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

SAVING STRIPED BASS

In 1998, Robitaille led the construction of a weir and aquarium at an historic shipbuilding yard in Saint-Laurent, creating a local tourist attraction and a fish-monitoring station in partnership with Quebec’s wildlife ministry. That year, he also helped produce Le Bar Rayé du Saint-Laurent, a history book about striped bass in the St. Lawrence.

Written by Quebec writer Pierre Dubois, the book helped create a groundswell of public and scientific support for a striper reintroduction project. “The issue got a lot of press,” says André Bellemare, a now-retired journalist who was a top hunting and fishing columnist in Quebec for more than 50 years. “The government decided to get onboard.”

In 1999, Quebec began buying juvenile striped bass from the Miramichi River and raising them at a fish farm in the Eastern Townships. Three years later, 11 fish were released in the St. Lawrence, including one by Robitaille and his son Patrick, who was four at the time. “It was only a symbolic release,” he says. “But it was amazing.”

Since then, annual stockings of thousands of striped bass at different sites, along with a strict ban on fishing, have helped to reestablish populations in parts of the St. Lawrence. “We know of two spawning grounds and the numbers of large fish being caught and released as bycatch has grown all along the river,” says Léon L’Italien, a Quebec government fisheries biologist.

It’s a conservation success story that Normand’s a part of…he has the health of fish and the ecosystem at heart

According to L’Italien, provincial and federal scientists are now working on a management plan that aims to safely reopen a striped bass fishery on the St. Lawrence in the next few years. “It’s a conservation success story that Normand’s a part of,” he says. “He’s a responsible fisherman who has the health of fish and the ecosystem at heart.”

André Bellemare, who first met Robitaille when Robitaille was a teenage guide at a high-end salmon camp on Quebec’s Moisie River, agrees. “Normand was a real driving force in the project,” he says. “But he’s shy and discreet and shuns the spotlight. His efforts are largely unknown.”

Robitaille, who caught—and released—his first striped bass in the St. Lawrence in 2005, continues doing volunteer work on Île d’Orléans, giving seminars on striped bass and, of course, fishing with family and friends. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that fishing is essentially a social activity,” he says. “For me, it not the size or the number of fish you catch, it’s the people you catch them with that matters most.”

To learn more about Norman Robitaille’s fishing museum, please visit www.outdoorcanada.ca/museum.