The Founding Fish (24 page)
Authors: John McPhee
May 23: A lightly jigged swing, a quick retrieve, a new cast flowing right out of the retrieve: your dart is back in the water, where it belongs. The variables count, surely, but there is nothing variable about the fact that shad do not swim in air. A dart in the air will not catch a fish. When your dart is in the water, show it. Give it the twitch. You're trying to irritate a fish. Which is not hard to do if you're in the right place at the right time. A shad could not care less about your dart, and will not go looking for it. Show it to the shad. Uninterested in food, the fish will snap at it only if it's in its face. And where in the river is the face? That's for you to guess. With a few exceptions, you are not fishing to visible fish.
May 26: In the A.M., I fish in relative discouragement, netting two fish while a man from Reading with a thin alchemical mustache gets fish on his line in more than half his casts. Fish after fish after fish after fish he hooks into while the rest of usâfour or five, on either side of him
and opposite himâhelplessly watch. One guy leaves, because he is so disheartened. Hackl, on the other hand, the eternal academic, apprentices himself to the Reading Rifle, and learns at the master's hip. He learns that he is using four-pound line with a six-pound leader. He is using a black-and-orange dart with a plastic tail. Of bucktail, he says, “Shad are not interested in that stuff.” He points his long flexible rod low over the water in exact conjunction with the swing of the dartâleaning forward intently, sighting down his line, a subtle lifting every few seconds, the ghost of a jig. He is not taking in line. A finger is on the filament, lightly touching its tension, like the curling fingers of a cellist. He tells Hackl that the shad were so thick near Foul Rift a week ago that he could feel the line go over their backs, could feel the line go over one fish while another came up for the dart. Hackl later compares him to a safecracker, and says that very few people can feel the tumblers fall. The man from Reading reels in another. He is an adroit horser but a horser nevertheless. He nets a fish in two minutes. Hackl asks him if it is a roe or a buck. He has no idea. Moreover, he would never eat such an orthopedic mess. He says he tried shad roe once. And how was that? Awful, he says, reeling in another shad. He says he has no idea why he always catches a great many more fish than do the people around him. He says that shad take lures into their mouths and back away from them in the same instant. All you need to do is sense the crucial moment and lift the dart. As hours pass, no one present catches much of anything, except the Reading Rifle, who is rarely without a fish on the line. The weather has turned cold. The temperature of the river is dropping. The fish are becoming hypothermic. The superstar does
not return in the evening. Fools return in the evening. Old fools, cold fools. This one feels nothing in two hours.
and opposite himâhelplessly watch. One guy leaves, because he is so disheartened. Hackl, on the other hand, the eternal academic, apprentices himself to the Reading Rifle, and learns at the master's hip. He learns that he is using four-pound line with a six-pound leader. He is using a black-and-orange dart with a plastic tail. Of bucktail, he says, “Shad are not interested in that stuff.” He points his long flexible rod low over the water in exact conjunction with the swing of the dartâleaning forward intently, sighting down his line, a subtle lifting every few seconds, the ghost of a jig. He is not taking in line. A finger is on the filament, lightly touching its tension, like the curling fingers of a cellist. He tells Hackl that the shad were so thick near Foul Rift a week ago that he could feel the line go over their backs, could feel the line go over one fish while another came up for the dart. Hackl later compares him to a safecracker, and says that very few people can feel the tumblers fall. The man from Reading reels in another. He is an adroit horser but a horser nevertheless. He nets a fish in two minutes. Hackl asks him if it is a roe or a buck. He has no idea. Moreover, he would never eat such an orthopedic mess. He says he tried shad roe once. And how was that? Awful, he says, reeling in another shad. He says he has no idea why he always catches a great many more fish than do the people around him. He says that shad take lures into their mouths and back away from them in the same instant. All you need to do is sense the crucial moment and lift the dart. As hours pass, no one present catches much of anything, except the Reading Rifle, who is rarely without a fish on the line. The weather has turned cold. The temperature of the river is dropping. The fish are becoming hypothermic. The superstar does
not return in the evening. Fools return in the evening. Old fools, cold fools. This one feels nothing in two hours.
