THIS isn't a story about the fish that got away. In fact, the nets of fishers up and down Lake Winnipeg are bulging with so many pickerel that the commercial fishery on the lake has been temporarily suspended. That's because the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation's processing plant can't keep up with the catch. At Tuesday's end, there were 12,000 tubs of fish waiting to be processed. That's about 750,000 pounds of fish. The FFMC plant has 300 workers and operates around the clock, seven days a week. But even on that schedule, they can only handle about 250,000 pounds of fresh fish a day. "We're just overwhelmed," said John Wood, president and CEO of the FFMC. "There's only so much we can do." The suspension is in place until Saturday. By then Wood said he expects to have the backlog processed. The FFMC said right now pickerel stocks in Lake Winnipeg are at unprecedented levels. Wood said it's due to a combination of plenty of food for fish and good spawning weather. However, pickerel lovers shouldn't expect prices to plummet at local fish stores. "We'll freeze a lot of it and move it into the market in a controlled flow so we don't cause a downward spiral in prices," said Wood. Robert Kristjanson has been working the lake for 60 years. The Gimli fisherman says this season's bounty is the result of a good spawn about five or six years ago. "It's beautiful to fish. It's nice to catch a big fish," said Kristjanson. But the teeming waters doesn't mean fishers will be getting rich, either. That's because the price they're paid by the FFMC for their catch is set at the beginning of the season and rarely changes. Moreover, there are restrictions on how much fish can be caught. Fishers normally catch their quota, so it just means that this season they'll catch their limit sooner rather than later. Kristjanson said he expects the catch will level off by the weekend, adding that the bigger fish are already moving north. He said having to haul his nets out of the water for a few days means extra work but said it comes with managing the fishery. "It's not like grain that you can just store in bins," said Kristjanson. Wood said expanding the plant to handle the surplus wouldn't make financial sense given that normally they can keep up with processing demands. This is the fourth time in the last eight years that the FFMC has asked fishers to pull in their nets. Wood said shipping fish to processing plants in Ontario or B.C. would also be cost prohibitive, given the distance. "The only logical way to do this is to ask everybody to slow down," said Wood. The FFMC is a Crown corporation that purchases and markets commercially caught fish from Western Canada's inland fishery.

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