I hardly knew New Haven until I started fishing it.
In August of my freshman year, I made my first visit to Dee’s Bait and Tackle in Fairhaven. I’ve been fishing all my life, and I had spent many slow afternoons at my sales job back in Kansas on Google Maps, ogling the lakes and streams of southern Connecticut and reading trip reports on the state’s stocked trout streams. I knew about Dee’s, too—I’d found it on one of my boredom-driven virtual sojourns—but I just stopped by to buy a license. I had brought all of my gear with me.
Dee’s occupies a south-facing storefront at the triangular intersection of Blatchley Avenue, Monroe Street, and Clay Street. It doesn’t look like much: the rest of the building appears vacant, and even the storefront windows are so scuffed and dusty that it’s hard to tell that there’s anything inside.
But the drab storefront conceals a lively scene: there’s almost always a line at the register. A bulletin board near the entrance is covered with pictures of grinning customers and their fish; if they weren’t all tacked on top of each other, they’d paper the whole room. At the register, Pete DeGregorio, one of two brothers who operate the shop, asked if I wanted a combined freshwater and saltwater license. I told him I’d prefer to save the five dollars; Pete wouldn’t let that slide. The fall striper run was just about to start up, and he didn’t want formerly-landlocked me to miss it.
Every fall, he told me, striped bass—“stripers,” colloquially—migrate south from the colder waters off Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to the warmer waters of the Southeast coast. Along the way, they run upriver from Long Island Sound into Connecticut’s shallow tidal estuaries, looking for baitfish like Menhaden that school in the riverbeds. Fishermen follow closely on their heels, hoping for a chance to battle the hard-fighting sport fish, which usually range between 20 and 35 inches in length. You can catch stripers all year in Long Island Sound, but the fall and spring runs make targeting them far easier and more exciting for shore fishermen: at no other time can you catch fish so big in water so small.
The lecture worked: I walked out of the shop with a saltwater license, a brand-new ten-foot rod, and a few bags of rubber swimbaits. Pete had told me that’s all I needed to hook a striper. I had big plans for that fall.
But when I started my freshman year, I got busy and forgot; the saltwater rod gathered dust on my dorm room wall.
***
I finally picked up the rod this October, after another conversation with Pete DeGregorio convinced me to get my act together. In my first three years at Yale, I certainly hadn’t avoided fishing entirely—I’d caught plenty in freshwater lakes and rivers outside of New Haven—and I’d been back to Dee’s for the occasional gear resupply. But still, I told Pete, I was too intimidated by the salty waters closer to my doorstep. Again, he didn’t let that slide. It would be easy, he assured me, if I did what he told me to do and went where he told me to go.
I began my first night of striper fishing at the first spot he recommended: the Sackett Point Road bridge over the Quinnipiac River in North Haven. I arrived at 3:30 AM, but a fisherman in a battered Dodge had beaten me to it. He hadn’t caught anything that morning and was on his way out, but he suggested I throw my swimbait upriver where a streetlight lit the incoming tide—“the fish seem to like the light.” I tried a few times, working the lure quickly through the murky water, feeling a bit silly about the locale I’d chosen: I was perched on a rock between a dingy pool bar and junkyard, and the water smelled nasty. It didn’t seem like the place to find a trophy fish.
But on my fifth cast, I hooked a striper. I wasn’t ready—my drag was set far too low—and within a few seconds the fish had run far enough that I couldn’t see where my line met the water. I’d rigged a flashlight above my reel so that I could see the water, but it wasn’t much use once the fight was on and my rod tip started flailing: any cars passing on the road above must have been treated to quite the light show. After a minute or so of push and pull, though, I managed to land it. As stripers go, it wasn’t huge—probably 26 inches—but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
The next two hours made the first fish seem like beginner’s luck. After a while, I left the bridge and tried a few of Pete’s other spots: the bank behind the Target in North Haven, Q River Grill near Grand Avenue Bridge, and Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven. No dice. Still determined to find the fish, I headed to the last spot on my list: a bit of bank on the Mill River north of the old English Station coal plant.
