The alewife is a fish that lives in salt water but spawns in fresh water. I’d heard that they ran so thick on the Mattapoisett that they literally choked the small stream with their numbers. I went to the place where Route 6 crosses the stream in Mattapoisett for the first time then in the spring of 1982 and while I did see lots of migrating alewives, I also discovered very healthy populations of rainbow trout just downstream from the herring weir that the Town had constructed, right at the bridge, for folks to catch the alewives.
I fished that section of the river many times that first spring. I really enjoyed seeing all the alewives squirt their way through the shallower stretches of water and watching as people (mostly kids) worked long handled nets at the weir, scooping up the fish as they swam by. Once the alewives stopped running though, the trout appeared to own the river. It was as if a switch had been thrown and suddenly the streaming masses of alewives vanished, to be replaced by the more sedate feeding habits of the trout as they rose for emerging insects on the water’s surface.
I took a map one day and traced the river’s path north towards its source at Snipatuit Pond. I found that the stream angled sharply away from the road only a short distance upstream from the herring weir. By speaking with the landowners whose properties connected the road to the water, I was able to fish some remote sections of the Mattapoisett over the course of the three subsequent springs. While I didn’t find trout everywhere, I was taken by how many holdover fish I encounter, trout that had been stocked one year and had survived through the winter to feed and spawn in the following year.
I also saw some fairly amazing things while casting for these trout.
Each May since 1934, there’s a race that’s held along the 12 miles of the river that flows from the pond to the herring weir. The really fun thing is the requirement that all of the boats entered must be hand made. Most are constructed from plywood, although other materials are also allowed. Because the stream is so narrow, boats are launched separately down the river at one-minute intervals. I recall being on the stream one early morning on race day (which is Memorial Day), carelessly tossing a fly out at a rising trout when the first boat came through. After about 10 or 15 minutes I finally wised up to what was happening and gave up on fishing in favor of watching the armada go by.
On another morning, I found myself looking at a piece of river that ran along the edge of a pair of cranberry bogs. The farmer had channeled water from the river into one bog, which ran downstream to a small holding pond. The outlet from the pond in turn ran into the second bog, which then ran back into the river. The farmer had constructed a simple weir that allowed him to control the flow, offering water to his crop without interfering with the river’s flow. It was truly a gorgeous bit of engineering.
So I went and knocked on the door of the house that stood near the pond. Gerry, the owner answered it and I chatted with him a bit before asking whether I could fish his land. He smiled and said I was welcome to do so. He even added that so long as I released everything I caught in his pond, I could fish there too.
For the next two years, I fished Gerry’s land as often as I could, hopefully without becoming a complete pest in the process. But in May of ’85, all of that ended when I made the move to Vermont.
A few days ago, I returned to the Mattapoisett River for the first time in 24 years. I drove up to Gerry’s cranberry bogs, stopped my car and saw a man riding a John Deere mower about the yard. He looked old enough to be Gerry. After all, the last time I’d seen him, I’d been in my late twenties and he’d been maybe forty years old himself. I walked over to him, he stopped his machine and I introduced myself.
It was Gerry. He smiled when I asked him if I could fish there.
“Everybody does,” he told me. “Just pack up whatever you bring in.”
I asked if the same rule applied to fishing his pond. He looked over at it briefly before replying.
“You probably won’t find anything there,” he said. “The fishing here isn’t what you remember at all.”
To begin with, it appeared as though the alewife run had almost completely vanished. In 2000, an estimated 130,000 alewives passed through the herring weir at Route 6. In 2008, that number had dropped to only 10,000. When I looked into the river, all I could see were dozens and dozens of baby freshwater eels. The alewives were nowhere to be found.
Gerry also mentioned that while the State still stocked the Mattapoisett, holdover trout were very rare.
“The water level’s gone,” he stated flatly.
It was true. Without the kind of flow that I’d remembered being present back in the early 1980s, it would have been almost impossible for trout to carry over through the winter. I was shocked at how low the water was.
Gerry explained that the State had bought a 150-acre parcel of land across from him, which was a good thing in that it meant that he had no neighbors. But that land was on top of a huge aquifer, one that had supported his farm for 40 years and the State subsequently allowed the towns of Marion, Mattapoisett and Fairhaven to sink municipal wells there. Gerry contended that the drawdown from those wells had impacted the Mattapoisett’s flow and had made it increasingly difficult for him to keep his bogs adequately irrigated.
I realized I was cutting into Gerry’s day, so I shook his hand and went to fish the river. While I did get into a few stocked rainbow trout, it was obvious that what Gerry had told me was true. The river was very shallow and it was hard to get the skittish fish to strike. I was beginning to wonder how the Memorial Day boat race would fare when I saw one of the wooden boats working its way downstream, presumably on a practice run of the course. Twice while I watched, the team of two boaters was forced to jump out of their craft to drag it over the silt and through the narrower openings. It was going to be a chore to navigate that stream in a few weeks, that was for sure.
Still, Gerry lives in a very beautiful spot and when I got back to my car, I looked back at his spread. By then, he’d finished mowing and I could see him with his chest waders on, trudging through the lower bog, looking over his crop. I used to envy him when I lived in that part of Massachusetts and I probably always will, at least a bit. But while my memory of his place and the river had remained fixed over the past 24 years, a lot had changed.
Copyright 2009 by Peter Cammann
