Renee Shannon joins Grifton locals for an authentic fish fry at the Country Store.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nWhen the fish are hot, we fill plates with fillets, fried hunks of roe, potato salad and coleslaw. I’ve never eaten roe before, and roll the tiny firm grains across my tongue. Despite the vinegar, the herring and shad are crunchy with needle-sharp bones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The locals eat the fish \u2014 bones and all \u2014 wrapped in white bread with ketchup. “If the bones catch in your throat, you swallow the bread and it catches in the bread and passes on through,” McLawhorn tells me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stories around the smoky table focus on the good fishing. “The hottest spot is at the mouth of Contentnea Creek,” McLawhorn says. “There’s more (shad) in supply this year than any year I can remember. I’ve never seen a run like this before.” This very day, in fact, a Greenville man brought in his catch to be weighed \u2014 a 3.8-pound hickory shad that tied the state record established in 1992. I can’t help but think of Strachey’s yard-long shad, missing from these waters for centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anticipation is building for the Grifton Shad Festival, which started in 1971 to celebrate the town’s long love affair with hickory shad. A sport fishery for shad has flourished on the Neuse River and Contentnea Creek since the 1800s, and the hook-and-line fishery continues to grow. While American shad and striped bass or rockfish were high-dollar, export fare for much of the 20th century, herring and hickory shad fed the locals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Janet Hasely, a New York native, helped establish the festival to recognize the town’s fishing heritage, and she continues to be its biggest promoter. She drops by after dinner to share some of the special “Mo Shad” merchandise, ranging from flags and T-shirts to jewelry. “Mo Shad,” the Grifton mascot, is a bony hickory shad skeleton that appeared with the words “Eat Mo’ Shad” on the town’s old drawbridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The festival features prizes for the biggest and earliest shad catches of the season, a fish fry, a “shad toss” in which participants compete to see who can hurl a dead fish the farthest, and a casting contest with rod and reel. Arts and crafts booths, a “Shad Queen” contest, parade and street performances round out the festivities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The annual event routinely draws about 10,000 out-of-town visitors, and McLawhorn appreciates the influx of sport fishers. Amid rumors of the good shad run, business has been especially brisk. “I’ve ordered more fishing tackle in the last month than I usually sell in the whole spring.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next morning, I try out some of that tackle. I spend a good 20 minutes figuring out how to cast into the current at the mouth of Contentnea Creek, as McLawhorn and Bahen duck and grimace behind me. Finally, after at least half an hour of ineffective casting \u2014 during which Bahen reels in three fish and McLawhorn, two \u2014 I get my first nibble. My line pulls hard to the right \u2014 my first fish ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If anything, the men are more excited than I am. Sadly, my first hickory shad disappears into the muddy water as I bring it alongside the boat. Bahen declares it a catch and release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even more determined, I flick the line out into the stream over and over. Around 11 a.m., as my casting wrist is getting numb, I pull a two-pound hickory roe shad over the side of the boat. Smiling proudly, I hold it all wrong for the camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s a long road ahead with no refrigeration, but I wish I could pack up my fish and take it home to eat. I’m a child of grocery stores and fast food chains, and the only herring I’d eaten before yesterday came in a can with a peel-back lid. Self-sufficiency is a flavor I’ve never tasted. McLawhorn assures me that someone will enjoy my catch and adds my shad to the others in the fish well. Then he guns the engines for a fast, cold ride back to the boat ramp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JAMESVILLE, ROANOKE RIVER<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
At Murray-Nixon fish company, baskets of herring await processing.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nAs we drive north, I scan the roadside canals for signs of fishing. In the old days, kids used to suspend bushel baskets from the bridges, waiting for telltale vibrations to travel up the ropes to their hands. A deft flick of the wrist, and up came the dripping basket with a few herring in it. Men and women would fish in the shallows with bow nets made from curved pieces of juniper and hand\u00ad-knotted twine. When fish flooded the streams, a good bow net could trap more than 100 herring in a single dip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Jamesville, once home to three commercial fisheries, seine hauls were so heavy that horses had to pull them in. These are the kind of memories Jeff Phelps wants to preserve in a Jamesville museum. An outspoken member of the town board, he appreciates the proud local traditions of the river herring fishery. “Elders have told me that for hundreds of years, when the herring would come up the river, there was some kind of festival here…. They’d have a seine all the way across the river and they’d crank them in. People would come down to the river in their Sunday dress to buy herring.