Early every morning, he slips away from Duluth’s Timber Dock aboard his 27-foot, steel-hulled gillnet boat, the Limerick. (Look for the shamrocks.) He motors out of the harbor at a steady nine knots, his 155-horse GM diesel purring contentedly as it burns the biodiesel that Howard himself brews for it.
He can run all day on five gallons of biofuel. Along with regular diesel, fish oil is a major component, though when short of fish oil he has been known to use french fry oil. He is passionate about the natural environment in which he works. “Clean water means clean fish,” he says.
As the sun rises, or even before it does, Mr. Howard passes under the famed Aerial Lift Bridge and enters the waters of Lake Superior. For the next several hours he’ll work the spots that he has learned over the years will produce fish, and he’ll work alone. The Limerick is a one-man boat. Not that he takes credit for his catch: “The nets do all the work,” Mr. Howard says. (That’s a little like a gardener saying the hoe does all the work.)
When Mr. Howard decides he is done for the day, or maybe just for the morning, he returns to shore and then heads for Howard’s Fish House, in Duluth’s West End. There, maybe with the assistance of a helper, maybe not, he will clean his catch and call his customers. He sells only fresh-caught fish, and he sells to order, though it’s possible to find that he has some extra fish on some days. “We don’t waste fish,” he says. “Lake Superior is a sustainable fishery, and this is a sustainable business.”
Although Mr. Howard, a native of Michigan who fished Lake Erie as a boy, is relatively new to Duluth-Superior, he is not new to fishing — “I’ve been fishing all my life,” he says — and the family name goes back in the Twin Ports to the 1870s, when great-grandfather John Howard worked as a commercial fisherman. Family lore holds that Superior’s Howard Bay and Howard’s Pocket are named for John Howard.
Mark Howard, feeling drawn to Duluth-Superior, came here after mustering out of the Navy in 1999 and worked various jobs on the Lake until he secured his own Minnesota commercial fishing license. Howard’s Fish House opened in 2006. As the only commercial fisherman in Duluth who is selling the fish that he catches daily, Mr. Howard is somewhat working against the current, caught in the tensions between biologists and regulators, sport fishermen and charter operators, environmentalists and commercial imperatives.
But he is deeply committed to operating a responsible, sustainable fish business clearly within the (many) rules, and he knows he has at least one powerful factor on his side: “People have to eat,” he says.