze-up," he says. "We've had guys fishing about as early as November 6, when they could actually get on the ice, and those same guys have had to hold off until December 10, depending on freeze up. So that's your biggest challenge, is weather." The business can be unpredictable in other ways. In 2002, Churchill thought he had found a viable way to complement what was strictly a catch-and-package business by processing whitefish eggs into caviar. "The caviar didn't take off, so we ended up just going full bore into processing," he notes. Today, his business still going full bore. To keep up with the demand, Churchill plans to add a second walk-in freezer to his plant next spring. He sees himself in the industry for many years to come, and harbours no doubts the market for northern fish will remain strong. So how do the fish of northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba stack up to the competition? "We've got the best," says Churchill with a smile.
