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Fish haul aims to spawn a Rappahannock revival

May 25, 2008 12:15 am

BY FRANK DELANO

FORT BELVOIR

That's what the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Rappahannock and other coastal Indians once called the April moon. It was a sign that the rivers were full of shad swimming upstream to spawn. The Indians filled their baskets with the fat fish and feasted by the water.

The biologists' boat was anchored two miles below Mount Vernon, where George Washington's slaves landed shad and salted them down in barrels.

The biologists also were seeking shad, but not for supper. Dean Fowler and Mike Isel work for the Shad Restoration Project of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

Their purpose that night, as well as on 15 other nights in April and May, was to collect eggs of American shad in the Potomac to restock the once vital and now nearly vanished fish in the Rappahannock River.

Processing that night's batch of eggs would take 12 days.

It continued in jars and tanks at a fish hatchery in King and Queen County. It produced 659,293 half-inch fry, as the barely visible shad larvae are called, which were released into the Rappahannock May 1 at Kelly's Ford in Culpeper County.

Dams on the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg blocked shad from reaching their upriver spawning grounds for almost 150 years.

In 2004, a great explosion of concrete and water breached Embrey Dam, built in 1910, and a wooden crib dam built in 1854. In that tumultuous instant, a shad path was opened from the sea almost to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The state began its restocking effort in the Rappahannock in 2003. Biologists could not find enough brood stock in the Rappahannock, so they went to the Potomac for shad eggs, said T.P. Gunter Jr., the former leader of the state's shad restoration effort.

Through 2007, almost 18.7 million fry were released in the Rappahannock and its Hazel River tributary. This year, the biologists hoped to hatch and release another 4 million.

For Fowler, Isel and their colleagues, shad season is six weeks of late-night collections of eggs from the Potomac and Pamunkey rivers, wee-small-hour deliveries to the hatchery, constant monitoring of hatching jars and tanks and, finally, long hauls in a truck to out-of-the-way release spots on the Rappahannock and James rivers.

Months later, the biologists said, they would still find shiny mementos of shad season in the form of stray opalescent fish scales in their clothes, shower stalls, beds and sofa cushions at home.

A TRANSFUSION OF ENERGY

Isel switched on 12-volt work lights mounted above the deck of the 27-foot fiberglass scow filled with plastic tanks and tubs. He turned on a pump to fill the tanks with river water.

Fowler peered in the darkness looking for Louis, Mike and Brad Harley, father and sons, the last commercial watermen in Fairfax County. The Harleys were hired by the state to catch shad for their eggs.

It was slack water between tides. Somewhere in the darkness, the Harleys in two separate boats had set 600-foot floating gill nets to catch shad for the biologists.

The roe shad were ripe with eggs. The bucks, as always, were ready with sperm.

Left to their own ways, the females would release their eggs in the water and the males would cover them in clouds of sperm. That night, fertilization occurred in a stainless-steel mixing bowl on the biologists' boat.

Louis Harley's battered skiff emerged from the darkness. On board were Donna Polite, a teacher at a Maryland middle school, her eighth-grade student Ivy Everheart, and Jim Cummins of the Interstate Commission of the Potomac River Basin. They brought Fowler and Isel 34 buck and 24 roe shad.

Cummins has been a shad advocate for years. Thanks to him, 54 schools in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia participate in a "Schools for Schools" program. They hatch shad eggs in their classrooms and release thousands of fry into the Potomac.

"For every student, at least one parent is involved. It's a good way to spread the word about these nearly forgotten fish," Cummins said.

The way he sees them, American shad--and their cousins hickory shad and herring--represent an annual transfusion of energy to East Coast rivers.

Shad capture energy from the ocean where they spend most of their lives, Cummins said. Bald eagles, ospreys and other birds build their nests near the rivers in February and March, in time for the spring runs of shad and herring.

Cummins said the shad eggs, "globules of fat protein, are eaten by lots of minnows and the minnows are eaten by lots of other fish." He said juvenile shad, which stay in the rivers for the first few months of their lives, are gobbled up by striped bass and other species.

At sea, shad provide food for dolphin, tuna, shark, cod and other deep-sea species.

Although now illegal to possess, the shad also bring out flocks of recreational fishermen seeking the thrill of landing the "poor man's tarpon" and releasing them in the water.

The tidal freshwater Potomac remains an excellent source of brood shad because of its improved water quality and submerged vegetation, said Cummins. In addition to the Rappahannock, eggs from Potomac River shad now stock other rivers in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

a magic mixture

While Cummins lectured, Fowler dried each female fish with paper towels and handed it to Isel. Isel squeezed each belly from head to vent as if he were squeezing paste from a tube.

A stream of eggs squirted into the bowl. Isel sucked up scales and specks of feces with a turkey baster.

Before long, the bowl looked as if it were half full of applesauce.

The males came next. The sperm looked like white hand lotion drizzled on the eggs in the bowl. Isel added two pitchers of river water and mixed it with his fingers.

"It only takes 15 or 20 seconds and all the magic happens. Now it's all starting to take place," Isel said.

He put the fertilized eggs into a tub fitted with panels of fine-mesh screen. He submerged most of it in the tank of circulating river water, where the eggs would grow rapidly and harden. The "magic" took about an hour.

Isel then took off the top of the tub. It was half full of sparkling, transparent eggs the size of BB's. "Little diamonds. That's what I like to call then," he said.

That night, the Harleys delivered 196 shad to the biologists. Seventy-two fish were released back into the river.

The remaining 124 fish were either dead on arrival or died when stripped of their sexual secretions.

The length of every fish was recorded. The head of every fifth fish was cut off to learn later in a laboratory whether it was from native or hatchery stock. Then Isel sliced the swim bladders of the carcasses with a knife and tossed them overboard to feed the crabs.

While this was going on, Louis Harley, 79, sat on the stern of the boat and remembered shad nights long ago.

"We'd go out in rowboats and catch so many shad that they'd sink the nets. I had to tie life jackets to the net to find the end of it. We shipped fish to Baltimore and split out the roes and sold them to restaurants in D.C.," he said.

In those years, Potomac fishermen like the Harleys landed almost a million pounds of shad a year.

By 1981, only 4,237 pounds were caught. The fishery was closed in 1982.

Louis Harley said his ancestors came to Mason Neck from Ireland in the 1820s. His grandfather owned a 100-acre farm now occupied by million-dollar homes. When he was a boy, Harley said, food from the land and the river fed the family.

He said, "Sometimes I think of the stories they used to tell me and I wonder, how did all this happen?"

Frank Delano: 804/333-3834
Email: fpdelano@gmail.com