Women Who Love To Fish

A lot of women in the Copper Country enjoy fishing but Michigan lags other states in the upper Midwest when it comes to the number of women taking up the sport.

A special exhibit opening up next week at the Carnegie Museum looks to show how much fun women can have when they cast their line.

“Fishing in Michigan—the popularity has actually been going up tremendously in the past couple years but despite that popularity, only about 1 in 5 licenses that are sold in Michigan actually go to a female. So, it’s very surprising to see that those numbers are so low and when you compare that with Wisconsin and Minnesota, those numbers are much higher. They’re closer to forty or sometimes fifty percent,” said angler Amber Voght, who is participating in a study by Michigan Tech graduate student Erin Burkett, funded by a Michigan Sea Grant under a Graduate Research Fellowship award.

The exhibit is called “Connections: Stories from Women Who Fish” and was created by a group of local women who took photographs and shared stories about why they fish and what fishing means to them.

Voght said, “This is a research technique called photovoice, where the participants of the research project actually go out and take pictures and then we describe our experiences.”

An opening reception will be held at the museum on Thursday, February 14th from 6:30-8:00pm.

“We’re just trying to show that anybody can fish and one of the group members actually had a really good quote where she said that whatever fishing means to you, it’s a way to connect people across generations, across nationalities, lifestyles, occupations—it’s really a way to bring people together,” said Voght.

The reception is free and open to the public. The exhibit will remain on display at the Carnegie Museum in Houghton through April.