STRIPED BASS: SOME PEOPLE GET IT, SOME PEOPLE DON'T

Every morning, when I don’t head outside, begins the same way.  I walk back into the den and turn on the TV (Channel 12 for the weather, CNN for the rest), then light up my laptop to check the news feeds.

This morning, a couple of striped bass stories caught my eye.

Anyone who fishes the northeast coast knows that striped bass are special.  Sure, tuna and makos grow quite a bit bigger, and their fight puts a striper’s to shame.  Inshore, bluefish pull harder, weakfish look better, and black sea bass are better to eat.

But striped bass have an aura that sets them apart from the pack.  They inhabit every type of inshore waters, from the high surf to deep-water ledges to tidal rivers yet, at times, can be nearly impossible to find.  They’ll eat everything from sand fleas to weakfish, but sometimes turn up their nose at our lures at the same time that seem to be blitzing on every fish in the sea.  They force us to fish at hours when other people sleep, in weather that keeps sane folks indoors, if we want to earn any real and consistent success along the striper coast.

For many anglers, they have achieved a sort of heroic status, a status that was only enhanced when, like the heroes of myth, they had their own symbolic descent into Hell in the late 1970s, when the stock collapsed and some people questioned whether it would ever rebound again.  But thanks to strict management measures, they returned to our seas in abundance, giving some fishermen a new understanding about why conservation is vital not only for the good for the bass, but for themselves.

Some people get that, some people don’t.  And that’s where today’s stories come in.

The first story was born in Rhode Island, after recent rumors of a 77-pound striped bass caught off Block Island began to circulate.  At first, no one knew whether the rumors were true, but when things began to settle down, two things became clear.  One:  A really nice bass had been landed off Block Island.  And two:  No one knows just what it weighed, but it was big.  That’s because, according to The Fisherman magazine,

“After boating the behemoth bass, [the angler] quickly decided not to harvest the [sic] her and instead got some measurements, a few photos and released the fish to keep the genes in the pool and to hopefully keep growing and making more future mega bass.  The fish taped out at an impressive 54 inches and sported a girth of 32.5 inches.  When plugged into the weight formula (girth x girth) x length/800, the fish comes in at 71.29 pounds.”

That’s a big bass, one far larger than most of us will ever see, much less encounter on our own, and the angler could hardly be blamed if he had decided to put such a fish on his wall.  Yet he chose not to do so, and instead returned that big, fecund female to the sea to hopefully prosper and replenish its kind.

He certainly "gets it."  He has learned the lessons of the past, and have taken them well to heart.

The other piece came out of the Cape Cod Times, and tells a far different story.

As most striped bass fishermen probably know, at least from second-hand info if they haven’t seen it for themselves, the Cape Cod Canal has been New England’s hottest striped bass venue for the past couple of years.  As always happens, readily accessible abundance draws hordes of anglers, and not all of them are the sort that we’d want to claim as friends.

Some of them don’t “get it” at all.  Thus, the Cape Cod Times reported that

“A blitz of striped bass at the Cape Cod Canal has brought a swarm of fishermen looking to take home a ‘keepa’.

“But with the crush of fishermen, there has been a surge in calls about fishing violations and a flurry of citations handed out by the state environmental police.”

According to the article, enforcement officers have typically been receiving at least 10 complaints each day, and sometimes 10 complaints in just one hour, about illegal striped bass fishing in the Canal.  Over 50 citations have been issued in a single week, and the violations are so common that the environmental police are calling in officers from other parts of the state to help them deal with the poachers.

Most of the violations are the sort of thing you’d expect—anglers exceeding the bag limit or keeping fish below the minimum size.  Some, apparently anticipating a bag limit violation, are hiding their fish in the rocks or among the trees; such intentional concealment violates Massachusetts law.  And, as one might expect, there are illegal sales.

Yet, as bad as those violations are, other conduct is at least as disturbing.  The Times reported that

“Police have also found many stripers belly-up or barely alive floating in the canal.

“’From what we have observed they appear to have hook marks, indicating that this is poor catch-and-release practice or people are (high-grading), which is also prohibited in Massachusetts,’ according to [Maj. Patrick] Moran [of the Massachusetts Environmental Police]…

“High-grading is when a fisherman catches a fish and sets it aside until he or she catches a bigger fish.  The fish caught earlier is then thrown back, even though it is unlikely to survive…”

 Thus, recent news about folks chasing stripers spans the whole gamut, from the altruistic Rhode Island angler to the slob fishermen plaguing the Cape Cod Canal.

