While I was away a post from the New Hampshire Fish and Game came across Facebook. The above picture shows an officer with 14 illegal oversized striped bass. Currently the size limit for recreational striped bass is one fish at 28-31 inches while commercial takes vary.
So what's going on up there. It really is all coming down to the bunker, or menhaden, or the pogies as they call them up in New England. We see them down here in the Raritan and New York Bays, the New York Bight, and along the Jersey Shore in the summer and fall. Big bass on adult peanut bunker and then bass of all sizes on immature or peanut bunker. We know how the striped bass migration works, they winter down south, for the most part, and summer up in parts north in and around New England.
Menhaden are "the most important fish in the sea" and are not only fodder for all types of predators fish but are filter feeders and do an incredible job in keeping waters in check. That's why when the Omega Protein boats come up off of New Jersey and New York to harvest bunker for fish food the damage to fish, whales, birds, and the water is disastrous. Depending on the year bunker make their way north, and it varies on how north they go. Montauk, Block, and Boston Harbor are locations where big bass summer over and will prey on bunker if they are around. So this year New Hampshire anglers
seem to be enjoying the visiting big bass that have pushed the pogies close and into Portsmouth Harbor. Portsmouth Harbor is in New Hampshire and just a stones throw to Maine. Since this story aired I am
sure the angling pressure has increased a lot in and around the harbor. When I talk with people about bunker I am surprised how much or little, they, or I, really know. But what usually gets them is this, bunker spawn off shore. Period. A lot of people think bunker in the bays and rivers are there to spawn. But that's not true. They spawn off shore and then the eggs "travel" into the bays and rivers, which becomes their nursery, and then grow before their migration out in the fall.
So back to the poaching. The ASMFC set the regulations to have a slot limit for striped bass at 28-31" for recreational anglers. That is along the East Coast except for the Delaware River on the Pennsy side and inside the Chesapeake Bay. There are commercial fisheries in some states but most have stopped those practices in part or in whole. North Carolina closed both recreational and commercial harvest in their waters hoping for a rebuild. New Jersey closed their commercial fishery and transferred that quota to the Bonus Tag Program. Massachusetts, pretty much the epicenter of commercial striped
bass fishing outside of the Chesapeake Bay, closed the Cape Cod Canal for commercial fishing. In Mass. boat and shore anglers can participate in commercial fishing. To relate it to what happened with the poaching remember Maine and New Hampshire don't have a commercial fishery.
According to the NHFG on July 15th they started receiving calls that a fisherman was seen catching and keeping large striped bass just outside the harbor. The alarm was sounded to the neighboring states and the search started. At a ramp officers found the fisherman as he tried to discard the 14 striped bass
that ranged from 37-47 inches which are about 22- 42 pound fish. Why would a guy keep those big bass if the size limits have been reduced to a slot? Well, in Massachusetts the commercial boat based size limit is 35 inches with a daily limit of 15 (FIFTEEN) fish. That lasts until the quota has been reached each summer. Massachusetts publishes those quotas each day as seen below for July 30th.
In addition to the quotas the commercial season in Massachusetts is also regulated by open and closed seasons as seen below. You can see that both shore and boat based fishing can only occur on
certain days of the week. This situation occurred on July 15th which was a Monday, but it was at night, and these New Hampshire fish would be "turned in" and counted for the Tuesday Massachusetts quota count. And while this guy seems to be the poster child the NHFW also caught more Massholes crossing
state lines to fill their Massachusetts commercial quotas. The quota for Massachusetts for 2024 is 683,773 pounds of striped bass. If the average sized fish reported is 28 pounds, a 40 inch fish, then about 24,420 fish will be harvested this summer. That's a lot of dead striped bass. I won't even get into the legal commercial fishery in the CB and those numbers.
Poaching has been going on forever. Wherever there are rules they get broken. That goes for recreational and commercial catches as well as for hunters and fishermen alike. We see it here in New Jersey but it's more on the recreational size. We tend to stereotype poachers here in New Jersey always
thinking it's non-citizens who do this illegal activity under the cover of darkness. Now that occurs, don't get me wrong, but poaching includes taking fish out of season, outside of size limits, and fishing outside of the three-mile line in federal waters.
In the New Hampshire case the poacher admitted he was going to return the fish to Mass. and sell them under his commercial fishing license there. According to the NHFG the value of those fish was $1,600, or $114 a fish. When these incidents are made public there is always outcry on what should happen to the guilty party. The officers write tickets and take the fish for evidence and usually to a local food bank so they don't go to waste. Rarely do we see the person arrested, and in this case, like many others, they go unnamed. Many people think the penalties should be more severe as to send a message to others who are part of this practice. Seizing fishing gear, or their boats, and even the trucks they used to tow the boats, should be part of the penalty.
About ten years ago I read a book written by Jeff Nichols, a Montauk chapter Captain. The book talks about the highs and lows of commercial striped bass fishing in New York. New York has it's own
storied history of commercial striped bass fishing between boat and shore based anglers. "Anglers", used loosely, as a large part of New York's harvest came from beach seining. Guys would drive on the beach in pick up trucks and find large schools of striped bass. They would deploy rowboats and net, or seine,
almost the entire school. The fish would be tossed into the bed of the trucks and then sold legally to fish markets, like the famous Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, or illegally through the back door of
restaurants, even the poshest ones in Manhattan and cities along the East Coast. Nichols speaks to this in his book, Caught. Which is a great read and can be found on Amazon, HERE. Today the Fulton Fish Market calls the Bronx home after moving there in 2005. I was lucky enough to spend a night at the old market one night back in the 1980's, but those were the good old film days, and I don't know where those photographs or negatives are.
I also shot at the new market in 2011 doing a story for New Jersey Monthly Magazine on sustainable fishing. That night I followed New Jersey restaurant owner Peter Panteleakis, of Oceanos in Fair Lawn fame, over to the Bronx market as he picked out fish for his restaurant. Interestingly, the above pick shows him checking out a striped bass, which can't be served in New Jersey restaurants. It was a good
assignment. I able to get behind the scenes in the wee-hours of the morning and watch the action go down. It's a difficult place to just break out a camera and shoot as people there tend to be camera shy and a little suspicious. The market has a long history of being controlled by, well, you know.
Time will tell how well the 28-31 inch slot will do towards rebuilding the striped bass. The commercial fishery continues to chip away at the larger cow female bass which are what do the heavy lifting as far as breeding each spring. Be it Chesapeake Bay, Hudson or Delaware River, strains having those fish return each spring is the only way to rebuild the fishery. Not playing by the rules, recreationally or commercially, is selfish and isn't fair to the fish or the other people who play by the rules, regardless of what you think about them.