Articles from the Neighborhood Newsletter

By Donna and Chris Wren (Hillsdale Road)

On a warm sunny morning in May our family found ourselves surrounded by scores of people, ankle deep in the Lower Mystic Lake. Hundreds of herring swam around our feet and it was our job to catch them gently and place them in buckets. As the water poured from the dam between the two lakes we stood in the current and sat our borrowed nets in the water, waiting. Every once in a while we were rewarded with one or two fish in our nets. Into the buckets they went, to be peered at suspiciously by our 2 year old daughter. “Fishies?”

What in the world were we doing? Well, the herring need to get over the dam in order to reach their spawning grounds. Plans for a fish ladder are in the works but, until then, the fish need our help! This 2-day “Herring Brigade” was sponsored by the Medford Boat Club and dozens of volunteers from all over came to move the fish, in buckets, over the dam and into the Upper Mystic Lake. After hearing about it on the trusty Arlington List, we decided to join them. We are so glad we did!

It was surprisingly relaxing to wait for a fish to swim into the net, pull it up, and start all over again. But it was not as easy as you might think, despite the large numbers of fish we could easily see - they are quite fast! Eventually we staked our claim on a good fishing spot and our 5 year old daughter started hauling them in! When the bucket had a few fish in it, someone would carry it over to the dam, hook it on a rope and away it would go. There were about twenty people up on the dam, hauling buckets up and dumping the fish down a slide on the other side. Pete Luongo from the DCR kept a tally of the fish. The final numbers? Over the course of the 2 6-hour sessions, 19,358 fish were moved!

We plan to watch for this event every year and hope to make “fishing day” a new family tradition - and we hope that next year maybe some of our neighbors can join us!

Tags: alewife, children, fish, mystic, The Leaping Issue 15(1)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.