THE ANGLER AS FATALIST

 No one should have been surprised when the striped bass stock collapsed in the late 1970s.  The warning signs were all there.

After a record-high year class in 1970, the juvenile abundance index for the Maryland portion of Chesapeake Bay—the single most important striped bass spawning ground on the coast—began to decline.  By 1980, it was in free fall.  Three of the five lowest abundance indices on record were recorded in 1980, 1981, and 1983.  1981’s index of 1.22 was the lowest recorded in a time series going back to 1957; it held that dubious distinction until 2012, when the juvenile abundance index fell to a disheartening 0.89.

The lack of recruitment had the predictable impact on the striped bass stock.  Older fish, hammered by what were effectively unrestricted commercial and recreational fisheries (and there was really little distinction between the two back then; commercial licenses had not been adopted by most coastal states, and supposedly “recreational” fishermen regularly sold their excess catch), were killed with no thought for the future, and with few young bass entering the population, collapse was inevitable.

But even after the stock collapsed, striped bass fishermen kept fishing.  In a few places, most notably Block Island and parts of Cape Cod, there were enough big fish available that many fishermen still refused to admit that the bass were in trouble. 

Along the rest of the coast, most harbored no such illusions, but we went fishing anyway, because we were striped bass fishermen and that’s what we did.  Day after day after day (or, because we’re talking about bass, perhaps it was night after night after night), striped bass anglers kept tossing their lures into a largely empty sea.

Once in a while, someone caught a fish, and some of those fish were large.  But for the most part, we headed out to the beaches and boats knowing that the odds were dead set against us.  Striped bass might not have been in quite the same category as unicorns and bigfoot, but by the early ‘80s, they weren’t too much easier to find.

Yet we fished.  Once in a while, we even caught a bass, and when we did, we usually released it, wondering when, and if, we’d manage to catch another.  But that uncertainty never stopped us from heading out the next day.

I thought of those times a couple of weeks ago, when I heard one of the speakers at the Saltwater Recreational Fishing Summit declare that

“Anglers are optimists.”

Maybe that’s true of young anglers, and new anglers, and anglers fortunate enough to live in those rare places where fish are abundant and well-managed.  But for those of us who have been on and around the water for a few decades, and have seen good fishing and bad fishing, and everything in between, I don’t believe that the “optimist” tag applies. 

We’re fatalists, who fish because we have no desire to play golf or tennis, don’t go to theme parks, and can’t see ourselves wasting time in a football stadium when the cold fronts blow and bait is moving down along the coast.

We fish, because we have little desire to engage in more trivial things.  The ocean, the air, and the hunt touches us in a way nothing else can.  So we venture out even when we know that the trip may be—probably will be—fruitless. 

That’s not optimism. It’s fatalism, which for some can be mixed with desperation.  

Such desperation manifests itself in folks who pour their money into faster, longer-ranged boats, loaded with electronics, that they hope might help them to find the last outposts of fish that once teemed just outside—and sometimes within—their marinas.  They seek the newest, most efficient gear, made of the most modern materials, in the hope that, so outfitted, they can glean one or two of the same fish that their grandparents caught, by the bushel, with handlines.

Though, I suppose, desperation might be a twisted sort of optimism, the sort of optimism that says “If I only spend another few thousand on electronics and gear, maybe I’ll be able to catch some fish.”

Although we fatalists might tell them not to bet too much on such an outcome.

Instead of financing false hopes, we chase memories.  In my case, those memories look a lot like weakfish.

Weakfish have long supported boom-or-bust fisheries.  Just what causes the boom-and-bust is still open to debate.  When the fish disappeared shortly after the close of the Second World War, many blamed the disappearance on a blight that decimated eelgrass beds during the 1930s.  Weakfish stayed scarce until the late 1960s, then hung around at greater or lesser levels of abundance for the next 30-plus years before crashing again.  The decline seemed to be linked to some unspecified source of natural mortality rather than fishing, with a 2009 stock assessment noting that

“Projections for this stock present a very bleak picture, where even under a moratorium of fishing the stock is unlikely to recover rapidly to anywhere near what one could describe as safe biological conditions.”

Yet for reasons that I can’t even try to explain, because I don’t quite understand them myself, I love to fish for weakfish.  So around the beginning of May, when lilacs are starting to bloom, I still end up somewhere on Great South Bay, probing the edges and channels, hunting for a different species of unicorn than I sought forty years ago but, up until a few years ago, when weakfish numbers began to rebound, I was hunting unicorns just the same.

I went out not expecting to find them, although once in a while I did, but because it was May, and weakfish season.  It would have been sacrilege not to try.

Thus, at last month’s Summit, I just shook my head when the same panelist who came up with the “anglers are optimists” statement suggested that if striped bass (and, by extension, weakfish or any other desired but absent species) isn’t available, anglers should be happy to go fish for catfish or other, less appealing things—that we should settle for less because fishery managers have failed to conserve the species that we value most.

To insinuate that all fish are the same, and that anglers in the Chesapeake Bay—which is where the panelist in question came from—should be happy catching hulking, invasive blue catfish, which are essentially no more than a trash can with fins, instead of native striped bass, is to denigrate the value of healthy native fish stocks, and devalue the angling experience.

It is better to seek unicorns, knowing that such quest will fail, than to abandon the quest altogether.

But it is better yet to spend time not only pursuing one’s dream, whether that dream takes the shape of a striped bass, weakfish, or shortfin mako, but in making such dream a reality.  

If I can be accused of any optimism at all—a trait that I will stubbornly deny—it is not in my role as an angler, but as an advocate, who believes that if enough people spend enough time engaging with fishery managers, they can push the management process in the right direction.  

Yet even there, fatalism plays its role.

For in some places, in some fisheries, managers seem to be elevating fishermen’s calls for increased short-term landings above the resource’sneed for peer-reviewed science and management based on the best available data.  Traditional conservation advocates have seemingly abandoned their former role of watchdogs protecting the management process, in favor of higher profile, and more heavily publicized, campaigns focusing on “30x30” protected areas.

To the fatalist, it can seem as if good fishery management is spiraling down the same path as good fishing.

But just as we chased striped bass and weakfish in the depths of their declines, knowing that failure was the likely end, the fatalist fishery advocate can go into a fight expecting to lose, while doing all he or she knows how to do to prevail.

And once in a while, as with bass in decades past, we might just catch a unicorn.