I could hear stripers in the river even before I made it to the bank of the Mill. The warehouses and auto shops and rail bridges of Fair Haven are quiet at 5:30 in the morning, but the fish come alive in the pre-dawn tidewater. I stopped in the dark and bounced my first cast against the eroded wall of the Amtrak rail bridge. Immediately a striper hammered my cheap rubber swimbait and ran upriver, nearly pulling me in with it. I fought it quickly, wary that the frenzied fish would find a way to weave itself through the industrial debris of the riverbed and break me off. Within a minute, I had it lipped, de-hooked, and back in the river.
My hands didn’t stop shaking with adrenaline for the next two hours. From the same overhanging beam of the old bridge, I hauled in twelve more stripers from the same twenty foot wide stretch of river. By 6:00 a.m. my right thumb was scored and bloody, but I hardly noticed.
About the time the fish stopped biting and the sun came up over I-95, a New London bound train broke the spell, and I finally got a look at the spot I’d found on Google Maps the night before. In the light, I saw that I had been fishing from the remnants of a rotted-out beam at the base of an old wooden rail bridge. The tide lapped at my shins. Foul-smelling steam from a nearby sewer pipe cut through the cold morning air. On the bank, rats picked their way through oyster shells and shreds of muddy plastic.
The sun and train had woken up neighbors that I didn’t know I had. Across the river, a half dozen people were stirring in sun-faded tents set up above the abutment of the old bridge. A woman tidying up the camp dumped the night’s refuse into the river, and the smell of urine drifted upstream.
***
Regardless of NO TRESPASSING signs, steep banks, and stinking tidal mud, fishermen take advantage of every available stretch of riverbank in the New Haven area. Even when I find myself alone on a secluded bank, I always find signs of use: there’s always a rusty hook, a bit of line, or a few crushed beer cans to keep me company. When I run into other fishermen, they’re always happy to share real estate, as long as our lines don’t cross. Often I’ve stood feet away from strangers at three or four in the morning, exchanging tips and tricks and cigarettes and leads on the best spots.
Earlier this fall, while looking for water around 2:30 a.m., I met a strung-out man in tattered clothes on Quinnipiac Ave in Fair Haven who saw my rod and offered to show me some spots along the river if I promised to give him some cash. “Those guys are always fishing behind the bar and grill,” he told me. “They do alright.” He walked me there, talking my ear off about the fishing he’d done as a kid. A week later on the same stretch of road, I ran into another man who stopped me to offer advice on cold-weather fishing. “There’s oysters down there,” he said of a bank downstream in the Quinnipiac, “so they feed year-round.” Urban fishing has its upsides: there are a whole lot more people around to wish you luck.
Many of the people I meet on the rivers of New Haven are hobbyists—they might keep the occasional fish, but they’re really in it for the thrill. They stop by the water for an hour or two, often on their way to or from work, and see if they can land a decent fish. I run into this category of fishermen at spots like Sackett Point Road, which is quickly accessible from I-91—at sunrise in mid-autumn, their cars fill the gravel lot by the bridge. Middle-aged suburban dads with neoprene waders and fishing vests cast beside chain-smoking old guys with surf rods rattling around in the beds of their battered work trucks. These hobbyists, myself included, are excitable and easily impressed, and they’re as quick as new grandparents to show you photos from their camera roll.
Others are true sportfishermen: hooked on stripers, they’ll fish all night, armed with an arsenal of baits and leaders and rods. Back at Dee’s, the truly committed are household names, and serve as invaluable information-sources on the status of the run. When one such sportfisherman, a Fairhaven local named Jose, stops catching inland fish sometime in late November or early December, Dee’s declares the run over.
Useful as these experts may be, Pete DeGregorio cares more for the newbies. “I want you to catch fish,” he told me one evening while he sorted sandworms. “And I go out of my way to tell you how.” Pete spends every day passing along advice. “There’s nothing like, you know, when somebody comes back and says ‘look what I caught!’ and you showed them how to catch it. And that’s probably the most exciting thing about it.”
There’s no substitute, he believes, for the knowledge-sharing community that a local tackle shop provides; Walmart or Bass Pro Shops can’t fill the void. Without the tackle shops and the expertise that they provide, he says, beginners have a harder time catching fish, and the sport suffers. “They get a bad taste in their mouth, and they just don’t go out again.” I, for one, have avoided that bitter feeling of getting “skunked” largely thanks to Pete and his brother. On slow mornings, I call them up, and receive a much-needed course correction: “Try the Ferry Street bridge.”
