Onaway sits along the shore of Black Lake in Presque Isle County, a small northern Michigan town whose single strangest annual event turns the frozen lake surface into the site of the shortest, and most tightly regulated, fishing season anywhere in the entire state, all built around an ancient fish species that very nearly disappeared from Michigan's waters entirely.
The Shortest Fishing Season in Michigan
Black Lake stands as the only body of water in the entire state of Michigan where sport anglers are permitted to spear lake sturgeon, a genuinely ancient fish species that the Anishinaabe people have long regarded with particular reverence, treating it in traditional lore as a kind of grandfather or king among fish. Each February, Onaway hosts the Sturgeon Shivaree, drawing thousands of visitors to watch anglers gather on the frozen lake and spear these prehistoric-looking fish through holes cut in the ice, a season so tightly managed that it has, in some recent years, lasted less than an hour before the harvest quota was reached and officials called the entire season closed.
That extraordinarily brief window reflects decades of careful fisheries management following a nineteenth-century sturgeon population collapse driven by overfishing, a crash serious enough that the species needed active, sustained conservation effort simply to maintain a fishable population at all, let alone one healthy enough to support even a heavily restricted annual harvest.
The Hatchery That Brought the Sturgeon Back
The Black River Sturgeon Hatchery, located just outside Onaway, releases hundreds of young sturgeon, known as fingerlings, into Black Lake every year, a sustained restocking effort that has helped grow the lake's adult sturgeon population back to a still-modest but genuinely improving population of roughly twelve hundred fish. That population remains small enough that Michigan's Department of Natural Resources monitors the harvest in near-real time each February, closing the season the moment a preset quota of speared fish is reached regardless of how much of the traditional season window remains.
The result is a genuinely unusual annual spectacle: a fishing season measured in single-digit hours rather than weeks, drawing spectators as much as active participants, and giving Onaway an outsized cultural identity built around a single ancient fish species and the elaborate conservation infrastructure required to let anyone fish for it at all.