Jim Merritt watches shad going past a given rock and goes upstream to cast back to the rock. Merritt is an almost pure fly fisherman. He eats his fish sometimes, and uses bait in the ocean. Tall and very trim, he can shoot a fly line seventy feet with a motion so slow it looks lazy. We are friends, neighbors, colleagues in New Jersey, and fish together on the upper river. Author of “Trout Dreams” and other books, he writes for many publications, including
Field & Stream
. Merritt, I should pause to say with unlimited appreciation, is my ichthyotherapist. In addition, he has watched over this book with brotherly concern. He has made fly rods for me and tied flies to go with them. Merritt knows the zip codes of fish. If he is bored and shadless, he goes up the river and fishes for trout. He says he knows where they like to hang. He returned one afternoon with a two-pound rainbow caught on a weighted size 4 black girdle bug. He had damaged the trout, so he kept it. Merritt is not a serious shad fisherman. Imagine taking off up a river to make twenty-metre casts to rainbow trout when you could be fishing for shad. He spends no more than two days a year getting what he calls his annual “shad fix.” He got it up in Equinunk one season, fishing around a boulder to a school of shad he could see. He said he noticed “that instant when the dart was inside the plane of the open mouth.” That was the moment when a fisherman should strike. The books say that shad hook themselves, and this does not contradict either Merritt or the Reading Rifle. The fish's movement up, down, or sideways may, with luck, do the trick. Knowing or feeling the key moment, though, will greatly increase the percentage of hookings, and, even when fishing blind (as most shad fishermen routinely do) the superstars seem to be aware of the moment. How? Merritt says they would not really know. That sixth
sense is something they just haveâan innate or experiential talentâand in all likelihood a person with such a gift will not be able to articulate what it is that is felt. This I know for sure: I do not have it. In the lower river, people in anchored boats set their lines in the river and don't even hold onto the rods. They wait for the fish to do it all. I'm afraid that's analogous to what I do with rod in hand upriver. I jig randomly. I'm waiting for the fish to act. A superstar reacts to every swing, and knows what is where, and when.
Field & Stream
. Merritt, I should pause to say with unlimited appreciation, is my ichthyotherapist. In addition, he has watched over this book with brotherly concern. He has made fly rods for me and tied flies to go with them. Merritt knows the zip codes of fish. If he is bored and shadless, he goes up the river and fishes for trout. He says he knows where they like to hang. He returned one afternoon with a two-pound rainbow caught on a weighted size 4 black girdle bug. He had damaged the trout, so he kept it. Merritt is not a serious shad fisherman. Imagine taking off up a river to make twenty-metre casts to rainbow trout when you could be fishing for shad. He spends no more than two days a year getting what he calls his annual “shad fix.” He got it up in Equinunk one season, fishing around a boulder to a school of shad he could see. He said he noticed “that instant when the dart was inside the plane of the open mouth.” That was the moment when a fisherman should strike. The books say that shad hook themselves, and this does not contradict either Merritt or the Reading Rifle. The fish's movement up, down, or sideways may, with luck, do the trick. Knowing or feeling the key moment, though, will greatly increase the percentage of hookings, and, even when fishing blind (as most shad fishermen routinely do) the superstars seem to be aware of the moment. How? Merritt says they would not really know. That sixth
sense is something they just haveâan innate or experiential talentâand in all likelihood a person with such a gift will not be able to articulate what it is that is felt. This I know for sure: I do not have it. In the lower river, people in anchored boats set their lines in the river and don't even hold onto the rods. They wait for the fish to do it all. I'm afraid that's analogous to what I do with rod in hand upriver. I jig randomly. I'm waiting for the fish to act. A superstar reacts to every swing, and knows what is where, and when.
