In Praise Of A Fabled Fish: The Shad Lambertville Is Celebrating The Return Of Its Famous Finny Visitors.

Attention fish lovers - especially those of you who relish the distinctive taste of the succulent shad: Tomorrow marks the beginning of the 10th annual Shad Festival in Lambertville.

This is the time of the year when thousands of the tasty fish swim from the sea into fresh water. They course through the coastal waters of the Carolinas and the Chesapeake Bay, up the Delaware River to Lambertville, then into the Delaware Water Gap and northward to Hancock, N.Y.

"To the people of Lambertville," says Dan Whittaker, proprietor of the Inn at Lambertville Station, "our annual shad fest is a great kickoff to spring. It symbolizes the start of the new season. People come here from as far away as New York, Baltimore and Washington. We have several hundred boats out on the river filled with eager fishermen" (and women, Whittaker added).

Spectators observe the action from shore. The event draws about 10,000 people to the picturesque square-mile city of Victorian and Federal-style buildings.

The festival started as a way to celebrate the return of the shad, a fish that lives most of its life in salt water but spawns only in fresh water. For a long period in the 1960s and 1970s, the Delaware River was so polluted that few shad dared swim it. Then the river was cleaned up, and the fish came back. Lambertville, site of the only remaining commercial shad fishery in New Jersey, the 102-year-old Lewis Island Fishery, saw cause for celebration.

The result: an event that combines an arts festival with demonstrations of shad fishing - not to mention a lot of creative shad preparation and eating.

Fred Lewis' family has been involved in shad fishing events for more than a century. "The custom of shad fishing dates back to Colonial times when Lambertville was a ferry crossing," said Lewis. "Recently I read that George Washington at Valley Forge sent his men out to hunt for food and they found shad were running in the Schuylkill." (Shad no longer can make the trip up the Schuylkill because of the Fairmount Dam.) Lewis' father started catching shad in 1888, and Lewis is convinced that "the shad taste best when they reach Lambertville. You get excellent flavor. If you catch them near where they spawn, they've lost a lot of the flavor." In 1910, the federal government conducted a survey on the quality of the shad and determined that the fish were best between Trenton and about 15 miles north of Lambertville.