By Angus Phillips
Sunday, June 11, 2006

What to say about the Shenandoah River? Talk to some folks and it's all but moribund; talk to others and it's doing all right, though no one thinks it's without serious problems that need to be addressed.

It's certainly a sad state of affairs when the once-pristine, storied waterway that winds down the region's handsomest valley in the shadow of the Allegheny, Blue Ridge and Massanutten ranges is tainted by massive fish kills and algae blooms. How bad is it? It depends on whom you ask and where they're sitting.

"It's terrible, absolutely terrible," says Bud Nagelvoort, who lives a stone's throw from the Shenandoah's main stem near Berryville, Va., and is chairman of the Lord Fairfax Soil and Water Conservation District. "The only fish I've got left here are carp. It's grim and it seems to be getting worse."

"It's not as bad as people say," retorts Harry Murray, who runs a fly shop, fishing guide service and pharmacy on the North Fork in Edinburg. "I fish it every day or two and I wouldn't be going out there if I wasn't catching fish. We're not getting the big bass we used to get but there's plenty of smaller ones. I think we're going to be all right."

"We had our best Memorial Day weekend ever, if that's any indication," said Trace Noel, who owns Shenandoah River Trips, a canoe livery on the South Fork. Noel said paddlers still flock to the river and though fishing was poor last year after a big spring kill, smallmouth bass are rebounding. He was happy to show me, first-hand.

Noel and I canoed three miles of the slow-moving, eye-appealing South Fork above his shop at the low-water bridge in Bentonville last week and I was cheered by the abundance of apparently healthy bass. I probably hooked three dozen smallmouths in a two-hour float and landed about a third of those. Most were about 10 inches long and showed no signs of the lesions and fin rot that lately have plagued significant numbers of Shenandoah bass and sunfish.

But one short, successful outing is hardly worth crowing about in the face of all the bad news that's emerged over the last couple of years.

In 2004, a spring fish kill laid waste to bout 80 percent of the mature smallmouth and sunfish in a 100-mile stretch of the North Fork, according to state biologists. In 2005, another kill wiped out a similar crop on a 100-mile-plus stretch of the South Fork and main stem. This year scientists are tracking an ongoing fish kill on the North Fork from Woodstock downstream and one on the South River, which feeds the South Fork.

Bob Cramer, who for years guided smallmouth anglers on the Shenandoah, has given up. "I averaged 50 to 60 trips a year," he said, "but I didn't take anyone last year or this year. You can't guide people somewhere where all they're going to catch are some dinks." He's been driving an hour and a half south from his home in Harrisonburg to fish the James River, which he says remains healthy.

No one knows who or what to blame for the decline of the shallow, serpentine Shenandoah, which winds gently through farm and forest land before joining the Potomac at Harpers Ferry. "We don't know what's killing the fish," says Steve Reeser, district biologist for the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

"Is it degraded water quality? Too many nutrients? Sharp water temperature fluctuations? Spawning stress? Long periods of turbidity? Hormone-disrupting compounds from herbicides, pharmaceuticals, agricultural food, fire retardants? Some combination of all these and other things?"

The best guess seems to be a smorgasbord of water quality issues so complex, it may take years to deconstruct. That drives longtime enjoyers of the river like Cramer, the fly-fishing guide, up a wall. "Everyone says, 'Do the science first,' but at the rate the state does that it'll take 10 years to get an answer -- and another 10 or 15 to straighten it out."

Virginia has established a fish-kill task force to isolate the problems. Meantime, Reeser says fishing is better than might be expected after a highly successful smallmouth bass hatch across the watershed in 2004. As a result, the river sports plenty of 10-inch bass like the ones I caught, he said. If those fish don't succumb to another kill, it could be the foundation for future strong year classes. But that's a big if.

Cramer reckons the cause of all the trouble is fairly simple: Too much farming and development putting too many nutrients and pollutants in the river. "But the state isn't going to indict itself or the agriculture industry," he said.

"Here in Rockingham County, every bit of land that can be farmed is being farmed, and what can't is being developed. We've got 500 dairy farms and 500 poultry farms in this county alone -- that's millions of tons of waste washing into the watershed, plus the nutrients from sewage treatment plants."

Indeed, problems of the Shenandoah sound eerily familiar to anyone who has observed the long-running decline of the Chesapeake Bay, where too many nutrients, mostly from farms and sewage treatment plants, led to algae blooms that clouded the water, blocked sunlight from the bottom and killed off bay grasses that clarify and oxygenate the water and stabilize the bottom.

Similarly in the Shenandoah, algae blooms and declines in rooted grasses are acknowledged to be part of the problem.

At least state and local officials appear to be taking it all seriously. Tourism is a booming industry in the Shenandoah region, which boasts Skyline Drive, Shenandoah National Park and a dozen or more limestone caves to explore, in addition to the river. Money talks, and no one wants to see many millions of annual tourist dollars jeopardized.

For the moment, the Shenandoah still looks like the grand old stream that inspired a revered, centuries-old song; and depending on whom you talk to, it remains a fine place to go. But these days, even to its defenders, the water looks browner over the next hill.

"We're not doing too badly over here, but from what I understand, the North Fork is a sewer," says Noel, the canoeist who makes his living on the South Fork.

"I think the North Fork is doing a lot better than the South Fork, in all honesty," said Murray, who guides anglers and sells flies on the North Fork.

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between, and it's not a happy truth.