June 4: Off to the river in waders on a Sunday morning, late. It is seven A.M., and the incomparable Erwin Dietz has been here catching fish since ten minutes after five. I haven't run into him in several years and have wondered what happened to him. The answer is “Nothing,” as the shad could tell you. Erwin invites me to join him on his rock. I hesitate and move toward other water. Erwin insists, says he often fishes with his son, side by side on a rock. We cast, Erwin hooks into a shad. I watch him bring it in. We soon cast again. Erwin hooks into a shad. He says he can feel them bump the dart in the center of the current, bump it again, and then go for it. With a third fish on his line, Erwin tells me to move around behind him and keep casting, in case there's another where his was. I fire my dart. Shad! “Doubleheader,” says Erwin. Fish netted, we are soon casting again. Another doubleheader. I am so high on adrenaline and vertically high on the rock that when the shad comes in and I scoop low with the net I poke it in the head and free the dart. “Quick release,” Erwin says. For thirty minutes beside Erwin, I am matching him one for one, for two, for three, four shad. Five for five shad. Muggsy Bogues could just have hit me with a nolook bounce pass, setting me up for a back somersault while sinking an underhanded flip shot from downtown.
The citrus king I interviewed in 1965 was Ben Hill Griffin, of Frostproof, Florida. His beloved granddaughter, then seven years old, was Katherine Harris, who grew up to become Florida's Secretary of State, and to fulfill a crucial role in the disputed election of George W Bush as President. Position counts. She cleared up some marbles out of the ring.
THE COMPENSATORY RESPONSE
W
hen a river sorts out its sediment loadâits boulders, cobbles, gravels, sands, and siltsâthe lighter things are carried farthest and the heavy stuff stays high, like placer gold in the first riffle of a sluice box. The upper Delaware is a big freestone stream, and some of the stones are the size of cabins. Many are not a whole lot bigger than armchairs. Wading on and among them can be difficult, especially where the currents are shoving you at ten thousand pounds per square inch. It helps that the water is clear. Except after long heavy rain, the water is clear. This is the Delaware River going past you at fifteen hundred cubic feet per second, and you can look down into it and read the label on your boots.
hen a river sorts out its sediment loadâits boulders, cobbles, gravels, sands, and siltsâthe lighter things are carried farthest and the heavy stuff stays high, like placer gold in the first riffle of a sluice box. The upper Delaware is a big freestone stream, and some of the stones are the size of cabins. Many are not a whole lot bigger than armchairs. Wading on and among them can be difficult, especially where the currents are shoving you at ten thousand pounds per square inch. It helps that the water is clear. Except after long heavy rain, the water is clear. This is the Delaware River going past you at fifteen hundred cubic feet per second, and you can look down into it and read the label on your boots.
You could also read the Clean Water Act of 1972, whose effect is everywhere in the big free-flowing river. As it passes cities, of course, the narrative intensifies and in Philadelphia becomes one of the signal chapters in the ongoing chronicle of the environmental movement. The twentieth century was not a great one for anadromous fish, lord knows, and before it was half over the spring shad runs in the Delaware River had been stopped all but cold by municipal and industrial pollution. Unnatural sludges were three metres thick, the edge of the river a film of refinery waste. From mines above Reading on the Schuylkill came acidic coal silts by the tens of millions of tons. Added in were the effluents of paint-and-dye works, tanneries, chemical factories, paper mills, and slaughterhouses,
and the flushed raw product of human bodies. A clean, green shad coming in from the ocean had about as much chance of getting past Philadelphia as it would have had surviving in a septic tank. Bacteria in the river consumed the water's dissolved oxygen. A thirty-mile reach from a little above Philadelphia to well below Chester was anoxic to the point of notoriety and acquired a litany of names: the black water, the pollution barrier, the pollution block, the Philadelphia sag, the d.o. sag. Ferries crossing the Delaware between Camden and Philadelphia plowed through dead fish. If shad made it past the barrier to go on upriver and spawn, their offspring faced the barrier coming down. In the summers of those years, shad schools in the Bay of Fundy commensurately declined.
and the flushed raw product of human bodies. A clean, green shad coming in from the ocean had about as much chance of getting past Philadelphia as it would have had surviving in a septic tank. Bacteria in the river consumed the water's dissolved oxygen. A thirty-mile reach from a little above Philadelphia to well below Chester was anoxic to the point of notoriety and acquired a litany of names: the black water, the pollution barrier, the pollution block, the Philadelphia sag, the d.o. sag. Ferries crossing the Delaware between Camden and Philadelphia plowed through dead fish. If shad made it past the barrier to go on upriver and spawn, their offspring faced the barrier coming down. In the summers of those years, shad schools in the Bay of Fundy commensurately declined.
