By Victor Greto
PORT PENN – Clyde Roberts, the last commercial sturgeon fisherman in Delaware Bay, isn’t going to be net fishing much longer.
Not long ago, he and his wife, Ruthann, were on their 24-foot Carolina skiff, “Miss Ruthann,” when a storm hit. Fighting high winds and waves, the 78-year-old Roberts and his wife couldn’t retrieve their nets.
“The weather blew up bad,” Roberts says.
“[Friends] jumped on our boat and helped pull us in,” he says. “I can’t imagine at 80 doing this in bad weather. Now, it takes me a day to recuperate.”
Roberts dropped his last net to capture sturgeon commercially more than 15 years ago, but fishing the bay, he says, even with a hook and line instead of a net, will be an integral part of the rest of his life.
“The greatest feeling in the world is launching out at daybreak when no one is out there,” he says. “It’s a great feeling of independence. Like this world belongs to me.”
As the Delaware River rolls past Delaware City and the Premcor oil refinery, the last of the industrial markers that have defined its character since passing Philadelphia, it begins to open so wide that it ceases to be a river, especially south of Bowers Beach. Towns at the southernmost reaches of the bay are as tranquil as those that dot the river north of Trenton.
The waters of the bay along the coast, mostly protected by Delaware’s 34-year-old Coastal Zone Act, are dotted with crab pots; an occasional recreational boater or fishing boat; a solitary fisherman casting a line from shore; the spindly remains of turn-of-the-20th-century resorts; and the longest contiguous string of wetlands in the Northeast.
Although the Delaware Bay’s sturgeon stocks were depleted by the time Clyde Roberts was born in 1927, there was a resurgence in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until 1981, when he retired from the post office, that he fished for the bottom-dwellers full time.
“We saw them jumping, so we figured they were coming back,” he says. “They can get up to 300 pounds. I caught some that were at least 100 pounds.”
By the 1990s, those days were over. Even so, there are plenty of other fish for Roberts, including American shad and striped bass.
And he does continue to fish in season a couple of times a week with Ruthann, his wife of three years. Roberts’ first wife, Kitty, died in 2001 after 50 years of marriage.
Perch and bass are the right fish to go after, according to Roy Miller of the fish and wildlife division of Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
According to state surveys, 55 species of finfish were found last year in Delaware Bay, three more than the year before. The highest number found, 62, was recorded in 1999; the lowest, 30, was recorded in 1980.
The most abundant include bay anchovy and menhaden in midwater; and summer flounder, white perch, Atlantic croaker, scup and butterfish near the bottom.
Bluefish, catfish, white perch, striped bass and shad are doing relatively well, the surveys show, while horseshoe crabs, oysters and conch are not. Although weakfish, an ocean-running trout, are found abundantly at the bottom, most are under the legal 13-inch limit. In a good year, a million weakfish may be harvested by fishermen; in 2003, only 6,500 were.
Crabs most valuable
At 56, William “Frenchie” Poulin is doing just fine.
In knee-high black boots and rubber overalls, the professional fisherman and crabber begins the last Sunday morning in July at his place in Bowers Beach by hosing down a dozen crab pots, black cages tangled with seaweed.
“Male crabs won’t go in a dirty cage,” he explains. The spray of the water, forced by an air compressor, mists the sunrise and coats his bleached-wood dock. He is surrounded by dozens of wooden casks, plastic buoys and chairs, red flags and coolers.
The dock extends from the back of his shop and is as cluttered as the outside. It’s filled with Philadelphia Eagles banners, a TV, glass counter and a grounds-encrusted coffee pot. From the shop, he sells much of what he catches.
This morning, like every other morning from May through October, he and Greg Gillie, 37, go crabbing in the bay, checking about 60 crab pots for blue crabs.
Blue crabs are Delaware’s most valuable fishery, Miller says.
In 2003, the most recent year the fish and wildlife division has records, 27 million crabs were harvested from the bay out of an estimated 287 million crabs – 70 million adults and 217 million juveniles. That number is way down from 1995, when nearly 50 million crabs were harvested, says Desmond Kahn, a biometrician with the Division of Fish and Wildlife.
The smaller harvest doesn’t necessarily mean they are being overcrabbed, Kahn and Miller say. Blue crabs are profoundly affected by weather patterns, and a severe winter always precedes a significant decline.
Neither Gillie nor Poulin makes his living from crabbing. But they make a respectable part of their income. Gillie, who installs septic systems, has been fishing and crabbing with Poulin since 1985.
“We split the crabbing 50-50,” Gillie says. “It’s my boat, his gear.”