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The herring run and the festival historically coincided with Easter Sunday and homecoming for local churches. The modem Jamesville Herring Festival is held on Easter Monday every year. For Phelps, a museum is the next logical step to recognize Jamesville’s heritage. History buffs also could pull tourist dollars into an economically depressed county.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He hopes to open a temporary museum in the town hall, displaying old photographs of the fishery. If his dreams become reality, a permanent museum will be housed in the Burras House someday. “It’s the oldest building in town, established around 1790,” Phelps says. “All the rest of the buildings were burned in the Civil War.” The museum could include Civil War-era artifacts and relics of the fishery. Phelps would also like to see Jamesville get a public boat ramp \u2014 something inexplicably missing from a town so defined by its relationship with the river.<\/p>\n\n\n
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The small-town charm of Jamesville’s Cypress Grill has made it a popular destination during herring season.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nJamesville is so renowned for its herring that it boasts the Cypress Grill, a weather-beaten restaurant open only between January and May. What’s on the menu? Herring, herring and herring. People drive from all over the state to eat there, and at the neighboring River’s Edge Restaurant. But when we arrive in town and drive to the parking lot overlooking the water, we find both restaurants closed and few people on the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
McLawhorn had warned us that herring had been scarce in the Roanoke River. “The dams should be opened…they’re holding the fish back. They need to turn loose the water.” Upstream from Jamesville, at Lake Gaston, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operates dams that control the water levels in the river system, and the 1999 springtime drought has meant low flow for months. Salt water has pushed far inland, and fishers worry that herring aren’t getting the signals they need to push upriver to spawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“What are you catching?” I ask veteran fishers on the riverbank. They’re selling a handful of river herring from a waxed cardboard box in the back of a pickup truck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Mostly rock,” they tell me. Striped bass have made an amazing comeback from dangerously low levels a decade ago, and their catch is still highly regulated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the fishers, Billy Williams, argues that similar state regulations are killing the commercial herring fishery. “They’ve cut us down to 100,000 pounds of fish for the Roanoke and Albemarle,” he says. “We’ll never catch any more fish.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vance Price nods. “Three or four years ago, you caught 1,200 fish in one drift,” he says. This year, the fishers’ nets come up almost empty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TAKING STOCK<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Workers unload fish from the conveyor belt at Herbert Byrum’s fish house.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nHerbert Byrum’s back yard slopes right down to a branch of the Chowan River. Between his place and his brother’s is a fish house where they unload their catch onto conveyor belts and into the backs of trucks bound for Perry-Wynns or Murray-Nixon Fish Company. “We got through Floyd pretty good,” Byrum says, long after the 1999 spring run is over. “It tore up our piers and our unloading conveyor…There was probably two and a half to three feet of water in the fish house.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Far more devastating was 1999’s low catch of herring. “We did a little sorrier up here than we generally do,” Byrum says. “The rock are taking ’em. They stayed in the south end of the river.” He estimates that he caught 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of herring a day and up to 6,000 pounds of striped bass, though he could only keep 10 of the rockfish per day due to MFC regulations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s a far cry from the 1930s, when farmers in the area would come to the river to buy a year’s worth of herring for their tenants. In more recent times, Byrum has faced several adversaries in the fight to keep the river herring fishery alive. Ditching and draining of the river’s tributaries for agriculture destroyed some herring spawning grounds. In the 1970s and 1980s, pollution from upstream industries and runoff from agriculture turned the Chowan River into a green soup of algae and dead fish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Massive cleanup efforts that began in the 1980s have resulted in improved striped bass and white perch fisheries and