The first fillip of environmental action came in the nineteen-thirties when the Interstate Commission on the Delaware River went to court. The industrial prerogatives of the Second World War undid the effort. In the late nineteen-forties, the federal Water Pollution Control Act somewhat lightened the sag, but commercial shad harvests that had reached many thousands of tons at the turn of the century were now under forty thousand pounds. In Lambertville, Fred Lewis netted about four thousand shad in 1939, about two hundred in 1945, and zero in 1953. Curiously, the resurgence of the shad run in the Delaware River was stimulated by environmental action that had nothing to do with people or legislation. In August, 1955, came two hurricanes so close together that their eyes were almost like double yolks. Called Connie and Diane, they attacked and flooded eastern America. Far upriver, where I read the labels on those boots in water going fifteen hundred cubic feet per second, local gauges, as a result of Connie and Diane, produced readings of a hundred and thirty thousand cubic feet per second. Exponentially gaining momentum on the way downstream, the waters plucked millions of pumpkins off the floodplains and spewed them like birdshot far into the Atlantic.
When these same waters reached the filth and deep sludges of the pollution barrier at Philadelphia, they scoured them out like a blown nose.
When these same waters reached the filth and deep sludges of the pollution barrier at Philadelphia, they scoured them out like a blown nose.
In 1963, in Lambertville, Fred Lewis seined six thousand shad. Meanwhile, a vanished figureâthe recreational shad fishermanâhad returned to the river. According to Dennis Scholl, a past president of the Delaware River Shad Fishermen's Association, the spring shad run first came back significantly in 1960, and by 1962 the river was laced with anglers. Joe Kasper, a fishing guide in the Trenton region, has described the sixties revival as “a marginal reappearance,” however. Enough remained of the pollution block to keep the runs modest, and another natural eventâa prolonged droughtâlowered the volume of the river and with it the levels of dissolved oxygen. After 1972, the enduring effectiveness of the Clean Water Act ever widened the way to the large migrations of the last quarter of the century, and to descriptions like this one by Anthony Brandt in
American Heritage
(April, 1994). “ ⦠the rocky bottom of the river is visible at depths of up to eight feet. You can also see the trout, which are plentiful, poised among the stones, and the pods of shad, twenty, fifty, one hundred fish moving upstream.” The shad were counted at first by extrapolation from the results of tagging programs, and later by hydroacoustical instrumentation attached to the pier of a bridge. In the eighties and nineties, according to the instruments, there were spring migrations in the Delaware exceeding seven hundred thousand shad. In summers in the Bay of Fundy, the schools commensurately increased.
American Heritage
(April, 1994). “ ⦠the rocky bottom of the river is visible at depths of up to eight feet. You can also see the trout, which are plentiful, poised among the stones, and the pods of shad, twenty, fifty, one hundred fish moving upstream.” The shad were counted at first by extrapolation from the results of tagging programs, and later by hydroacoustical instrumentation attached to the pier of a bridge. In the eighties and nineties, according to the instruments, there were spring migrations in the Delaware exceeding seven hundred thousand shad. In summers in the Bay of Fundy, the schools commensurately increased.
