It's sad to see the shad industry floundering

Several factors have led to the decline of the fishery, which once thrived along the Connecticut River. BY TOM MEADE

• ESSEX, Conn. -- From the mouth of the Connecticut River at Old Saybrook, upstream to Turners Falls, Mass., sport fishermen are celebrating an ancient rite of spring, the spawning run of American shad. In Essex, Conn., Saturday, sport fishermen and commercial netters will join together for the Connecticut River Museum's Shad Festival.
• Upstream in Haddam, Joe Zaientz, a retired netter, and George Bernard, a sport fishermen, have forged a friendship and founded a museum centered on shad, the state fish of Connecticut.
• The Haddam Shad Museum is housed in a tiny building behind an office building where Zaientz once practiced dentistry by day. By night, he netted shad, using essentially the same methods George Washington used as a commercial shad fisherman.
• "Real commercial fishermen fish from sunset to sunrise to make money," Zaientz said. "I only took one drift and was home by 9:30 so I could get a good night's sleep and not be sued for malpractice."
• Before the settlers, Native Americans trapped shad on rivers from Nova Scotia to what is now the St. John's River in Florida, the shad's natural range. Some of their stone traps are still visible on many streams including the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania and the Westfield in Massachusetts.
• The dams of the Industrial Revolution decimated or completely destroyed the shad population on some rivers. On the Pawcatuck and Palmer rivers in Rhode Island, small runs of shad remain. On other streams, particularly the Hudson and the Connecticut, the shad continued to run upstream as far as they could to spawn each spring, and a small commercial fishery thrived.
• For generations, residents of the Connecticut River Valley waited for the first shad of spring with as much anticipation as they looked forward to the first Hadley asparagus, another local delicacy.
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• The fish kept coming, even through the early 20th Century when the river was filthy with pollution.
• For about six weeks, when the forsythia and shadbush were in blossom, the mouth of the Connecticut supported a fleet of haul-seiners who caught the fish, women who boned the fish, and packers and teamsters who shipped the shad to markets and restaurants all over the East.
• Today, the numbers of fish and commercial fishermen have dwindled. Once there were as many as 1.5 million shad annually counted at the dam in Holyoke, Mass., where an elevator lifts them upstream. Now, there are only between 500,000 and 750,000, said Bernard. He blames the burgeoning striped bass population for ruining the run of shad and other members of the herring family. (As recently as the 1980s, it was unheard of to find stripers above the Connecticut's brackish water; now the predatory striped bass are common as far upstream as Springfield, Mass.) Other recreational fishermen blame over-exploitation by commercial fishermen at sea.
• "When I started my dental practice in 1970," Zaientz said, "there were 16 commercial boats right here in Haddam, and I would say there were probably 80 commercial fishermen [in the lower river.] Now I'd say there are less than 16 in all."
• Several factors, Zaientz and Bernard believe, led to the demise of the shad fishery.
• The world market. "You can buy fish from anywhere in the world now," Zaientz said. "People don't have the excitement for local food anymore. You can buy strawberries at any time of the year. It's the same with fish. There's no excitement about the new crop anymore. People have gotten spoiled.
• The lack of youthful enterprise. "When there were 16 boats here in Haddam, a lot of them were manned by high-
• school kids," Zaientz said. "It was a good way to make a lot of money in the spring. Nowadays, a kid doesn't need a seasonal job; he can just go to McDonald's for a year-round job."
• The lack of processors. "Shad's a bony fish," Zaientz said. "In years past, local women could make a lot of supplemental income by boning fish in a month and a half. Now there are more jobs available for women, so most of the boning is being done by older people. There are very few people learning how to bone."
• "And it's very hard to learn," Bernard said. "It takes me about 10 minutes. There are approximately 970 bones in a shadand it takes a lot of skill to get them."
• Over the years, as Americans became more affluent, more people began pursuing American shad for sport. Recreational anglers sometimes call the fish "the poor man's salmon" in the North or "poor man's tarpon" in the South because it was available to everyone, and when it's hooked, the shad leaps like a salmon or a tarpon. It's a fierce fighter.
• In 1871, barrels of shad were shipped by train to the Sacramento River in California. Today, they thrive from the upper Baja California in Mexico to Alaska, but a commercial fishery never developed on the West Coast, Zaientz said, "because no one knows how to bone them out there."
• The American shad is a member of the herring genus, Alosa; its Latin species name, sapidissima, means "very tasty." The fish's French name is similar: alose savoureuse.
• The fish's roe is prized everywhere. New Englanders prefer their shad fillets bone-free, but in the Mid-Atlantic, fishermen slow-cook shad on planks or deep-fry chunks of fish so the bones virtually disintegrate.
• Restaurants throughout the Connecticut River Valley are serving shad now. Some are also offering Hadley asparagus from the farm region upstream in Massachusetts.
• Cooks, shad boners, commercial fishermen, recreational anglers, and others who share a passion for shad will gather at the Connecticut River Museum Shad Festival Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The museum is less than an hour from Rhode Island. From Route 95, take Exit 89 to Route 9 north. Then from Route 9, take Exit 3 and follow the signs to the Connecticut River Museum in Essex.
• The Haddam Shad Museum is open Sundays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. From Rout. 9, take Exit 9 and follow Route 81 to the village of Higganum. The museum is on scenic Route 154 in Higganum.