News Photo by Julie Riddle Tim Wieczorkowski, at his Presque Isle home on Thursday, shows off the 28.22-pound brown trout he caught at the 2006 Alpena Brown Trout Festival — the biggest brown trout ever caught in Lake Huron, according to a certificate given to Wieczorkowski by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

ALPENA — Since 1975, a brown fish with a light belly and a backful of black spots has lent its name to the festival Alpena claims as the longest-running fishing tournament in the Great Lakes.

After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to keep Lake Huron stocked with a fish no longer flourishing in its waters, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources washed its hands of restocking brown trout in the lake a decade ago.

With the fish no longer the thriving species it was when the Alpena Brown Trout Festival began, state officials suggest planners consider a new name for the annual Northeast Michigan celebration.

“Why don’t they call it the Alpena Fish Festival?” wondered Tim Cwalinski, senior fisheries biologist at the Gaylord DNR office.

Thunder Bay boasts a plethora of fish species adapted to local living conditions. Such a fishing bounty offers enough to celebrate on its own without importing a fish that costs more than it may be worth, Cwalinski said.

After dumping more than 3 million brown trout into Lake Huron in Alpena since 1979, according to the DNR Fish Stocking Database, the DNR discontinued the practice after 2011 when the fish failed to thrive.

When the festival began nearly 50 years ago, brown trout flourished in Lake Huron, munching happily on the abundance of alewives swarming waters in Thunder Bay and around the lake. An invasion of zebra and quagga mussels disrupted the food chain, however, largely wiping out alewives and decimating the brown trout population.

The DNR’s planted, young brown trout, with their small size and instinct to stick near the shore, also became an easy lunch for birds such as the cormorants that regularly swoop and dive near the mouth of the Thunder Bay River in Alpena, Cwalinski said.

Rearing and planting brown trout cost the DNR $1.50 to $2 per fish, said Cwalinski, potentially costing the state upwards of $25,000 per year even after brown trout plants were scaled back drastically in 2010 and 2011.

In 2007, when the state planted 75,000 fish, biologists estimated each fish caught by an angler cost the state close to $300.

“That’s an expensive fish for somebody to catch when their license is $26,” Cwalinski said.

Despite Alpena’s dedication to its favorite fishing festival’s founding fish, the DNR does not plan to return to stocking the brown trout that don’t offer a good return on investment, Cwalinski said.

Such an investment produces far more than a fish at the end of a string, according to the planners of Alpena’s Brown Trout Festival, which swings to life on July 15.

In recent years, local fish aficionados have reached into their own pockets to dump the trout into Thunder Bay, giving local and visiting anglers opportunity to take home a black-spotted fish, prize money, and the joy of snagging one of the region’s most prized catches.

“They were the ones that started it, the browns,” said Fishing Tournament Director Brad MacNeill.

Since the mid-1970s, when brown trout were plentiful enough to be caught off of Alpena’s breakwall, the festival has celebrated and embraced its namesake, and, “as long as I’m around, I plan to keep it a brown trout festival,” MacNeill said.

Nearly 3,000 brown fish were planted in Thunder Bay last fall, courtesy of generous donors eager to keep the brown trout tradition alive in Alpena.

Tim Wieczorkowski, assistant fish director for the festival who started a nonprofit specifically for taking donations for brown trout stocking, has been fishing for the scaly brown trophy since he was a child in a car seat.

“It’s like catching an eagle,” he enthused, describing the thrill of the hunt for the prized fish he called one of the lake’s prettiest trout.

He gives his stocked fish a fighting chance by planting them where they have the best chance of survival, in deeper water and carefully spread across Thunder Bay, Wieczorkowski said.

Alpena’s fish fest benefits local businesses and bonds the community in a week-long vacation of summer fishing fun — a net profit that puts the $3.50 he pays per fish into perspective, Wieczorkowski said.

“To an average person, it’s not worth $3.50,” the fisherman said. “But, to a community, it’s priceless.”