- Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, the Community Assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority support from Spring Hill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas b Hagan.

- This is WQLN.

- I always say that Erie County is the largest of all the counties in Pennsylvania, and I get questioned on that.

But if you add in the waters of Lake Erie to the landmass that we have here, that's all part of Erie County.

And we are truly the biggest county in Pennsylvania.

- Erie has such extraordinary qualities, and all too often we are the last to realize it, and we're certainly slow to promote ourselves.

- There's definitely something true about a, a, a particular phrase, the Backyard Syndrome, it's called, right?

So the idea behind the Backyard Syndrome is that you grow up in this area and you're like, Hey, you know, I've seen this a thousand times, or, you know, it just kind of becomes bland.

- There's not many places that you can go in the world where you have this huge body of water.

You can do anything from boating to fishing, to just enjoying the sunset.

- Just meeting all the different researchers and specialists, scientists, educators, partners, organizations like The Sons of Lake Erie.

- The Sons of Lake Erie was a club, was organized actually at a graduation party back in 1981.

The attendees of the party were all buddies who all were fishermen, and they were complaining about the status of the fishery at that time.

Sons stands for Save Our Native Species, and we were incorporated back in 1985.

During that time, as a group, we were able to lobby the state legislature and the Pennsylvania Fishing Boat Commission to tighten up the amount of fish that could be taken each year.

- The Sons of Lake Erie were probably the best local shock troops for the environmental community.

- There is a, an environmental issue.

They're there, and anybody that's running for office can understand that these people were watching to make sure that they don't do something dumb that's gonna in endanger the environment.

- Number one, we feel that the contaminants in the area of the code plant affect our fishery and affect our drinking water, and we have to do something about it quickly.

And number two, there's an opportunity here to provide more outdoor space for people.

- I think the suns of Lake Erie played a particularly critical role in moving us back toward a swimmable bay, which, which required, given the setup in Erie, required Erie to meet much higher standards of sanitary and storm water, sewer protections, invest in its infrastructure, some of which was stunningly out of date.

- One of the important things as a scientist is I find it incredibly valuable to speak with people like those that are members of the Suns, because trends that they are seeing, that they are observing, that, you know, maybe as a scientists, because we're not out there fishing all the time, maybe we don't realize that.

So I think it's important to take that information as well as the data that we're seeing and, and bring it together to ask really good future questions to look at - For a, a word of prayer.

And we can be underway.

Love me and gracious God, I give you thanks for this day and for your creation and for every person that is here, for all those here that served our country, and I, we just thank you for them and pray your blessings upon them.

- They're an organization like none other.

I mean, they, they truly are, you know, conservation oriented and promotion oriented, like they really want the fishery to succeed.

- We do an awful lot with the Pennsylvania Fish Commissions over the years.

We've worked very closely with them.

- So the Pennsylvania Fishing Boat Commission is responsible for managing the fisheries and the reptiles and amphibian species, as well as the boating that's done across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Our office here is responsible for the Lake proper, and we, we solely work on Lake Erie and what goes into Lake Erie and what comes out of Lake Erie.

The first fishing license was established in, I think it was 1921.

And then as you move forward for our unit in 1959, our research vessel was built the perca, which we still use to this day.

And then in 1997, we switched over from gill netting to trap netting and to what we see in our current fishery today.

- We have one of the most amazing fisheries, you know, in the world.

And when you look at it, what all these agencies do, you know, like the Game commission, fish Commission, DEPI mean, all, you know, they're all doing work to, to protect, to, to preserve and conserve our natural resources so that all future generations can enjoy.

- Well, the Pennsylvania Fishing Boat Commission operates 14 state fish hatcheries here in Pennsylvania.

Mixture of cold water, trout, hatcheries, cool water, which is what we have with our steelhead hatchery.

And then warm water, which we do our small mouth jam of catfish.

- So a, a fish hatchery is a, a contained area where they are actually taking the egg sperm and, you know, creating a good population that can eventually be released when they reach a substantial size that, you know, they'll be able to survive in their environment.

And it also is typically targeting different types of sport fish, which also helps support the fishery.

- Samuel Wilmont was a guy that was sitting in Lake Ontario watching the Lake Trout disappear and hearing the terrible stories.

And then he was watching the white fish disappear.

So he proposed a hatchery system to replace the loss of the white fish.

- From my understanding, he did set the example by starting them in Canada.

I do know that much about 'em, but I think our first one was 1883 in Erie.

First hatchery was built the corner of second and Sassafras Street, and it stayed there until they started changing the lake water.

