When Leonard Winchester heard rumors circulating among fellow fishermen last month that walleye in Lake Fontana were contaminated with mercury, he didn’t believe it.

Winchester’s life revolves around walleye. Every morning at day break, he strikes out on the lake in search of the fish and doesn’t return until lunch.

“I only fish for walleye and I only catch walleye,” said Winchester, who lives in Bryson City. He eats walleye two or three times a week — dredged in Zesty Italian dressing, coated in shake-n-bake and deep fried is his favorite — and regularly treats friends and family to fish fries with his surplus.

But the rumor persisted. So Winchester called a state fish biologist, hoping he would dispel it as crazy gossip.

“That’s what I expected to hear. That’s what I wanted to hear,” Winchester said.

Instead, Winchester was dealt a life-altering blow. Samples of walleye taken from Lake Fontana last fall had indeed tested positive for high levels of mercury. The state health department hasn’t issued a formal warning yet, but one is pending in coming weeks, according to state health officials.

Winchester was unwilling to forsake his morning fishing routine, and still sets out on the lake every morning, lowers his line and jigs for the walleye. But it ends there.

“Right now I am throwing them all back,” Winchester said. “All week, I went fishing every day, caught fish every day and threw them back.”

Winchester had to cancel his family fish-fry this month and took everyone out to eat instead.

The level of mercury in Lake Fontana walleye makes it unsafe for children under 15 or a pregnant or nursing woman to eat them in any quantity. The general population should eat no more than six ounces a week, according to state health officials. (See chart.) The federal Environmental Protection Agency has tougher standards, suggesting no more than one meal a month by the general population.

Whether it’s once a week or once a month, part of the joy of eating walleye has been taken from Winchester.

“It’s like saying you can take poison, but you can only take a little bit of it,” Winchester said. “When I eat it again, it will taste the same, but when I see it on my plate, I will never be able to look at it the same.”

Given the likely source of mercury pollution — emissions from coal-fired power plants — undoing the problem seems far off. It means a not-so-small piece of Winchester’s life has been taken from him for good.

“In my lifetime I will not see this situation improve,” Winchester said.

Guessing game

There’s no telling how long the walleye in Lake Fontana have carried unsafe levels of mercury. It’s the first time in at least two decades the fish were tested. Fish in Santeetlah were tested at the same time and are also contaminated.

Fontana and Santeetlah are the only two mountain lakes tested so far, and walleye is the only species that’s been tested. Despite the lack of data on fish in mountain lakes, there are no plans to collect more.

“We are limited as far as our resources go,” said Jeff DeBerardinis, environmental specialist with the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources. “This was a one time shot to help fill in data gaps in our data base.”

That leaves fishermen guessing whether walleye from other mountain lakes — and whether other species of fish — are also contaminated. The safe bet is unfortunately “yes.” Mercury falling from the sky on Lake Fontana is surely hitting Lake Glenville, Nantahala, Chatuge and Hiwassee as well. And the other species of large fish, like small-mouth bass, are preying on the same things as walleye. If walleye are ingesting mercury from the food chain, these other fish are, too.

However, it’s impossible to say for sure without testing, DeBerardinis said.

“You can’t necessarily make that leap,” DeBerardinis said. The mercury enters the food chain at the bottom, by attaching to the lake sediments and works its way up to the big fish through bioaccumulation. The composition of the lake sediment dictates how well the mercury adheres to it.

Fontana and Santeetlah lakes were chosen for testing largely at random. Toxicologists with the state health department noticed the gaping hole in mercury data not just for walleye, but for other fish species around the state that are commonly eaten. The toxicologists pushed DENR to conduct a round of testing on these species.

The first step was getting their hands on the actual fish, however. For that, they turned to biologists with the N.C. Wildlife Commission in Waynesville. Every fall, the biologists spend a few weeks monitoring fish species on mountain lakes, furling and unfurling 250-foot gill nets and studying what’s hauled in.

Last fall, Fontana and Santeetlah happened to be up in the rotation, so those were the two lakes that the toxicologists got fish from.

“We were basically collecting fish anyway and we packaged them up in ziplock bags and sent them to DENR,” said Powell Wheeler, the district fishery biologist with the Wildlife Commission.

The fish came from all over the lake: the shore, the middle, and both ends, Wheeler said.

Why the delay

It’s been 10 months since the fish samples were taken from the lakes, and the health department has yet to publicly release the results or issue the requisite fish consumption warning. Not only were people like Winchester gobbling down walleye in quantities that aren’t advisable, but so are children and quite possibly pregnant and nursing women — two groups that shouldn’t eat any of the fish. Winchester’s pastor is a fisherman and catches walleye for his 18-month-old granddaughter who loves it.

Winchester is disappointed that it’s taken so long for the public to hear about the data.

“People have to know this. They need to know they are rolling the dice,” Winchester said.

Officials at DENR and the health department blame the lag on being stretched too thin or being short-staffed. Besides, it’s not as simple as taking a melon-ball scooper and hollowing out a little walleye flesh, DeBerardinis said.