One might reasonably asks “Who is more typical of striped bass fishermen, the Rhode Island angler concerned about the future health of the stock, or the poachers on the Canal who care about nothing save themselves?”

I’m not sure that anyone can answer that question without first defining just what a “striped bass angler” is.

As much as I hate to say it, if we define “striped bass angler” as anyone who, at any time, might fish for striped bass with rod and reel, the scene at the Cape Cod Canal probably exposes a pretty good cross-section of the community.  

That’s because, when you set such a broad definition, you include a lot of folks who never “paid their dues,” who never fished for bass in all sorts of weather, learning the little details of how, when and why one finds fish and gets them to bite throughout a range of constantly changing conditions.

Instead, you find quite a few folks who have little respect for or knowledge of the fish or the fishery, but merely seek to cash in when the fishing is easy.  Today, they’re fishing for striped bass in the Canal, but when the Canal cools down, they’ll be back on their computers and smart phones, looking for the next blitz, instead of working the waters trying to find a pocket of fish for themselves.

Such people not only don’t get it, but they’re so far from the heart of the fishery that they don’t even know that there’s something out there to get…

If you narrow down the notion of “striped bass fishermen” to those folks who have spent years—or, if new, plan to spend years—working out the ways of the striper, the picture is a lot more favorable. 

The ranks of serious striped bass fishermen still include older folks who we might call the “Keepers of the Lore,” who pass down tales from the collapse four decades ago, and remind younger anglers that, if we’re not careful, the same things could very well happen again.  They try to teach newcomers how and why to release unwanted fish (always remembering that the occasional striped bass dinner is OK, too) and, if the student seems worthy, teach them how to catch some bass, too.

Those folks “get it,” as do plenty of younger anglers who come to the hearings and say that “We don’t want to see them collapse again,” even though the last collapse happened before they were born, meaning that they could only have seen it through their fathers’ or older friends’ eyes.

In truth, the conservation ethic among dedicated striped bass anglers that I’ve known—and over the years, I’ve come to know a lot of them—is undoubtedly stronger than it is among any other salt water anglers in the northeast.  Along the entire coast, only the folks who chase bonefish, permit and tarpon, and maybe some West Coast salmon anglers, seem to come close.

And that’s a good thing.  Yet, if I’m to be honest, I have to admit that there is a subset of striped bass fishermen—very good, very dedicated, very successful striped bass fishermen—that really don’t “get it” at all. 

Some are poachers, pure and simple.  They see the bass as little more than dollar bills to be plucked from the water.  They seem to enjoy catching bass, but the fishing is more like a job, and it’s not clear that they’d do it—or at least do it so often—if fishing cost them money instead of enhancing their bottom line.

Then there are folks with big egos. 

Some are just tackle shop heroes, people who apparently live such drear and meaningless lives that they find their purpose in killing striped bass and getting their pictures on bait station walls, living for the assumed admiration of the next guy who walks into the shop to buy a few fresh bunker. 

Others live in a larger world, with Internet presence and YouTube channels, who have found a way to monetize their angling talents.  

They reach a lot of folks, and have the potential to do a lot of good by promoting the principles of good sportsmanship and effective conservation.  Of course, some of that stuff is controversial and might upset their sponsors, so in the end, like the poachers, they usually just concentrate on maintaining their cults and their bottom lines, and let the striped bass take care of themselves.

And that’s too bad, because it looks like the striped bass is going to need all the help that it can get in the soon-to-be future. 

The stock’s not overfished—yet—and the latest stock assessment update says it’s unlikely to become so.  However, the stock’s a lot closer to the biomass threshold than it is to the target, so if the stock is not overfished, it’s not all that healthy, either.

That’s not good, because right now, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is conducting a new benchmark assessment of the striped bass stock, and part of that assessment will include options for new reference points that could, if adopted, push bass abundance down even lower.

Down in Washington, it looks like the effort to open federal waters, in whole or in part, to striped bass fishing just got its second wind.

The folks who don’t “get it” will, of course, support such an opening, and such new reference points, in order to increase their (legal) kill.

That means that the folks who have figured out that healthy fisheries—recreational and commercial—depend on healthy fish populations, have a big job to do in the next year or so.  They’re going to have to go to the hearings, when they finally happen, to fight for the stripers again.

It’s the same thing that they’ve done for the past forty years.

The faces have changed, but the mission remains. 

As those who “get it” already know.