FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: 



The small-town charm of jamesville's 

 Cypress Grill has made it a popular 

 destination during herring season. 

 At Murray-Nixon fish company, 

 baskets of herring await processing. 

 Buckets hold dozens of fat catfish, bycatch 

 from a heavy load of river herring. 



Hall now performs three lockings a 

 day during spawning season, just for the 

 fish. In between, he leaves the gates open 

 to attract more shad into the chamber. 

 The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 

 which operates the dam, has extended the 

 same strategy to the two dams farther 

 upstream. "Big schools of shad fry have 

 been seen as far upriver as Fayetteville," 

 Hall says proudly. "With the three-hour 

 lockages ... 80 percent more fish are 

 being passed upstream." 



On that optimistic note, we head to 

 the car. In the parking lot, families pack 

 shad into buckets full of ice for the ride 

 home. Some folks spare a few fish for 

 their neighbors. Bahen says that many 

 coastal plain residents still rely on shad 

 for springtime dinners. "When the 

 dogwoods bloom and the corn is about 

 two inches high, these people know it's 

 shad time," he says. 



GRIFTON, 



Contentnea creek 



It's already getting dark when we 

 pull up outside the Grifton Country Store, 

 a family business that caters to recre- 

 ational fishers as well as road-weary 

 drivers in need of a soda and snack. 

 When we walk through the front door, I 

 hear crickets chirping. A sink holds 

 cardboard boxes full of bugs for bait, 

 alongside the minnows and worms. One 

 wall is ornamented with lures in plastic 



bags: shad darts, spoons, and flies. 



Our host Lubie McLawhorn, who 

 owns the store with his wife Nettie, 

 leads us into a back room. The smell of 

 hot oil fills the small space, and on a 

 counter, a line of pans holds floured 

 fillets of trout, hickory shad, river 

 herring, American shad and two kinds 

 of roe. Master cook Allen Shirley is 

 conducting a fish fry just for us. The 

 secret, he says, is to add vinegar to the 

 oil just before adding the fish. "It 

 crystallizes the bones." 



When the fish are hot, we fill plates 

 with fillets, fried hunks of roe, potato 

 salad and cole slaw. 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. 



The locals eat the fish — bones and 

 all — 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. 



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 — a 3.8-pound 

 hickory shad that tied the state record 



established in 1992. 1 can't help but think 

 of Strachey's yard-long shad, missing 

 from these waters for centuries. 



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. 



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. 



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. 



The annual event routinely draws 

 about 10,000 out-of-town visitors, and 

 McLawhorn appreciates the influx of sport 



10 SPRING 2000 