“It is quite labor intensive to actually create that data set. It takes many experts each step of the way,” DeBerardinis.

When DeBerardinis got the fish from the wildlife biologists last November, he put them in a deep, deep freezer — minus 20 degrees Celsius — until he could block off time to process them. The 30 walleye from Lake Fontana and Santeetlah comprised just one batch out of 200 that came in from the testing blitz. He thaws each fish, scales it, fillets it and blends it, whirling the fillet in a stainless steel blender to “homogenize” the tissue. He puts samples in little aluminum cups, refreezes them and sends them to the state’s chemistry lab.

There, the samples join a long queue awaiting chemical analysis, from ground water to soils. Once tested, the raw data is sent back to DeBerardinis, where it waits some more until he can write up a report. His report is then sent to toxicologists at the health department.

The state health department has had that report for two months, but has yet to review it or issue an advisory.

“The reason it hasn’t been looked at to date is staff issues,” said Sandy Mort, toxicologist with state health department. Mort said the health department lost one of its two toxicologists in April and has yet to fill the position. Hopefully, that will happen soon, she said.

“We try to get on this stuff as quickly as possible because of the public health implications. Hopefully it will be addressed within the next few weeks,” Mort said.

Throw back the big ones

Winchester’s one hope is that smaller walleye are packing less mercury.

“The older the fish the more mercury it’s got. The bigger the fish the more mercury it’s got,” Winchester said.

The state’s data bears that out. The bigger fish indeed have large quantities of mercury than smaller ones.

“It tends to concentrate as it goes up the food chain,” said Ellen Stafford, who works in the chemistry lab for DENR in Raleigh. “Any large fish that eats smaller fish, is going to bioaccumulate the mercury.”

DeBerardinis wasn’t surprised that walleye tested high for mercury.

“We expected they would be high,” DeBerardinis said. “A couple pound walleye is going to consume nothing but fish who have also bioaccumulated anything else in the water.”

If Winchester stuck to 10-inch walleye versus 20-inch walleye, he could stay in the safe zone and resume eating as many as he wanted. But if every fishermen did that, it could lead to problems with the walleye population.

“You don’t want to be knocking out one age class in that fishery,” DeBerardinis said.

Winchester fears the mercury warnings will cast a pall over Lake Fontana. Fishermen come from hours away to troll for walleye, but once a large sign warning against consumption appears at the boat docks, Winchester fears they’ll go elsewhere. Of course, they might be contaminated everywhere else as well.

The allure of walleye won’t be so easy for some fishermen to give up. Powell Wheeler, a fish biologist with the Wildlife Commission, called walleye “a very, very fine eating fish.” It’s the most popular fish to eat among lake fishermen, Wheeler said. It’s popularity is one reason the state toxicologists sought data on it.

Walleye has white flesh and no fishy odor or taste.

“It’s the best of any fish in the world,” Winchester said. “I have not eaten anything that compares to walleye.”

What’s to blame?

Ellen Stafford, who works in the chemistry lab for DENR in Raleigh, said coal-fired power plants are the prime culprits behind mercury deposits in fish.

“That sounds like we would probably pin it on the power plants,” Stafford said of the walleye. “There is a lot of mercury in coal and once you burn it, it goes everywhere.”

Mention pollution from coal-fired power plants, and people in Western North Carolina instantly begin grumbling about Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA operates a string of old coal-fired power plants west of here, putting WNC in the path of prevailing winds and the pollution they carry. TVA plants are notorious for not having modern emission controls, being grandfathered in prior to today’s rules.

But Avram Friedman, director of the Canary Coalition in Sylva, said coal plants everywhere are to blame.

“We can’t blame it all on TVA, although a large part of pollution in this area probably does come from TVA,” Friedman said. “Mercury contamination is not something that is localized. It is a global issue.”

Friedman was disappointed to hear about the walleye contamination, yet another sign of the planet’s deterioration.

“It used to just be large ocean fish that were contaminated, like tuna and swordfish, but mercury has been building down the food chain and upstream. Now they are finding it in mountain creeks,” Friedman said.

Mercury contamination is another reason to turn away from coal, but the opposite seems to be happening. Duke Energy is building a new coal plant outside Hickory, one of dozens of new coal plants going up nationwide. Duke’s pollution permits from the state do not mandate “maximum achievable control technology” for mercury — permits issued ironically by the same state agency that conducted the walleye testing.

Since the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency has required new coal plants to install the best and latest technology at their disposal to capture mercury emissions. But the Bush Administration undid the regulations on mercury, specifically exempting coal-fired power plants from the mercury rule.

Environmental groups went to federal court over the issue and won, restoring the mercury rule for coal plants earlier this year. But Duke Energy got its pollution permits during the interim, while the court case was still pending. In fact, the court ruling was handed down just days after Duke had its permits in hand from the state. Environmental groups want the state to amend Duke’s pollution permit and require the maximum controls on mercury to reflect the court ruling. The state has refused, however, so environmental groups, led by the Southern Environmental Law Center, are suing the state over the permit.