Читать книгу Woodside, the North End of Newark, N.J - C. G. Hine - Страница 25

Seventy-five years ago this was a hunter’s paradise, and even within the memory of some of us old codgers the fishing for shad and smelts was a well established industry. In fact, the fishing rights of Green Island were for hire, as I am told that one could rent them for a day or a week and do his own fishing. Old Fink, whoever he was, once gathered in five hundred shad in one haul; at least one of his contemporaries does solemnly affirm such to have been the case, and another as calmly tells me that fourteen bushels of smelts were the reward of two hauls, of which he had cognizance.

This almost sounds as if we were again on the lake of Gennesaret. But still greater wonders are recorded by Mr. William Stimis, eighty-seven years of age, who has heard his father say that he had seen 1,200 shad caught in one haul, and he, William, with three others, gathered in 120 bushels of smelts in one night. He also tells of a striped bass weighing sixty-six pounds, sturgeon six feet long and of a host of lesser fish that swam the Passaic.