This is an anthology of "Fish Stories" having to do with Maine's Fish History.
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FISH STORIES FROM MAINE-
SALMON, SMELTS, AND HERRING IN ABUNDANCE-THE MAINE SARDINE-
The New York Times
published: March 30, 1980
Bangor, Me., March 29-
The Penobscot River at
Bangor, from which 200,000 tons of ice will be taken in barges and vessels to New-York the coming Summer, has always been noted for its fishing,, and in the long ago , when salmon, sturgeon, shad, herring,trout,pickerel, and smelts ran it, the British came here and fought for the control of the fishing privileges as well as for the oak timber which grew upon its banks, to be used at the royal navy yard at Halifax. The gained a victory, but before they secured it they sunk a fleet of twenty-one American war vessels,leaving at the bottom of the river some 120 cannon, many of which have been taken out since by United States dredging machines. For years after the slaughter of the fish was terrible, and there are farms upon the river banks of wonderful fertility, made so by the thousands of pounds of shad and herring thrown out from the smaller brooks and streams into which they crowded by means of pitchforks, and afterward spread as fertilizers.
It is a fact, and the times and places have been described in the ancient local press, that in many instances shad and herring have run in these streams in such numbers when in search of spawning grounds as to fill them from bank to bank, the rear schools actually forcing the advanced guard, which was stopped by a dam high and dry upon the shore, Salmon were in such abundance that when boys were “bound out”, the articles of apprenticeship stipulated that they should not be obliged to eat of it more than twice a week. Along the shores then, and as late as twenty-five years ago , lobsters from six to fifteen pounds were in abundance, and at that time live lobsters were sold at wholesale at 3 cents each, regardless of size.
Each season, too, the tinkers, as young mackerel were called, swarmed in every bay, and so numerous and hungry were they that bait was not needed to catch hem, only a jig- a hook with lead at the end next the line-which glistened in the water. Then the fishermen ground up a porgy or two and, seeking the open bay, threw this “throw bait” out, the oil spreading and quickly attracting schools of tinkers. then, as rapidly as the hands and eyes could work the line, only about eight feet long would be cast and hauled. never waiting to “feel the bite”, for often the fish would catch the glittering hook in midair.
The porgy was hardly eatable, but for years it was an important factor in commerce. The oil was for a long time the basis of all prepared paint, and in the collection of it hundreds of men were engaged. The fish would not take bite, but as they swarmed in schools;s they were caught in seines. With the porgy and the tinker came the big horse mackerel, often as large as the body of a horse, and which subsisted on the smaller fish. As he could make havoc with a seine whenever he came in contact with one a sharp lookout was kept for him, and when a tin was seen on the placid water, boatmen armed with harpoon and line set out for him.
But porgies, tinkers, horse mackerel, and rotund lobsters have had their day along the coast from Sandy Hook to the Banks of Newfoundland; smelts, and young herring- the latter, when done up in tin boxes and given a French name passing in the marts of trade as sardines. The latter fish furnishes employment to thousands of people and returns a big revenue to the State, and for this reason has been called the “King of the Sea,” but he plays the same part in the economy of nature there as does the rabbit in the forest both are food for all their neighbors.
The real king of the bays of Maine and the lower courses of the rivers is the smelt. He is present in greater numbers than all other fish combined. In size he ranges from three to ten inches in length, and of the medium ones ten or twelve inches will weigh around a pound. Eight months of the year he is game for fishermen, being taken in every known way of fishing, save by spearing. As soon as the frost of October set in he can be caught with hook and line or by means of the wire rig. This consists of a ten-inch piece of wire suspended by the line, attached at the middle with two and sometimes three hooks made fast by means of stout thread four inches long. Small minnows make good bait, but the smelt will eagerly snap at the throat of a brother and goes with a rush for the hook having on it the eye of some other smelt.
Then there is smelt fishing through the ice, the men actually sitting in their own houses as they do this. With matched boards a house 6 feet by 4 feet is made and set upon the ice , in one end being a stove. Inside, a hole 5 feet long and 1 foot wide is cut through the ice, and in this are placed a dozen lines. The bait at this season consists of the clam worm, a sort of an ear-wig fellow in shape and color, but often longer than the smelt who undertakes to eat it. When the fish are biting, times are lively.
