Oregon Outdoors: Poor man's tarpon

ELKTON — Darrell Moore walks his American shad contraption off the back of his powerboat, right into a tight Umpqua River migration lane for the least understood and appreciated anadromous fish in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s a MagLip 3.5 lure normally used to catch salmon or steelhead, the more sexy anadromous fish for this region. This time, the deep-diving, wiggling lure has a shad jig suspended 20 inches off the back, and the lure is keeping the jig right in the nose of migrating shad.

“It might be a bit high-tech, but it’s simple,” says Moore, owner of Elkton Outfitters and a longtime Umpqua River guide. “Once you find them, you put the rods into the holders and wait for them to smash it.”

And the shad respond. Known as “the poor man’s tarpon,” shad are bending rods early and often in the Umpqua, one of the greatest shad rivers of the Pacific Northwest.

This year’s shad run is in the midst of its early sumer heyday, and there is no river better place to fish for these non-native mutant herring than the Umpqua, which annually sports a few hundred thousand or more shad — one of the lesser known and least studied species in the region.

But one thing seasoned shad anglers like Moore know is that these smallish but aggressive fish are a sport anglers’ best friend. They’re easy to find, easy to catch and they’re willing combatants for every type of angler from a greenhorn to a seasoned fly-fisher.

“They really will bite just about anything,” Moore says.

The best shad fishing on the Umpqua is roughly Mother’s Day through Father’s Day, and it’s not uncommon for anglers to catch dozens of shad a day on bright jigs or fluorescent floss flies in chartreuse, orange or red.

Shad dominate the mainstem lower Umpqua in the Elkton area, where they are best intercepted where the river’s bedrock narrows their migration routes to very predictable stretches.

“Any spot where you take that many fish and have to narrow them down, that’s the place to be,” Moore says. “And right here, we’re in the middle of that lane.”

That place this week is right out in front of the Big K Guest Ranch private boat launch. It’s where bedrock channels the shad into a trough roughly twice the width of Moore’s jet sled.

That’s where Moore developed this fishing technique, which uses a MagLip lure like a diver to pull the shad jig down to the bottom and let it wiggle around until a shad bites it.

“It’s the best technique I’ve found for these fish, and you don’t even need to know how to cast to get them,” Moore says.

Though not native to the Umpqua, they are native to the East Coast and have made a unique impression on American history.

There was a massive commercial fishery for shad in the 1700s, and George Washington was a commercial shad fisherman before he became head of the Continental Army. That army lived on shad during the Revolutionary War, and the troops survived Valley Forge largely on a shad diet.

So many of the country’s founding fathers had their fingers in the shad industry that the species was known as the “Founders Fish.”

They came to the West by train in 1871, when about 25,000 shad fry survived the overland trek in milk containers until they were released into the Sacramento River.

In 1885 and 1886, nearly 1 million fry were released in the Columbia, Snake and Willamette rivers. Their spread is considered one of the most remarkable cases of introduced species, now running all the way from Baja, California, to Alaska.

Locally, you’ll find some in the Rogue and Coos rivers, but the Umpqua is the place to be for shad in spring, though precious little is known about them here.

No population estimates are available, though there seem to be enough annually to support a strong fishery at such hot spots as Sawyers Rapids and Yellow Creek.

“It’s a great time to be on the water, and they’re a great fish to go after,” says Evan Leonetti, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist in Roseburg.

“There seems to be a plethora of them,” Leonetti says. “Rarely do we get any complains about the shad fishery.”

Nowadays, few people eat shad. The smallish fish are more bones than flesh, with a few die-hards smoking and canning them to dissolve the bones and make the fish more edible.

“I ate it once,” Moore says. “I’m not saying it was bad, but it wasn’t good enough to make me want to go through the hoops to do it again.”

Those who keep shad primarily use them as crab bait. They are thin and stack well in the freezer, and are a greasy morsel for Dungeness crab that seals and sea lions won’t bother stealing like they will rockfish or other crab baits.

Ironically, shad means “delicious” in Latin, which might be one reason why Latin is a dead language in the 21st century.

“Maybe it was lost in translation,” Moore says.

Reach Mail Tribune reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or mfreeman@rosebudmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman.