restaurants closed and few people on the 

 water. 



McLawhorn had warned us that 

 herring had been scarce in the Roanoke 

 River. "The dams should be opened ... 

 they're holding the fish back. They need 

 to turn loose the water." Upstream from 

 Jamesville, at Lake Gaston, the U.S. 

 Army Corps of Engineers operates dams 

 that control the water levels in the river 

 system, and the 1999 springtime drought 

 has meant low flow for months. Salt water 

 has pushed far inland, and fishers worry 

 that herring aren't getting the signals 

 they need to push upriver to spawn. 



"What are you catching?" I ask 

 veteran fishers on the riverbank. They're 

 selling a handful of river herring from a 

 waxed cardboard box in the back of a 

 pickup truck. 



"Mostly rock," they tell me. Striped 

 bass have made an amazing comeback 

 from dangerously low levels a decade 

 ago, and their catch is still highly 

 regulated. 



One of the fishers, Billy Williams, 

 argues that similar state regulations are 

 killing the commercial herring fishery. 

 "They've cut us down to 100,000 

 pounds offish for the Roanoke and 

 Albemarle," he says. "We'll never catch 

 any more fish." 



Vance Price nods. "Three or four 

 years ago, you caught 1 ,200 fish in one 

 drift," he says. This year, the fishers' 

 nets come up almost empty. 



TAKING StOCk 



Herbert Byrum's back yard slopes 

 right down to a branch of the Chowan 

 River. Between his place and his 

 brother's is a fish house where they 

 unload their catch onto conveyor belts 

 and into the backs of trucks bound for 

 Perry- Wynns or Murray-Nixon fish 

 company. "We got through Floyd pretty 

 good," Byrum says, long after the 1999 

 spring run is over. "It tore up our piers 

 and our unloading conveyor . . . There 

 was probably two and a half to three feet 

 of water in the fish house." 



Far more devastating was 1999's 

 low catch of herring. "We did a little 

 sorrier up here than we generally do," 

 Byrum says. "The rock are taking 'em. 

 They stayed in the south end of the 

 river." He estimates that he caught 5,000 

 to 10,000 pounds of herring a day and 

 up to 6,000 pounds of striped bass, 

 though he could only keep 10 of the 

 rockfish per day due to MFC regulations. 



It's a far cry from the 1930s, when 

 farmers in the area would come to the 

 river to buy a year's worth of herring for 

 their tenants. In more recent times, 

 Byrum has faced several adversaries in 

 the fight to keep the river herring fishery 

 alive. Ditching and draining of the 

 river's tributaries for agriculture 

 destroyed some herring spawning 

 grounds. In the 1970s and 1980s, 

 pollution from upstream industries and 

 runoff from agriculture turned the 



Chowan River into a green soup of 

 algae and dead fish. 



Massive cleanup efforts that began 

 in the 1 980s have resulted in improved 

 striped bass and white perch fisheries 

 and decreased incidences of algal 

 blooms. But now that the water quality 

 is back, years of over-fishing are taking 

 their toll. The state has enacted strict 

 rules to protect river herring stocks and 

 let their numbers rebound, but to many 

 struggling commercial fishers, the 

 regulations curbing their industry are 

 anathema. Fishers who work the inland 

 waters must comply with regulations set 

 by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commis- 

 sion, while coastal waters are regulated by 

 the Marine Fisheries Commission. 



Sara Winslow, fish biologist with 

 the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries 

 (DMF), explains the rationale behind the 

 1999 regulations, which reduced the 

 quota for the river herring fishery to 

 450,000 pounds. The quota was 

 subdivided to include 300,000 pounds 

 from the Chowan pound-net fishery; 

 1 00,000 pounds from the Albemarle 

 gill-net fishery, which includes the 

 Roanoke River; and 50,000 pounds that 

 could be assigned at the DMF director's 

 discretion. 



"River herring stocks are still over- 

 fished and populations are at extremely 

 low levels," Winslow says. "The 

 number of spawners in the population is 

 very low." Stock assessment analyses 



12 SPRING 2000 



