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New Jersey Monthly Magazine
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Had A Shad?

Every spring, the Atlantic shad (an ocean fish), swims up the Delaware River. What better reason to hold a festival in the fish's honor? The annual Shad Festival has become a New Jersey institution.

Posted March 15, 2010

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Photo by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey.

Photo by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey.

Photo by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey.

Photo by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey.

On the West Coast, salmon swim arduously up the Yukon River to spawn. By us, the Atlantic shad, an ocean fish, fights its way up the Delaware every spring to do the same. Fisherpeople are waiting at the Annual Shad Festival. As author John McPhee (a perennial NJ Best) pointed out in “The Founding Fish,” migrating shad don’t eat, but they will strike at lures—maybe out of pique, but nobody is sure why. Everybody is glad they do, because a dish of blackened shad with shad roe wrapped in bacon (far right) is delicious. At last year’s festival, members of the Lewis Fishery went after shad with a seine (above). People bought “Shad Happens” T-shirts. The Gardner family (Laurie, John, Jack, and Elenor, below), formerly of the Shore but now of Pennsylvania, dug into shadwiches.

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