This Quebec museum owner helped save striped bass in the St. Lawrence River. Here’s how

RAISING AWARENESS

For Robitaille, the museum is the culmination of a lifelong passion for fishing, and a decades-old dream to help preserve the sport’s history and popularity. It’s also a crowning achievement for the tireless volunteer and unsung hero in the successful reintroduction of striped bass in the St. Lawrence.

Raised in the working-class borough of Montreal North, 63-year-old Robitaille has many great fishing stories of his own, starting with the first trout he caught as a kid in a stream near Joliette. “We brought it home and it lived all winter in our bathtub,” he said. “We fed it worms and pepperoni and stuff, and put in a jar when we took our baths. In the spring we released it where we caught it.”

In 1992, Robitaille and a few locals founded the Corporation pour la Restauration de la Pêche à l’Île d’Orléans, a volunteer group dedicated to preserving and promoting recreational fishing on the island, where the St. Lawrence widens into an estuary and the outflow of freshwater from the Great Lakes begins to mingle with saltwater.

The museum is the culmination of a lifelong passion for fishing

“We had three goals,” Robitaille says. “We wanted to create a museum, build a weir to catch fish that people could come and see and learn about at low tide, and to work for the return of striped bass.”

Robitaille had long heard stories and seen pictures—some on display in his museum—about striped bass, a heritage species in Quebec and a once-abundant game and commercial fish in the St. Lawrence. But overfishing and habitat destruction led to the species vanishing from the river starting in the late 1960s.

In addition to organizing fishing tournaments on the St. Lawrence and collecting items for his eventual museum, Robitaille and some corporation members begin giving talks and seminars on striped bass to raise both awareness and support for a reintroduction program. Those efforts intensified when they learned Quebec was planning to declare striped bass extirpated in the St. Lawrence. “We went into panic mode,” Robitaille says. “It was do or die.”