Thursday, September 03, 2009
Should we be concerned about saltwater stripers?
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
“Fished Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel this morning 4 a.m. -- sunup. Outgoing tide, tons of gulls, but no rockfish (striped bass). It is Oct. 31st and schoolies should be thick at least. Managed one nice fat 28-inch striper, but that was it. I can not remember a Bay season so poor. This is my 3rd trip in Oct. and figured they would be thick after all this weather.”
-- from a 10/31/08 blog
I have some guests coming to the coast of Virginia in October to join me for striped bass fishing. And I’m a little concerned.
Time was when catching school-size stripers was a sure thing in the spring and fall. All you had to do at dawn or dusk was cast a Wind-Cheater or bucktail to the mounds of riprap that give foundation to the four islands of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Your fishing rod was certain to jerk, bow and dance under the power of an 18- to 26-inch silver-sided striper.
For years, this fishery has been about as sure a thing as you can find in angling, a place you can take casual anglers and be assured of putting them into fish.
But no longer.
Don’t get me wrong, there are times you still can catch stripers in abundance. But I’ve seen this fishery become less and less productive as school-size fish become increasingly scarce. It no longer is a sure thing. In fact, you can get skunked or go away with just one or two hits.
The strange part, I’ve heard few fishermen acknowledge this. Fishing reports continue to laud great action. So do tackle shops.
For a time, I was beginning to wonder. Had I’d lost my touch? All I had to go on was personal experience, nothing scientific. Maybe the fish were just hanging out somewhere else.
But more recently I have been joined by other anglers complaining about declining catches pretty much across the whole range of the Atlantic striper population. There are even some who predict that the population is crashing, like it did three decades ago when things got so bad the fishery was shut down under a five-year moratorium.
You might say that fishing for jumbo stripers during the winter months remains outstanding, and you'd be right.
In 2008, the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament awarded 1, 298 citations for outstanding striped bass catches. That was nearly one-quarter of the tournament’s entire citation count for 35 species.
No scarcity here. Or is it?
I recall when the fishing for giant largemouth bass in Back Bay was outstanding, providing 100 or more citations a year. Anglers, including me, flocked there to fish. I wrote stories about the greatness of this fishery. In reality, it was dying.
I sold one article on the topic to Outdoor Life Magazine, which sat on it for more than a year, when the editor contacted me to say he was ready to publish it.
“You can’t,” I said. "That fishery has died.” It had gone that quickly and is just beginning to show signs of a return.
What was happening: there were no small fish replacing the big ones. The trophy catches were the last gasp of a dying fishery. When the big fish were gone, so was the fishery. It isn’t unusual for a troubled fishery to provide a couple years of outstanding big-fish action, then bottom out.
Is that happening with saltwater stripers?
About a year ago I began keeping a file on what I saw was a decline in the striper population. Most of it was anecdotal, like the blog at the top of this column. But more recently there have been a bunch of magazines and journals reporting a downward trend.
The July/September issue of Fly Rod&Reel contains a six-page spread by its conservation writer Ted Williams that can make you very afraid for the future of striped bass. Williams says, “The slaughter is on again, dwarfing anything we saw in the 1970s.”
Scientists have been slow to come around, but even they are beginning to examine figures and trends that indicate problems are looming for this most popular species.
Coming up: Four things we need to do for stripers
