Ferryville Wisconsin- Commercial Fishing

Ferryville is a little village with a population of 192 in Southwestern Wisconsin. It is located on National Scenic State Highway 35 between Prairie du Chien and LaCrosse Wisconsin. Ferryville is at rivers edge and is an excellent area for hunting, fishing and water sports. Along with being a sportsman’s paradise, Ferryville, is a motorcycle riders dream due to the hills, valleys, curves and just pretty scenery. We may be a small village but we have plenty of friendly people and lots of beautiful scenery.

For more information on Ferryville, Wisconsin, please visit our website www.VisitFerryville.com

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Ferryville, Wisconsin. The people, the location, the place for all seasons. Jerry Bordman and I'm a commercial fisherman. Jerry, how long have you been a commercial fisherman? Well, at 80 years old and all my life. Is commercial fishing something you can do year round? Yes. How long have you been calling this area of the Mississippi River your home? All my life. I was born born here on the river. Matter of fact, my brother, my oldest brother, my folks used to live on the islands and he was born on the refuge before locking dams. And he's still alive? I think he's probably one of the last few people. He's 88, basically. This is something you've done your entire life? Yes. So what is commercial fishing on the Mississippi River? Like the type of fishing we do, we sane, we call sandy and then deal netting, tram netting, hoop netting, hoop nets and fox traps. Many various different types of fishing and all various different skills. The fishing nowadays is very easy. It's a lot of manual labor, but it's still easy. What it used to be, I can remember when, like back in the late forties and early 50s, there wasn't hardly any boat landings on the river. And so when we were standing underneath the ice, these fish had to be hand slated to the banks, to the railroad tracks and carried up over the railroad tracks and then carried up over the road bank. Now that was work that I want to tell you. So gradually the boat landings opened up where you could get to the landings and transport your fish. In 1947, the dyke going to Lansing, when the ice went out that spring, they went out thick and it took every one of the bridges out. Therefore you couldn't get the fish to Lansing because that's what the main market was. You had to go by a boat and hope you have enough ice to get in there in the wintertime. My oldest brother. And my dad stood at the Windowski bridge there and they watched that ice take that bridge out and they just went to Lansing and come back for that about a half an hour before that. Wow. That was how long did it take to fix that bridge? 1956. Ten years? Yep. Put in ten years. Wow. Like I said, that was the biggest market around. We had a lot of markets around, small markets. Quite a few of the one in furnishing and one in the big halls. The big bunches always went to landscape. So, Jerry, is commercial ice fishing your big time for fishing, or is it during the summer as well? No, we used to fish year round, but now the markets have gone and the only fishing that we do now is we fish under the ice. In the spring, when the ice goes out, we sell all our fish to New York live. We shift them all live to New York. They go out and semis tanks on with liquid oxygen and we put £20,000 of fish on a truck. And also in the springtime, when the water opens up in, we have what they call a Jewish holidays. At that time, we go for the big carp. For the holidays, they want the big Carp, anything £12 and up, and then after that usually done from the summer. So besides the carp, what other kind of fish are you fishing for? Buffalo carpent. Buffalo, primarily because catfish, we catch a lot of catfish in the scene, but in the state of Wisconsin, if you're sanding underneath the ice, you can only keep £100 of fish per haul. So you'd mentioned that you sell all of your fish to the state