So the water supply was no longer any good for hatching fish.

So in 19 14, 19 14, 19 16, it built a Chestnut Street hatchery, which is the current Water Authority Administration building.

And they were in business till about the early 1960s.

- It was decided early on that that the way that we fish in Pennsylvania, you know, hatches were very essential.

You know, we, we utilize our fish, we stalk fish, we, we repopulate lakes that we draw down when we have to do dam removals or, or, or fix dams, dam repairs, you know, so we, we, we raise just about everything, you name it.

And we're, we're probably raising it at one of our hatcheries.

We are almost as big as a national hatchery system for the federal government just here in Pennsylvania.

But we raise those fish because that's what our fishermen use.

That's what, that's the exploitation that we see our fishermen, you know, not only demand, but you know, need those kind of numbers in these bodies of water.

And with fisheries management, you know, we harvest a lot of fish annually that our anglers consume.

So we, we continue to produce them.

- So again, having that balance, having that balance of economy, of the environment, of realizing that we're all part of this environment, it impacts us and to be sustainable, we need to be sustainable in what we do.

And we need to collaborate between, you know, science as well as the economy.

I think it's, it's just this balance that has actually progressed over the years.

I think we're getting closer and closer to that and understanding that and supporting that.

- The mission of DCNR is to protect and conserve the natural resources for all future generations to enjoy.

And the best way for us that we can do that is through those natural experiences.

- Oh, the DCNR.

Yeah, they're wonderful as far as education and taking care of the park.

I often kind of joke that I said if the moon itself disappeared to gone and nobody put it on the internet or in the newspaper or on the nightly news, I said there'd be people live their whole life and not even notice that it wasn't there anymore.

They're just not in tune with nature.

And I don't know how you instill that.

They - Are the smartest, neatest bunch of people I've ever worked with.

And Oh yeah, every one of the environmental educators out there, they're just awesome.

The knowledge that they have.

And you can't help but being with them and walk race far into what you were.

Yeah, - We always incorporate our mission with every component of our education or interpretation.

So we do a lot of interpretive programming for the general public, like night hikes and outdoor cooking programs.

And the list is very long of, of, you know, a lot of the different types of programs that we can offer.

There's - Always something new and, you know, emerging.

And I always say, as a scientist, as long as you can keep asking a question, you have really good job security.

And there's always a question to ask.

So that's the, the exciting challenge about being a scientist is what's that next question.

- And that's a great thing about the story of DCNR and all these agencies that we have today.

Their story led up.

That's how they got formed and organized, is you needed a group to monitor this.

You needed a group to monitor that.

You needed folks to, you know, step in and say, Hey, this is a good idea, but you should maybe do it, you know, this way, this way, this way instead of just this way.

And all of us can enjoy it.

- The Regional Science Consortium or the RSC is this membership and the membership includes colleges and universities, state and federal agencies, nonprofits, and then school districts.

And so our mission is really to focus on a lot of the research here in the Lake Erie and upper Ohio River watershed and ecosystem.

So it's, it's this collaboration of, you know, faculty members, researchers, students that are all kind of have this common goal of, you know, different things that are happening in the ecosystem in this region.

- Oh, that's really a, a, a nice situation because they had worked to get the buoys out in Lake Erie so that I could set at home and see how big the waves were before I put my boat in and found out that the waves were longer than my boat.

So stuff like that and, and the research that they're doing and all, it brings a lot of people together and educates a lot of people.

- Back in 2007, the RSC launched its first buoy and that buoy only has what's called a water quality sod on it.

And a sand is this, this tube where there's a bunch of probes at the bottom and we measure a bunch of parameters about the water quality.

So that would be temperature, pH conductivity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen.

And then over the years we progressed and we launched a, a larger buoy that is the near shore buoy.

It's off of the lighthouse at Pascal State Park and about two and a half miles off the shoreline and 50 feet of water.

And this one was a much more sophisticated buoy.

And we also have a video camera on the near shore buoy.

So every hour or two, we are getting a ten second clip that we can see what the conditions look like.

So now we're monitoring things about the weather, such as air temperature and wind and solar radiation.

But then that wave meter, which a lot of people are most tuned into, is giving us average wave height over a 10 minute period.

And over that same 10 minute period, what is the maximum wave height?

It's also giving us wave direction and wave period.

- We work hand in hand with the Regional Science Consortium.

You know, Dr. Sch is doing a lot of good work over there.

- Okay, interval 30 seconds, let's just go to Walnut and see if we can make it work.

- Okay.