Nature being in so many ways cyclical, it is not surprising that the twenty-first century brought more alarm than confidence to the likes of me. Despite the official figuresâthe twenty-year averages of three hundred and fifty thousand shad in the Connecticut River, four hundred thousand in the Delawareâit seemed obvious to shad fishermen that runs were again diminishing. The evidence
was in large part anecdotal. George Bernard, co-founder of the Shad Museum, in Higganum, Connecticut, said he knew a commercial fisherman in Nyack, on the Hudson River, who used to take his shad to the Fulton Fish Market in a tractor trailer and now used a pickup. The number of commercial shad fishermen on the Connecticut River had rapidly dropped from twenty-five to four. Sport fishermen were spending more time casting and less time reeling in fish. My own fishing diaries were showing a marked increase in time on the river versus shad in the net, but I didn't care.
was in large part anecdotal. George Bernard, co-founder of the Shad Museum, in Higganum, Connecticut, said he knew a commercial fisherman in Nyack, on the Hudson River, who used to take his shad to the Fulton Fish Market in a tractor trailer and now used a pickup. The number of commercial shad fishermen on the Connecticut River had rapidly dropped from twenty-five to four. Sport fishermen were spending more time casting and less time reeling in fish. My own fishing diaries were showing a marked increase in time on the river versus shad in the net, but I didn't care.
Not only were the fish more scarce but also they were younger and smaller. In the Connecticut, which had known eleven-pound shad, a five-pound six-ounce roe had taken first place in the 1999 Shad Derby at South Hadley. In the Delaware, some roe shad were now in the two-pound range, and there were bucks of twenty-four ounces. The rogue roe shad I caught in Lambertville that took a hundred and fifty-five minutes to land was, as I have mentioned, only three years old, while the ages of virgin females coming in to spawn had long been four or five years. In that era (the early nineteen-nineties) the fact that she was three years old was even more unusual than her exceptional tenacity. She signalled what was to come. The number of three-year-old roes in the spring migration considerably increased in following years. “A population reduced in abundance needs to spawn earlier,” Boyd Kynard explained. “It's a compensatory response to mortality. As populations decrease, they become sexually mature earlier. When populations do this, they're not just doing it for the hell of it. One of the first signs of an overfished or otherwise threatened population is when the average age goes down. Somewhere in the shad life cycle, abundance is being affected. All the populations that we know of on the East Coast show this decline in abundance. Our run in the Connecticut River is down fifty per cent. There's mortality happening somewhere.”
Ask a shad fisherman where the mortality is and you'll get a
strong, clear answer. Ask another shad fisherman, and you'll get a strong, clear, different answer. This is topic B on the river. When shad fishermen are not talking about the fish they have caught, they are talking about who caught the fish of which they have been deprived.
strong, clear answer. Ask another shad fisherman, and you'll get a strong, clear, different answer. This is topic B on the river. When shad fishermen are not talking about the fish they have caught, they are talking about who caught the fish of which they have been deprived.
“Portuguese.”
“There's Portuguese fishing boats out there in the ocean stealing shad.”
“I don't know if they're Portuguese or Japanese, they're gill-netting shad in the ocean.”
“They're Americans. They're commercial fishermen from the Chesapeake Bay who go out off the Virginia Capes and haul in shad for cat food.”
“They call it the âocean intercept fishery.'”
“It's not them. It's sport fishermen who are really killing off the shad.”
“Striped bass are what's really murdering shad. Stripers in the rivers in the fall eat millions of baby shad. Their bellies are bulging with juvenile shad.”
“It's not the striped bass, it's the algae blooms that are killing off the shad.”
The indictment of striped bass, also known as rockfish, might have been a little more airtight if people on the river had not been making the same complaint for a century: “The rock fish, in fact, comes into our rivers for the sole purpose of feeding upon the young shad,” said Dr. J. Ernest Scott, of New Hope, Pennsylvania, in a paper called “Old Shad Fisheries on the Delaware River,” read before the Bucks County Historical Society in 1908.
In 1998, the Shad and River Herring Management Board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission decided to phase out the ocean-intercept fishery. The commercial interceptors were getting only five cents a pound for shad, but the fishery filled an
important gap for them. “Shad carry fishermen through the early part of the yearâthe time of year when other fish are not present,” said Jack Travelstead, Virginia's Chief of Fisheries. Implying that ocean catches were indeed the cause of the decline in population, he added: “The offshore fishery harvests the greatest number of shad harvestedâthe majority.”
important gap for them. “Shad carry fishermen through the early part of the yearâthe time of year when other fish are not present,” said Jack Travelstead, Virginia's Chief of Fisheries. Implying that ocean catches were indeed the cause of the decline in population, he added: “The offshore fishery harvests the greatest number of shad harvestedâthe majority.”
