Let me tell you this. When it comes to striped bass, and striped bass fishing, this December 2024 everyone is running scared. It's one of the only times where I've seen spin, fly, for-hire, commercials, tackle shop owners, and everyone in between sharing the thought that 2025 COULD be the year where drastic, and far from perfect, changes are made in the regulations regarding striped bass.
I've seen it in the questions and statements during open mic nights following the ASMFC meetings, see it in the form letters written during the open comments, and in posts on the various social media outlets. In as way it has brought everyone together, although they are really worlds apart each with their own motivation, and selfish ones at that. Is it all about the striped bass? Like really trying to figure out how we can keep just about keep all of the fish swimming and help the species survive? Or is it I want mine, and if we can do the right thing, mostly affecting the other sectors, then I'm good with that.
It's even getting personal. I've seen do-gooders pinned against do-gooders. I've seen people flexing their opinions based on their own take and interpretation on the science and data, which they use to bolster their own arguments. Yes, there's science involved, but there should also be common sense. You can't remain married and expect your wife or husband to allow you to have a side piece. You can't have your cake and eat it too. And that's what everyone wants. Either it's to allow you to "Keep one for the table" or "This is how I feed my family" the bottom line is everyone wants to kill, either purposefully or by accident, striped bass in any size the ASMFC will allow.
The Gold Standard in determining the health os striped bass has been the juvenile striped bass survey held by Maryland down in the Chesapeake Bay. Since greater than 70% of the striped bass swimming are born in the CB that's where studies are focused. Number two is the Hudson and the third is the Delaware River. The data shows that recruitment has been abysmal for years. While anglers have tunnel vision when they catch that beach blitz or go out on their buddies boat or jump on a Captree fleet head boat and see thousands of fish, that is just a small slice of the picture of the striped bass biomass. "Epic", oh please. "They're hundreds of acres of bass out in the EEZ", okay.
If we look at the Maryland graph we can see there's a few years where we had decent, or good, YOY (Young of the Year) returns. Some years that come to mind moving backwards, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2011, and 2007. We've all been talking about protecting the 2015 and 2018 year classes in and around the current slot. Slots can work, but not if you harvest every single fish in that class. The next class, which may be around, or not, was 2011. Those fish, according to the charts, would be > than 40 inches in length. I caught some 40+ inch fish this year, and they are around 15 years old.
While we have been looking to protect the next classes (2015 & 2018), that we hope will start producing the eggs of the next YOY classes, we've been hammering down on smaller (Think Jersey's Bonus Tags) and larger (Think commercial fisheries) fish up and down the East Coast. And don't forget all those big fish that died following the poor catch, mutilate, and release practices every spring and early fall.
So now everyone is using the science and data and their own math to figure out how "We can get ours". They take a fish, say 35 inches, multiply it by 1000 divide it by 4, add 6, times it by the F, add the index, and then divide it by 3, and come up with a hypothesis on why things should remain the same, or be changed, mostly for the other guy. In the end a dead striped bass, or 10,000 of them, means less fish in the biomass. While the YOY is a great starting point to look at the health of the species, it's the SSB (Spawning Striped Bass), that we need to protect. And those fish aren't, either around, or doing, like procreating, like we need them to, all in order for us to kill them.
I've floated the idea, since I was against the slot, that size limits would have to be changed to protect certain year classes. That either means going below, or above the current slot. who's going to get all jazzed up taking a 24 inch fish for the table? That fish, is about five years old, and just getting into their early years of being ready to reproduce. They'll reproduce, in the Chesapeake, Hudson, or Delaware, if conditions are just about perfect, and they choose to spawn. Just because you get all gussied up and head out for a night on the town doesn't mean you have getting laid on your mind. Many fish make the trip to spawn, but not every fish does.
If they, the ASMFC, decides to have an "over" limit, over 35, 38, 40, inches or larger, it would mean disastrous things for the striped bass. Killing more of one to save another is a lose-lose proposition, of course in my opinion. Do you want to see what we saw in the early 2010's all over again? Head boats drifting on top of large bass chasing bunker on top or sand eels along the bottom?
Do we want to see anglers gathered at the local pinch point on the beach waiting for the big girls to push the bait in? And then dragging those fish, that they can't cary due to their weight, along the sand, wood, and asphalt, to their trucks? I don't. But it's going to happen.
It's like ordering a pizza and then the brutes take what they want before they feed the kids. They'll then grab for the pizza cutter and slice up the two remaining slices for the kids to eat. There's just not enough to go around, and you can't just go and order more striped bass.
The concept of No Target and No Harvest is real this year, coupled with closures that they call "Waves". In order to have these changes work, you need anglers willing to fall in line, and have enforcement around to keep people honest, which we know doesn't happen. Recreational anglers have their wants, as do the commercials. But things change. What about the whiting and ling fisheries we used to have? I have no first hand knowledge of that but I've heard. It was a winter thing, off the beach and jetties, and from the boats. They don't exist anymore and either do those fisheries. There were head boats that depended on that fishery each year, but it was lost, and we're looking at striped bass circling the toilet and on their way to, yes, extinction, or at least a lost fishery.
I could write about this everyday, and I've penned my opinions on this since I started this blog 15 years ago. Basically it has been the same message, "Dead striped bass equals less striped bass". You can squeeze what fish are left through whatever formula or equation you want but at the end of the day we have to stop the insanity and realize that striped bass can't give us all that we want from them. It isn't and will never be sustainable. If the ASMFC came out and said "NO FISHING" for striped bass for two years I would be okay with that. I'd go to work, find some other hobby to satiate me, and eventually drop dead. Why can't we take no for an answer these days? We expect the new generation to fall in line and play within the rules but when it affects us we lose our shit and try and manipulate things to get our way.
The cave men used to like to hunt dinosaurs. One evolved and one didn't.