We provide whatever boat work we can provide for her.

So we take our 26 foot skiff out when it's time to try and do some diagnostic work and get her out there in a timely fashion.

Because, you know, it's important for, for the Regional Science Consortium 'cause it's collecting a lot of information that they use.

But it's, it's even more so important for us because so many of our, our, our anglers and our boaters use it and, and we need it to be working for them and we want it to be working for them 'cause we want them to make good decisions and be safe.

- These buoys are really important in terms of scientific work because we are monitoring all this data.

We are logging all this data and it's important to know those trends.

And we take this data and not only do we feed it in real time to our website, but we also feed it to Noah's National Data Buoy Center.

And so if you go to their website, you can see all the buoys across the entire world.

You, I mean the entire globe.

And then you can zoom in on Lake Erie and see ours showing up there.

We have the weather station video camera, GPS unit, beacon solar panels, wave meter down low and then underwater we have a water quality sun taking measurements on the water parameters.

The buoys are, you know, a lot of wires, technology, things that can get wet, things that can't get wet, things that have to be weatherproof.

And we are sticking them out in the middle of Lake Erie, which can be, you know, a, a very interesting environment.

You get a lot of wind, a lot of waves, a lot of storm events.

- This happen a lot.

- No, it's always something new when we come out here.

- That's the exciting part.

It's, it, it really is a wonderful piece of equipment.

It's, it's a wonderful piece of technology that our fishermen and our boaters use constantly.

I mean, she was looking at some of her Google performances and you know, she has like 33,000 hits in one month because these, these people rely on it.

And I, and i, I, you know, I tell people it's, it's like your cell phone.

We voted for years without the buoy out there.

Now when the buoys not out there, we don't like even thinking about it.

We don't like talking about it.

We complain about it.

We, we call, we wanna know why the buoys aren't working.

- Gross - Looks good.

- These buoy do so much more.

They measure acidity of the water, they measure the temperature of the water, they measure the amount of nitrogen and oxygen in the water.

Now some of the obvious things they do is they measure waves, real time waves, real time swells and, and that kind of thing.

So the most obvious use of these buoys is, you know, how are the waves doing?

How are the swells doing?

But having these buoys to give you real, real-time information, it's helped me as a forecaster.

But this data is accessible to the general public and many utilize that buoy data to help them determine should I go out on the lake today or not.

- One of the questions I like to ask people is, what do you think the tallest wave we ever measured on the buoy dating, you know, all the way back to 2014, what do you think was the tallest wave?

The buoy measured 26.5 foot wave.

So if you take that back to the days of, you know, a hundred years ago when people were on ships and did not have the National Weather Service or any type of weather forecasting, that really plays into why we might see so many shipwrecks in this area.

The storms in Lake Erie come up very quick and very strong.

So if you were a hundred years ago standing on a schooner on the deck and looking up at 26 and a half foot wall of water, you could see that would be terrifying.

And you can understand why we, you know, had so many shipwrecks in this area that we did.

- When you go back and look at when those wrecks happened, most of them happened a long time ago when there was no, people were going down, up and down the lake with fish oil, whale oil lights.

So you couldn't see them.

And if you imagine and, and understand that the busiest trade route in the world in the world was from Buffalo to Detroit or Detroit, it, if you're a an Ontario person listening to this, wouldn't it make sense that the most wrecks would be on the busiest route at the time before we had the advantages of navigation, you know, and all the stuff like, you know, your smartphone will tell you more about everything you need to know about where you're going in your boat than some of the best equipment that there was even 10 years ago.

- Past job is to survey shipwrecks, right?

Maritime history and share that maritime history with the community.

Past is a working group of the Regional Science Consortium, which is the organization that brought everyone together to form past, past incorporates a dive team to do the survey work, a history team, to do research work, and an educational team to do outreach and education.

- The mission behind this working group was to really evaluate the shipwrecks that we have in Lake Erie.

We also wanted to inventory them.

And so creating this positive peer pressure that if there's certain things on the ship, they should stay there, they should not be removed.

You should never remove any type of artifacts from a ship.

- Past is faces a number of challenges.

Every member of a survey team is, has to be trained in how to do survey work.

It's not something that comes easily or is done well without considerable practice.

So they're going down and they're taking measurements on a ship and they cannot talk to each other because they're underwater.

The history team has to overcome the tyranny of distance in the form of looking back a hundred or 150 years into the past.

You then have to do community outreach because this is, this is all fascinating, but it's, it's not very helpful to the community if we're not sharing it with the community.

And we do that.

