Sixty-eight years of fishing

In my last column, I reported that Narrowsburg’s first shad were caught on Sunday, April 27 by a fisherman from Peckville, PA—in the southern Lackawanna Valley—who landed two shad early that afternoon.

	TRR photo by Ed Wesely Gene Piersimoni landing a shad below the Narrowsburg Bridge on May 4. (Click for larger image)

A week later, I met the fisherman himself, Gene Piersimoni, who, with his wife, was relaxing at the Darbytown landing during another afternoon of fishing. “Yes,” he said, he’d caught the two fish I’d heard about, but his first catches had been a few days earlier, probably on a Tuesday.

That must have been April 22, the day a well-respected fisherman had lamented on the Internet: “Five hours of unproductive [shad] fishing at Portland.” (Portland PA is 85 miles down river from Narrowsburg.)

Gene told me his father had brought him to Narrowsburg in a “brand new 1935 Olds,” and that he’s been fishing up here ever since. He recalled, too, how during the Great Depression he and young friends had played in the shadow of nearby anthracite mines and frolicked sometimes in a gaunt, towering “breaker” building.

“I usually come up the third week of April,” he informed me. Fishing from the bank on the first Sunday of May, in a river that seven weeks ago had supported two feet of ice, Gene landed and released three shad before stowing his gear late in the day and heading back to Peckville.