Shad Fishing with Everett Nack
by Cynthia Owen Philip
Once upon a time I went shad fishing with Everett Nack, the Hudson River's quintessential commercial fisherman. I was living in Claverack then and knew him because I used to buy shad from his wife, to whom he entrusted the sales. She was a Rock City girl who could de-scale and filet a slippery fish faster than you could pull a dollar from your pocket. Then she would toss the heads to her prancing, gleaming black Labradors. The tails went into her garden. It grew the most magnificent lilies of the valley and delphinium I have ever seen.
I also knew Everett because he kept his catch of goldfish in one of our farm ponds before sending it to his buyers in New Jersey. In addition he used to trap skunks, pop out the spray sacs, tame them and dispense them as pets. My daughter desperately wanted one. Fortunately, Everett was otherwise preoccupied that season.
One day I summoned the courage to ask him if he would take me shad fishing. "Sure," he said. "I like to fish the up tide. It will be changing in that direction just after six o'clock in the morning two days from now. You can meet us at the landing in Linlithgo at that time."
Big round Mr. Sun was just peeking over the purple hills as I slipped groggily out of bed, sloshed down some coffee and sped south on 9G to Linlithgo. Everett's sixteen-foot wooden row boat was piled high with a 500-foot, twenty-foot deep net, neatly folded in big overlapping pleats for easy launching. One of his four sons was at the oars. Watching the dexterity with which Everett played out the net was a joy. On its top were buoys on thirteen-foot strings to give space for larger boats to ride over them, although the law, based on ancient custom, gives commercial fishermen first rights. On the bottom were big rings to weight the net down. The trick was to cast a buoy in one direction and a ring in the other so that the net landed flat on the water and the tide took it out as it sank upright; hence, a set net is called a drift. After it was in place there was little to do, or so it seemed to me, but watch the buoys bobble a bit as the shad hit it, caught by the gills as they coursed up the river to their special spawning grounds. That's the place where each shad was hatched. They find it instinctively after a five-year growing spell in the ocean. They then return to spawn in that place every year.
Within a little over an hour, Nack reckoned it was time to pull in the net. The timing has to do more with knowing the river and what snags the drift might run into than the size of the catch, he told me. But in those days it was easy to satisfy both needs. The net was studded with shad slashing silver as they struggled to free themselves from their entrapment. Nack said I could help take them off. I did it, if not too proficiently, glad at last for some work. In my mind, I can still feel their stickiness and smell their fresh fishiness. It was a good haul—more high priced roe shad than buck shad—and there were enough fish to fill all Everett's New York City and local orders. Among them was a lone striped bass. "Only the second one I've ever netted," Everett exclaimed. "Got one last year. Too bad, because of the PCBs, you're not supposed to eat them."
The Disappearing Shad
Unhappily, things have changed dramatically since that fine outing. On a cold day this January, with dreams of spring bringing succulent baked shad and bacon-topped sauteed roe to my table, I paid a long postponed visit to Everett. Keen and nimble as ever, he filled me on the latest river fishing scenario.
"Today there are so few shad you have to fish a whole tide to make it worthwhile," he told me. "You drift one net, then a hundred yards further north you set another. You go back the to pick up the fish in the first net, and drift that net a hundred yards north of the second net, which you then empty." It now takes the full seven hours and a lot more heft to get far fewer fish. And there are the bass to contend with. They have multiplied and multiplied. (Chester Day, veteran fisherman of Red Hook, says they double in number every year.) They not only tear the nets, they gobble up shad fingerlings making their way to the ocean. Unlike shad—which do not eat while they are on their spawning run but live off their stored fat—stripers are voracious.
But worst of all, Everett believes, is the chlorine discharged by the municipal sewer plants that empty into the river—fifty to sixty tons a year starting in 1979, in accordance with a law prescribing centralized facilities. This discharge kills both eggs and fingerlings, he says. The only ray of hope came in 1998 when for a period the state cut the allowable chlorine discharge by 75% (which with new technologies was relatively easy to do). In the 1999 season, the river was boiling with shad fingerlings. But after that, the catch mysteriously slipped back to its former slim pickings.
Moreover, the rich diversity of river species has now all but disappeared, he told me. There are virtually no more tubifex worms, no snails, no frogs, no salamanders, no smelt, no silver and golden shiners, and very few hardheads —"killys," they're called, or more formally, blue-banded mud minnows. The few remaining carp are on the no-eat list. Even ducks are scarce, he said. Because there is little food for them on the river, most of those remaining have resorted to inland ponds. Some fishermen blame the water chestnuts, too, complaining that they form such light impenetrable canopies in the coves as to wipe out the lower food chain.