decreased incidences of algal blooms. But now that the water quality is back, years of over-fishing are taking their toll. The state has enacted strict rules to protect river herring stocks and let their numbers rebound, but to many struggling commercial fishers, the regulations curbing their industry are anathema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fishers who work the inland waters must comply with regulations set by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, while coastal waters are regulated by the Marine Fisheries Commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sara Winslow, fish biologist with the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF), explains the rationale behind the 1999 regulations, which reduced the quota for the river herring fishery to 450,000 pounds. The quota was subdivided to include 300,000 pounds from the Chowan pound-net fishery; 100,000 pounds from the Albemarle gill-net fishery, which includes the Roanoke River; and 50,000 pounds that could be assigned at the DMF director’s discretion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“River herring stocks are still over\u00adfished and populations are at extremely low levels,” Winslow says. “The number of spawners in the population is very low.” Stock assessment analyses also show that the number of recruits \u2014 fish that reach sexual maturity and return \u2014 is also very low.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Buckets hold dozens of fat catfish, bycatch from a heavy load of river herring.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nEach year, the DMF samples the river herring harvest to assess the overall stock. Most of the herring harvested are 3 to 5 years old \u2014 usually first-time spawners \u2014 suggesting that the older ones have been fished out. Younger fish are still in the ocean, maturing before they spawn for the first time. “We want to see a wide span of age classes represented in a harvest,” Winslow says. “For the last 10 years, the majority of the harvest is from one- to three-year classes.” In the 1970s, up to eight-year classes were represented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In February, the Marine Fisheries Commission adopted a Fishery Management Plan for river herring. The plan limits the commercial herring fishery to 300,000 pounds per year. That total allowable catch is divided into three portions: 200,000 pounds for the pound\u00adnet fishery on the Chowan; 67,000 pounds for gill nets in the Albemarle Sound herring management area; and 33,000 pounds that the DMF director can assign. With the new limits, the division expects it will take 14 to 24 years for the river herring fishery to recover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The commission also instituted a new cap or daily creel limit of 25 river herring for recreational anglers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The final herring management plan vote came after criticism of an earlier proposal that would have limited river herring to a 100,000-pound bycatch fishery. Under that plan, herring would only be harvested incidentally, as a limited “bycatch” when fishing for other species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Byrum was among a group of fishers who thought the bycatch proposal would result in wasted fish. “If it’s a 25 percent bycatch, you’ll have to catch 100 pounds of white perch and catfish before you can take in 25 pounds of herring.” Since a pound net holds 5,000 pounds of fish, if the rest of the fish are herring, they’ll have to be thrown back. And herring just aren’t the same after being squeezed in a tight net with a lot of other fish. “That’s 4,875 pounds of herring that will die and get thrown away,” Byrum says. “That’s stupid. Herring is a fragile fish. If you bunch it up, it’ll die.”<\/p>\n\n\n
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Fried herring at the Cypress Grill is a springtime tradition.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nThe 300,000-pound limit was approved after the Marine Fisheries Commission again heard from the co-\u00adchairs of an advisory panel for the river herring management plan. The panel had recommended a total catch of 450,000 pounds. Jerry Schill, president of the North Carolina Fisheries Association, says he was pleased that advisors had a chance to present their proposal again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There may be no simple solutions for the recovery of these fisheries. Shad and river herring are more than fine-\u00adtasting, silvery fish that swim up North Carolina’s rivers every spring, pulled by forces we neither see nor feel. For generations of hard-working citizens \u2014 often the state’s poorest and most invisible people \u2014 they have been gifts from the river, a seemingly endless bounty that created jobs, traditions, and plenty in the midst of want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the numbers of shad and herring continue to dwindle, a part of North Carolina heritage vanishes with them: three centuries of town reunions on the riverbank, baked shad at Easter, fresh herring at the Cypress Grill, 5,000 pounds of fragile fish flashing in a net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Byrum says, it’s beautiful fishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n