Gillie makes up to $500 a week from the crabs, he says. “About $40 an hour. That’s not bad.”
Gillie’s boat is loaded with 12 of Poulin’s crab pots tied to black-pink buoys, and a half-dozen wooden bushel baskets to hold the crabs.
Gillie reels in one of the already deployed pots with a rope tied around a pulley. He then pops the bait out, turns over the pot, and dumps the crabs into a plastic tub.
The tub’s side has a sticker that marks inches. Poulin goes through the crabs, throwing those more than five inches long into one basket and larger ones into a different basket. Those under five inches go back in the water.
During the first hour, they pull in dozens of crabs.
“Look at that one,” Poulin says of one male. “That’s at least a pound of meat.”
It takes them nearly two hours to check their pots and gather five bushel baskets of blue crabs.
Gulls crowd the boat, screeching when the bait, chunks of menhaden, plummet into the water.
When sunlight spears through the clouds, Poulin smiles, his face a maze of creases and wrinkles.
“You can see my place from here,” Poulin says, as he gazes at the houses and docks on Bowers Beach.
‘Best-kept secret in Delaware’
The quaintness of Bowers Beach and other places along the Delaware Bay is accentuated by the stillness around them.
Blame transportation improvements to Delaware’s ocean beaches, severe storms and the silty nature of the beach as reasons why the bay is no longer home to large resorts and hordes of sun worshippers. In the 19th century, steamboat excursions from Philadelphia brought summer tourists to Port Penn, Collins Beach and Woodland Beach.
But many of the beaches, siltier and muckier and further eroded over time, could never compete with ocean resorts such as Rehoboth Beach after the automobile came of age.
That explains why Kitts Hummock residents Mike and Carol Costello were able to buy their beachfront half-acre of land five years ago for only $25,000.
“It’s the best-kept secret in Delaware,” Mike Costello says of Kitts Hummock. A site director on the weekends for Southern Illinois University’s military program at a branch campus in Dover, he also is an adjunct teacher at colleges throughout the area. He works mostly out of the home he built here.
Although his beach is a horseshoe crab sanctuary in late spring and early summer, he and his wife often watch the small waves and “live between the flies” that at times swarm the coast.
More often, however, he takes out his kayak and paddles along the shore with his daughter, Molly.
The restoration of the bay’s marshes around places like Kitts Hummock has helped bring back the number of fish in the bay.
“The major benefit of the wetlands is their value as fish nursery areas and fish feeding areas,” says John Teal, scientist emeritus at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Marshes are the kidneys of the bay, he says, because they intercept water from the land, and bacteria clean it up through the flushing movement of the tides. The mud at the bottom traps many things, too, including dangerous chemicals and oil.
The recovery of the marshes in recent years has been impressive, Teal says. “I have stood on the shore of one of these marshes and could walk across the striped bass that were sitting and eating as the little fish came off the marsh with the tide.”
Removing the dikes was key
In late June, part of the restored 4,171-acre Commercial Township marsh looks absolutely primeval.
Once a diked salt hay farm located at the mouth of the Maurice River on the bay in southern New Jersey, tufts of a bright green plant called spartina now dot the brackish water.
A short time ago, the spartina here was choked and bullied by phragmites, a reed that grew to cover nearly three-quarters of the area after the dikes prevented the flow of salt water and the ecology of the marshes changed.
Since the dikes have been removed, the salinity of the water has risen to more normal conditions and the reeds have been reduced dramatically.
The marsh now feels desolate, misty, laced with sinuous channels of water. Great blue herons, egrets and osprey dot its tiny islands.
Less than a foot from the shore are dozens of horseshoe crabs spawning. Under grass nearby, hundreds of ribbed mussels cling to each other. Each adult filters a liter of marsh water per hour, and there are up to 500 mussels for each square meter of mud. Dozens of thumb-sized fiddler crabs race up short, sloping banks.
“This is what a marsh should look like,” says Ken Strait, manager of the estuary enhancement program of the Public Service Enterprise Salem Generating Station.
The station and the program were created in 1994 to minimize the effects of the Hope Creek nuclear power plant in Salem, N.J., but its reach has extended to more than 20,000 acres in both New Jersey and Delaware.
In Delaware, the program has worked to eliminate phragmites at five sites, from Woodland Beach to Cedar Swamp to Silver Run, mostly through the yearly spraying of pesticides.
In New Jersey, it has helped restore thousands of acres of wetland sites near the Maurice and Cohansey rivers, and at Alloway Creek just north of the power plant.