Scientists add zebra mussels to the black list. Extremely efficient filter-feeders, they rob shad fingerlings of the plankton they need, according to Dave Strayer of the Institute for Ecosystem Studies. Each one passes two gallons of water a day through its body, wiping it clean of anything edible, even bacteria. The number of zebra mussels varies widely from year to year. In heavy years up to a half a trillion of them filter the river; in light years, they are hard to find. Nack agrees. He reports that up to eight years ago the bottom of his boat was covered with mussels; now there are none. Strayer thinks this is because the multitudes eat up the nutrients, starving out the next generation. Eventually they come back again — in spades. Roger Downs, who has been catching shad in a program that sends roe to the Susquehanna to repopulate its once teaming waters, told me that, in the past ten years, zebra mussels have thoroughly cleansed the Hudson off Astor Point in Rhinebeck.
Another recognized threat to all fish on the river is non-point source pollution such as petroleum, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and dissolved manure that reach the river and its tributaries from nearby housing and commercial developments and farms.
Furthermore, according to Clearwater's Navigator, the water taken from and discharged into the river by the major riparian power plants destroys untold trillions of fish. The Indian Point power plant has been authorized to take in 2 billion gallons of water a day for its cooling operation. Over 13 million shad a year as well as 158 million striped bass and billions of larval and plantonic fish are scooped up at the same time. After the water has performed its cooling function, it is discharged into the river at temperatures up to 19* hotter than the ambient temperature. Little aquatic life survives. The NYS DEC has issued a draft bill mandating closed-cycle cooling, which would eliminate 95% of the loss, but since it contains a "conforming to the best technology available" clause, it may well turn out to be an illusion. Finally there is the bustling off shore fishery. These large boats catch the shad as they migrate along the Atlantic coast in the spring; the poor fish never get a chance to reach their home rivers to spawn. Perhaps a new federal program will stop this depredation.
The present sad fact is that, whereas during the shad spawning seasons of the late 1970s and 80s Nack used to send tons of fish every day to New York City, today he's lucky to get enough shad for his local trade and roe for his high-classs Boston market. He also used to net five hundred pounds of perch, sunfish, bullheads, among other species; today, he says, three or five of these fish are an average catch. The result is there are now only ten or twelve commercial fishermen on the Dutchess and Columbia county stretch of the Hudson.
Still Fishing
Everett is just plain angry when he talks about the river's deterioration. But that has not stopped him from fishing. He took me to his attic to see the net filament on which he's sewing top and bottom ropes for the upcoming season. Soon he'll add buoys and lead. He also has a heavy 500-foot haul seine among his equipment. He ties one end on the shore, makes a wide circle in the water with other end, then swings the seine around, landing the fish on the shore. What's hard to find, he says, is a snagless length of beach.
Back downstairs, Everett discoursed on all sorts of fascinating shad lore. For instance there are, according to tradition, three distinct shad runs. The first, in early May when the shad bush and forsythia are in bloom, is known for its fat roe. The second comes with the lilac bloom and is appropriately called the lilac run. The roe is smaller, because eggs leave the sac in layers—that is, not all at once but over a period of time, and several layers may already have been spewed off before the fish reach our area. The third is the locust run, in early June when those trees are in bloom. These shad are smaller, but their roes are large. Everett thinks they may be first year spawners.
The fertilized eggs hatch in four to six days, depending on the warmth of the water. In October, the fingerlings made their way to North Carolina, where shad congregate 200 miles off the coast. They spend summers in the Bay of Fundy gorging on its rich array of shrimp and other nutrients. When they are four or five years old they return to the place where they were hatched to spawn. Shad, it seems, have a big brain for a fish, and use their sight and hearing and the lateral line sensitivity as well as instinct to find the exact location. Nack told me that he once picked up six fish that had been sent to the Susquehanna for its restoration project the previous year in the same location in the Hudson where he had tagged them.
All the while Nack was recounting these things, he was busily knitting a herring net. He does it in the old fashioned way: with a spacer and a long steel needle around which he wraps his twine, running it through a notch at its end. His fingers flew so fast and so surely I couldn't see how he was doing it. Very kindly he slowed down and I think I figured out the knotting, though I knew I'd be clumsy at best if I tried it. Then he showed me how he tapered the net after the midpoint by joining the end two squares together. When finished it will be four-foot square. He'll secure wooden bows into the corners and to a midpoint block of wood to which he will attach a long pole. The end product, he says, looks something like an overturned umbrella. Then, in the spring when they're running, he'll "scap" for herring at Linlithgo and Columbiaville.
As I left, Everett Nack invited me to go shad fishing with him again. I can hardly wait for the shad bush to bloom. A working day on the river with a heaping plate of fresh-cooked shad and asparagus at its terminus is, in my mind, a day of sheer bliss.