With regard to the diminished population, Boyd Kynard is not much moved by blooming algae, voracious bass, or floating interceptors from any nation: “There's a lot of us who believe it's not as simple as that, and what could be causing these decreases in abundance is not the traditional overharvest, because the data are in, and there's no large foreign fishing fleet or sport-fishing groups that are causing this massive decline in abundance out there. You have to look to more natural cycles, about which we know very little. We know that the climate is changing. We know that the sea temperatures are changing. We know that areas which were previously very warm in the North Atlantic are now very cold, and very unsuitable for Atlantic salmon. The same sorts of things may be going on with American shadâthat is, areas in the ocean that were formerly good places to overwinter, good places to feed, may now be colder and not have those food resources that shad have evolved a genetic homing to. When they get to those places, there's very poor feed. This may be causing mortalities. There's also striped bass. I am one of the school that doesn't believe that striped bass are the sole contributing factor to the decline of abundance of shad on the East Coast. I certainly think they can be a factor. If you talk about the potential loss of feeding areas at sea and the increased predation by striped bass on a shad population, now you're talking about two factors thatâacting togetherâcould possibly be responsible for the large declines in American shad in rivers all up and down the East Coast.”
I asked him if sport fishing could change the population.
He said, “Not unless the number gets way down. Then, any kind of mortalityâsport fishing, problems with damsâgets to be a great deal more important.”
The twentieth century's crenelated pattern of abundance and decline and then renewed abundance and recurring decline is generally taken as a textbook example of latter-day environmental stressâthe world in its handbasket approaching its landing in hell. It is of interest, though, that in the nineteenth century this same anadromous species went through a crenelated pattern of abundance and decline and then renewed abundance and recurring declineâa result and example of environmental stress. The first dam in the Connecticut River was constructed, after all, in 1798. In 1822, Philadelphia blocked the Schuylkill, the city's need for reserved water taking automatic precedence over the free-flowing nature of the river. In 1830 and 1839, dams were completed on the Susquehanna that pushed back the spring migration to within forty-odd miles of the Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, the Connecticut had been blocked in all but its first fifty miles. As demand increased and supply dwindled, commercial fisheries prospered where rivers still flowed free. All through the nineteenth century there were commercial shad fisheries in many places on the Delaware River. They had names like modern music groupsâNew Shaven, Quick Step, Snapjaw, Wool Cap, Jug, Crab, Purgatoryâand they lasted in large numbers a hundred years. Many a “water haul” was madeâthat is, the seine came in empty. At the fishery at Betley's Point one season, soon after the turn of the nineteenth century, thirteen consecutive water hauls were made. The fourteenth pass netted eighteen hundred shad. Thatâto a farethee-wellâis shad fishing. One day in the eighteen-thirties, Dr. Samuel Ladd Howell's Fancy Hill Fishery, on the left bank across from Philadelphia, hauled in a net containing ten thousand eight hundred shad. In the
American Journal of Science and Arts
(July,
1837), Dr. Howell praised both God and shad for their abundance and availability: “They afford a striking illustration of the goodness and design of an all-wise Providence, in making it a law of their nature that they shall thus annually throw themselves within the reach of man.”
American Journal of Science and Arts
(July,
1837), Dr. Howell praised both God and shad for their abundance and availability: “They afford a striking illustration of the goodness and design of an all-wise Providence, in making it a law of their nature that they shall thus annually throw themselves within the reach of man.”
In 1839, the Massachusetts Zoological and Botanical Survey reported: “The Concord shad have almost entirely disappeared, their ascent having been cut off by dams.” Henry David Thoreau, two years out of college, was not unmindful of this development, least of all during the fortnight that summer when he travelled by dory with his brother, John, on the trip that resulted ten years later in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Thoreau and the aquaculturist Seth Green were the nineteenth century's foremost defenders of American shadâGreen the more practical, Thoreau the more passionate.
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