***
But Pete sees a few ongoing threats to the health of the community. Especially for beginner fishermen, access is a problem. Some of the best fall striper fishing in New Haven can be found in dilapidated stretches of post-industrial water, hidden behind chain-link fences or obstructed by highway interchanges. “It makes it tougher,” Pete told me, “because I’m skeptical of who I send where.” Although New Haven is built around its waterways and oriented towards its harbor, industrial development and urban renewal have alienated the city from its water. Now, many of the New Haveners who use local waterways access them with difficulty or even illegally. Fishermen at the popular Long Wharf Pier, for example, have to pass a sign that reads “NO FISHING AT ANY TIME” on their way to the water.
From Pete’s perspective, strict regulation of the recreational fishery in Connecticut also poses a threat, particularly to low-income and immigrant communities in New Haven. To protect the overall health of fisheries in Long Island Sound, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection imposes a complex set of regulations, updated annually, that limits the recreational harvest of fish. Fishermen can only keep one striper a day, for instance, and it must measure between 28 and 31 inches.
For many fishermen, annual adjustments to these take restrictions can be life-changing. Especially along waterways within the city of New Haven, many are just trying to put food on the table. But it’s these fishermen who take greatest advantage of the city’s waterways.
Subsistence fishermen are some of Pete’s most reliable customers: they fish in any weather, and their habits are less tied to the migration patterns of sportfish like stripers. It’s these low-income subsistence fishermen, Pete says, who are hurt most by the complex and changing list of regulations imposed on the recreational fishery. Although he sells more licenses than anyone in the state, for example, DEEP never sends him enough regulation booklets. “They expect everyone to go online,” he said, “but a lot of people can’t go online.”
He told me that regulations on the recreational fishery fail to take underserved communities—and the value of subsistence fishing—seriously. He cited limits on porgy implemented by DEEP as a particularly glaring example. Porgy, he explained, are mostly targeted by Black and, increasingly, Latino fishermen in New Haven. They aren’t an exciting fish to fight, but they’re easy to catch and good to eat, so they’re a staple food source for some families. For years, there were no minimum size or daily creel limits on porgy harvest. Pete fought tooth and nail against porgy limits, in part because he thought that the state was taking the wrong people into account: “Is it a class thing? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing: it’s awful funny that they attack the porgies.”
If anyone needs to cut back, he said, it’s the commercial fishermen. Commercial outfits must also follow stringent regulations, but their methods—particularly draggers and gillnets—catch and often kill fish indiscriminately. Pete thinks the commercial fishery is given more regulatory leeway because it’s viewed as a food source. But the recreational fishery, he reminded me, feeds many of his neighbors. He knows that not all of the subsistence fishermen follow catch limits, but he struggles to blame people for it. “You’ll see people taking small fish. But they’re feeding their families. It’s not right, but you know you see the commercial guys . . . what the commercial guys destroy is unbelievable.” As long as the water is there, people who are hungry enough to hop fences and breathe a bit of sewer gas will fish it.
***
On a recent November morning, I drove over to a little unused scrap of tarmac on the West River, just north of the Kimberley Avenue bridge, to try my luck. I’d been fishing since midnight with relatively little to show for it—I’d hooked three undersized stripers—so I figured I’d use my last bit of energy on a new stretch of river.
I parked in a spot that seemed public enough, next to an old boarded-up structure with a sign that read “COAST GUARD AU—”—the rest had chipped away. While I was setting up my rod, two old men puttered up in a battered Suzuki Grand Vitara, handicap tag fluttering beneath the rear-view mirror. They produced a few surf rods from the trunk, rigged them up, and started making their way down the trash-covered, unmaintained trail through the underbrush by the high-tide line. The older man, maybe seventy, picked his way under the bridge with a wooden cane, clutching two surf rods in his free hand and struggling on the slick rocks exposed by an outgoing tide. The younger man, maybe sixty, carried buckets.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
They responded in good but rarely-practiced English: “Stripers, blues, porgies, you know, anything. Something for dinner.”
They set up by the water, threw out a few lines, and waited. I tried my luck for a while, didn’t get a bite, and left them to it. I’d caught my fish for the day. They would probably be there a while.