Salmon coming in from the sea and swimming for the spawning beds do not eat, but in going back they take their fill of smelts. So do the coast seals, and the small fry of the smelt is food for the small shad fry. In fresh water land-locked salmon cannot thrive unless the young have the spawn of the smelt on which to live, and success met with in stocking the ponds and lakes of Maine is due first to the fact that smelt food is abundant there.
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On the Taking of Salmon at Mechanicville
The New York Times
Published: July 22. 1893
Various are the ways of catching salmon. Old Prof. ELKANAH HODGDON of Moore’s Indian Charity School used to drive them into the shallows of the Connecticut River with the assistance of the Rev. Eleazer Wheelock’s hired man, and then roll sawlogs over them until they were firmly embedded in the mud, whence they might be safely and conveniently gaffed with a hoe or muck rake. In the Penobscot. Maine sportsmen of the old school used to kill them with sled stakes, though this required no little skill, as an adult salmon, unless struck with force and squarely upon the top of the head, had some chance of escape.
The method more generally practiced by the Penobscot anglers, we believe,was to set steel traps in the fishways. This plan was very successful. In low and clear water, what modern trout angler would describe as “fine” fishing, the shotgun has sometimes been found to the only means of catching salmon. On the overflowed Mississippi river bottoms catfish are frequently caught by causing them to be chased with dogs. We think the plan might work well in favorable localities.
Save upon the score of their effectiveness it is unnecessary to characterize any of the methods of capturing salmon we have here mentioned. The main thing is that they are successful. From the point of view of a man who is out of salmon and must have some they are worthy of the highest praise. Within the past week, however, a kind of salmon fishing of which we have never before heard has been practiced at Mechanicville, near Troy, upon the Hudson ‘River. We desire to call the attention of the public and of the White Caps to the practitioners of this new art.
It is well known that for many the Fish Commissioners of the State of New York have been laboring, and with gratifying success, to introduce salmon into the Hudson, which was formerly a salmon stream. This is the first year in which any considerable number of salmon have been taken, From the Troy times of July 15 we quote a description of how they are taken at Mechanicville:
“ Yesterday a party went to Mechanicville to visit the grounds where so may fine salmon have appeared this Summer. The principal spot where the salmon have been feeding is back of Campbell’s Tallmadge Hotel. The water yesterday was as smooth as glass, and it was with high hopes that twenty enthusiastic disciples of Izaak Walton arranged their tackle and boats and turned their eyes toward the mirror-like stream. Since fishing began back of the hotel this year, it has been the custom of the anglers to make the cast , and then, if a fish were hooked, to get into the boat and follow the prize until it is succumbed. Poles have been used for the cast, and the bait is flies andpork. Of the four or five big salmon caught at Mechanicville this year, pork was the bait with which each was captured.”
Mr. CAMPBELL of the Tallmadge Hotel will pardon us if we make a suggestion. We recommend we urge , we entreat him to procure at once a capacious dog, feed the animal little or not at all, give him the range of the grounds back of the hotel, and teach him to assail and consume all men who approach the stream bearing pork and poles. The practice of catching salmon with a “pole” and with pork as bait should at once be made so odious and fraught with peril as to cause its immediate and permanent discontinuous. Public sentiment in Troy and Mechanicville , we fear, cannot be trusted in this matter, as we have heard of no unusual number of murders in that region since the opening of the salmon season.
If Izaak Walton has any living heirs they have cause for action against our Troy contemporary for describing these Mechanicville malefactors as “disciples” of that fine old angler. Izaak sometimes, we are sorry to say, would slip a worm on his hook whenever the trout were not hungry for feather, but potztausend! the old gentleman would never , never have gone a-fishing with a ham or a side of pork in his basket to be used for bait.
Think of projecting this greasy lure across a salmon pool! Fancy the abject degradation of the being who could offer such a filthy morsel to the great Salmo Salar!
The man who would try to catch a salmon otherwise than with the artificial fly should be tarred and feathered. Saratoga County newspapers please copy.
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Salmon in the Hudson-It appears they are multiplying Rapidly
New York Times, October 14, 1891
Excerpt
-” The result of opening dams with good fishway without aid from the hatcheries is shown in the case of the St. Croix River, forming the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick, The river had been close up for many years by impassable dams, and in consequence all anadromous fish were about run out from the river. From three to five years after the building of the fishways the catch of salmon increased from nothing up to 6,000 pounds and alewives form 50 up to 600 barrels a season. The same beneficial results were obtained after building fishways on the Medway and Clyde River of Nova Scotia.”
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SEASON OPENS TO-DAY
New York Times
April 1, 1900
Excerpt:
“The Penobscot is by far the best sea salmon river on the Atlantic Coast, and the bulk of the supply for the eastern markets of the country is taken in the weir below this city. All along the river the salmon finds its way, and may be seen sporting in the rapids hundreds of miles above Bangor or resting in the shady pools in quiet stretches of the far-away west Branch.
Fly fishing at Bangor Pool has been a great sport since 1885, when Thomas Allen, a Warden, found that the salmon would rise to the fly. Anglers of note from all over this country, and a few from Europe, come here every Spring to cast for the big fellows, and while they usually have good luck, they long for a return of the days described by the old settlers when both salmon and shad were so plentiful that shiploads of of them were sent, in dried or pickled form, to the West Indies and South America, and when they were used even as a fertilizer in potato fields. It was a common saying on the river then that a vessel had a cargo of ”salmon and shingles out, rum and molasses back,” on a voyage to the West Indies.”
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THE COMING OF THE SHAD
New York Times
April 13, 1902
Excerpt from article
“The yield of the shad fisheries on the Atlantic coast shows a gratifying increase during the last twenty years. In 1880 the catch was slightly in excess of 5,000,000 in number. In 1888 it exceeded 10,000,000; in number 1892,11,000,000; in 1896, 13,000,000, and in 1901, as already stated, it approximated 15,000,000. of the catch during the year last named about 300,000( difficult to determine if 3 is 8) were obtained in the Kennebec, 50,000 in the
Connecticut, 1,000,000 in the Hudson River and New York Bay, 4,000,000 in Delaware Bay and tributaries; 6,000,000 in Chesapeake Bay and tributaries, 2,000,000 in the sounds and estuaries of North Carolina, 900,000 in the rivers of the Southern States from the Cape Fear to the St. John’s,and the remaining in various coastal waters. Comparing the yield of 1880 with that of 1901 it appears that the increase amounts to 10,000,000 in number, or $2,500,000 in value, at 25 cents each, the average price by consumers. “
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On Shetucket Salmon Hunting
The New York Times
February 17, 1889
Excerpt-
“As recently as May, 1861, a sturgeon, called in the marine vernacular an Albany beef, which weighed 125 pounds, jumped into a passing boat of Gale’s Ferry and was captured and killed. After the great freshet of February,1729, the river fairly swarmed with fish, 20,000 bass being caught within a few days. Ever since then the river has been famous, and after each freshet,, which is an annual institution of Norwich, demands come from far and near for the striped bass of the Thames River. During the season of 1871, 300 barrels of mackerel were taken from the river between Norwich and New London, six barrels being filled with one seine.
There is looked up in the safe of a Norwich gentleman, with either quaint and rare old family heirlooms, a centennial document binding a boy to a farmer residing on the banks of the Quinebaug, in whence it is stipulated that the boy should not be fed on salmon more than once a week. In the swift and treacherous rapids just below the Laurel Hill bridge, at the mouth of the Shetucket , salmon were speared in unlimited numbers years ago. Traditions handed down recite the stirring times the old settlers of this old place had hunting fine salmon; how immense brush fires were built upon the river’s banks, by the light of which the people, some in boats and others on land, chased the fish now up and now down the stream, spearing them as they jumped the rapids with long-shafted tridents, or wasters, as they were called, and how others, armed with nothing but the strong arms that nature gave them loaded with stones, and rocks which lay in piles along the banks, were so accurate in their aim that they killed the monsters at every leap, while seines stretched across the river caught their dead bodies......”
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