It's a sunny day in Port Clinton as people wander through a summer street fair. During the week, Randall Lipstraw splits his time between being a barber and sitting on the local city council, but today he's helping out at a food stand, dishing up plates of Lake Erie perch as fast as the cooks can pull the fish out of the fryer. Lipstraw says the local fishing industry generates a lot of income for the region and for Ohio.
LIPSTRAW: "The state makes so much money from fishing --- licenses and stuff. And when tourists come up here, they're also putting money into the local economy with motels, camping, restaurants. One hand feeds the other."
Several miles away, charter boat owner Rick Unger gets ready to take a half dozen people on a deep water fishing expedition. Unger's been running Chief's Charters for ten years and he's the current president of the 800 member Lake Erie Charter Boat Association. But, lately, he's been wondering about the future of his business, given the stories he's been hearing about an invasive fish called the Asian carp
UNGER: "We're scared to death by it. We've seen what it's done to the river systems. We know what, potentially, it could do to Lake Erie."
The foreign fish were originally imported to clean ponds in the southern United States, but some of them escaped and have been slowly working their way up the Mississippi. Asian carp reproduce quickly and tend to starve out local fish by gobbling up their food supply. The fear is that they will make their way into the Great Lakes and dominate the waters. And then there's the jumping problem.
It's become a comic staple of youtube --- there are dozens of home videos showing rivers choked with hundreds of leaping carp that occasionally smack into the face of a nearby boater. But, it's no laughing matter for the person who gets his nose or jaw broken by twenty-to-fifty pounds of flying fish. Rick Unger isn’t laughing either. He and others who make their living off the Lake, fear the arrival of the Asian carp could be the death of recreational fishing here.
UNGER: "Bait shops…tackle shops…fish-cleaning houses…marinas --- all of that goes away. Then, you're going to lose your motels, your hotels, your restaurants, your bars --- all of that would close down for lack of tourism on Lake Erie."
According to the Ohio Division of Wildlife, sport fishing generates 1.8 billion dollars across the state, each year, with about 800 million of that coming from Lake Erie.
Roger Knight of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources watches tourists get on a Lake Erie ferry. Knight has spent 30 years studying the life of the lake. He's seen the arrival of a number of invasive species, including the zebra mussels of the 1990s. He says Asian carp could be a much bigger problem.
KNIGHT: “They are very prolific animals, the habitat's right. Lake Erie would be a perfect place where the odds are in their favor that they would be able to reproduce. And that's the issue for us.”
Like many communities across Ohio, the Port Clinton area has its share of boarded-up homes, closed restaurants, and shuttered shopping strips. Not as many people are chartering boats, these days, due to a shaky economy.
Rick Unger sits with a bottle of Corona at the end of a day on the Lake. He says his business has been down, this summer, but a busy June and July kept him afloat. Now, the approach of the Asian carp has gotten him thinking about the city of Cuyahoga Heights, where he used to work as police chief.
UNGER: “Cuyahoga Heights had a huge industrial base. As with the rest of America, a lot of those jobs went away --- those factories started closing up or running shorter shifts --- and it hurt my city.”
And he can't help but wonder if he might have to live through that again.