We, we put on talks, we do exhibits, we did a large exhibition at Tall Ships Erie in 2022 that reached thousands of people and was very well received.

So that, and you also have to remember, no one's getting paid for any of this.

This is all volunteer time.

- We need more people like past, they do fabulous stuff.

They're documenting, they're gathering information from people.

Let's go take a look at those shipwrecks 'cause they're time dated, they're not gonna be there for a long time, so we should go and find out more about them.

- So one of the things we're able to do is take those shipwrecks and catalog them and, and submit them for a pass PASS pass number to our historical commission here for Pennsylvania.

And so that there is a record of these historical sites and the dive team has really helped with volunteering to take these measurements, to take these surveys, but also collecting photographs and videos.

So Jeremy Banister is the one that has been, you know, really collecting a lot of these high resolution pieces of footage that we have then been able to put into photo mosaics and photogrammetry.

So that's a 2D and 3D version of it, again, serving as a record of what the shipwreck looks like now.

And so we, we continue to move forward and in fact, a current project we have going on right now that is funded by our Pennsylvania DEP Coastal Zone Management is looking at these shipwrecks as habitat for fishes.

So almost like an artificial reef.

So just getting an idea of not only the historic structure, but how is it used biologically as well.

- I think it's very important that as part of erie's tourist industry that's increasingly taken over the Bayfront, that we don't lose sight of where we came from and what our heritage is going and preserving the history of shipwrecks and serving and sharing these shipwrecks is one way to do that.

And I think that as we continue to go forward through time, that's simply going to become more and more important so that we retain a grasp on our own history.

- So early in my time as county executive, I suddenly had a calendar appointment with Noah and they wanted to talk about national marine sanctuaries.

And one thing they said about our community is that we already had a Marine campus here.

They said, when you start to think about what you have, you have the maritime museum, we have the Bayfront Center for Maritime Studies, we have the science consortium, all the things going on through DCNR at Precal, and then there's many other entities, whether we're talking about the sons of Lake Erie or you know, you name it.

There's so many groups that have come together to try to improve this waterfront and these waters.

And so they said you're in an advantage from most places we're talking to because you already have sort of an infrastructure put together.

And if you were able to have a successful application to noa, you could actually bring this campus together in a more solidified way to have an even bigger impact.

Here.

NOAA is now moving this on towards the designation process.

- I think that now that we have made a commitment to clean water and we are, we're making major investments, Erie is, has a growing stature as a community that's making a contribution about the broader debates in how to maintain, provide stewardship and restore the lakes and address pollution problems on the lakes and also in related communities.

If you look - At the marine sanctuaries other places, Erie has a lot of tourism, more tourism isn't bad.

More reasons for people to come here isn't bad.

You know, if the diving community comes, you know, we have a few divers here now, great, you know, more people to, to boat more people to utilize what parts and pieces we have that other people don't have access to.

- If we are designated as a marine sanctuary, it's going to inspire many people and organizations to come together during that time and it's will elevate our maritime history.

- Blake Erie is one of the most amazing e ecosystems that we have in this area.

And so anything that can provide more focus, more opportunities for us to protect this area from an environmental standpoint and from a cultural history standpoint, I think that is a very good thing.

- Having the ability to do more education and have no assets and resources to support education and getting students as well as the community to really value what's in their own backyard and, you know, be proud of, of where we live and is, is gonna be really valuable to our education as well as our research.

- The sturgeon incursion once ruled the gray lakes until the Fishman deemed their existence a mistake.

These spiny old giants were filling the nets, taking a room from the preferable catch, the, - The sturgeon incursion there.

Nobody wants it, the sturgeon incursion.

Now our bay is haunted.

The sturgeon incursion, the damage is done.

The sturgeon incursion.

Now our sausage sunk - From the to the Colbys.

They wanted them gone and nobody would tell them that they were wrong.

They pulled them and dragged them up onto the shore to the native lake Giants were nearly no more after new folks from Farlands express their distaste for the treatment of these fish that had been dis displaced.

Oh man, the Fisher Sherman learned of a taste so divine.

They adjusted their nuts and they tossed out their lines.

The the - Sturgeon incursion fish.

Nobody wanted the sturgeon incursion.

Now our bay is hunting the sturgeon incursion.

The damage is done.

The sturgeon now our song is sung.

- It seemed like this bounty would never, and so they called up their neighbors and called up their friends.

- Chronicles is made possible by a grante from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming revenue authority support from Spring Hill Senior Living and the generous support of Thomas b Hagen.

- We question and learn.