Whitefish by Carl Gawboy

Summary

Carl Gawboy, “Whitefish,” watercolor on paper, 2025, 18″ x 24″, $2,100

“Whitefish, This plentiful fish, spawns just before freeze-up, and is delicious smoked.”

– Carl Gawboy, 2024

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FROM ARTIST CARL GAWBOY: 

During the fur trade you would see people cleaning whitefish and setting them out on a little tripod smoker in the background, smoking them down until they were almost the consistency of a piece of plastic. That’s how they preserved them. Today, when I buy fish from a commercial fisherman, I like the kind of smoking where it’s just smoked a little—just enough to cook it. Delicious. But when it was done for storage, it was smoked and smoked until it was absolutely dried.

Whitefish themselves are a plentiful fish. You can still go to the DNR and buy a whitefish netting license, and they’ll tell you what size mesh to use. If you use too small a mesh, you’ll catch the small fish along with the large ones. If you use a larger mesh, the small fish just swim right through and live, and the bigger fish get caught. 

With the right net, you can harvest whitefish by the tubful today. And nobody really goes after them—fly-fishermen sometimes say they can catch whitefish on a fly, but that’s not very common, and regular rod-and-reel fishermen don’t bother with them. Walleye and northerns eat whitefish, though. And just like other fish, there’s a time when they run, when they spawn around rocky islands in the millions. That’s when they’re netted, just like in the days of the fur trade.