![]() Crabbing basically keeps us alive now.” A SHAD AND HERRING PRIMER “I’ve enjoyed being a commercial fisherman, but I wouldn’t want my kids to do it. Like them, Byrum expects to keep fishing till he dies – but he doesn’t expect anyone to follow in his footsteps. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him were commercial fishers. Where he used to catch up to $40,000 worth of herring a year, he now catches $10,000. “Since 1994, it’s been cut down to just over 20 percent from the restrictions,” Byrum says. Marine Fisheries Commission (MFC) regulations have become more and more stringent, his take-home pay from the fishery also has dried up. But as herring stocks have dwindled and N.C. ![]() River herring used to bring in three-quarters of his living. He has been fishing since 1964, when he was still in high school. ![]() But each year, Bryum finds it harder and harder to fill his boat. So many glistening fish heaped together in the early morning sunshine certainly look like an embarrassment of riches. It’s beautiful fishing,” Herbert Byrum likes to say. The other fish - striped bass, perch, and catfish - to back over the side. When it’s full from gunwale to gunwale, their skiff holds about 4,000 pounds of river herring. River water, slime and silvery fish scales wash around their boats as they dip more wriggling bodies from the shrinking confines of the pound net - 40 pounds of fish per dip. The sun has hardly risen over the Chowan River, but Herbert Byrum, his brother Bobby and crewman Hazel Rountree are already knee-deep in fish. With the sun hardly risen over the Chowan River, crewman Hazel Rountree has a long morning ahead of pound-net fishing.
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