Thursday, September 10, 2009
Four things we need to do for stripers (Part II)
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
A couple of winters ago I was striped bass fishing with a guide on the Virginia coast. I told him at the start that I didn’t want to keep any fish, that I preferred catch and release.
“If you don’t want them, I know a guy who will take every one I carry to him,” the guide told me.
I’ve never understood why guides and charter boat skippers, who depend on a decent fishery for their livelihood, are so prone to keep everything they catch. When a guide releases a striper, isn’t that a bit like making a bank deposit?
Yet I continue to get e-mail images from charter boat captains that show a half-dozen grinning angels holding up two giant stripers apiece.
They aren’t doing anything illegal. The limit is two and the customers paid good money to be on the boat. But I am thinking the time has come that we need to start handling this wonderful resource with more care (See last week’s Cochran column). Do you really need to keep two big fish when one will provide all the meat you desire?
No one is saying that striped bass are scarce. But there are growing indicators we could be headed toward another crash if we aren’t careful. I am old enough to remember the previous crash and I don’t want any part of another one.
Here are four things I think we need to do:
- Reduce the mortality of striped bass.
- End black market kills.
- Protect the food sources of stripers, namely Atlantic menhaden.
- Take more seriously the efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.
As I said in last week’s column, reports of a fishery in decline mostly have been anecdotal, and they occur at a time when there have been upbeat scientific assessments of the fishery. That is changing. Concern is being expressed in credible journals. Even professional fisheries managers are beginning to take notice. Some examples:
There is a six-page spread in the July/September issue of Fly Rod & Reel by conservation writer Ted Williams that has the ominous sub-title: “If you care about fishing along the Atlantic Coast for striped bass, be afraid -- very afraid.” Williams stated that what currently is happening to the striper population dwarfs what occurred in the 1970s. Last year was the worst since 2000 in the number of landings of stripers. The take in several states was off nearly 50 percent. Guides had to cancel their season in some instances.
Commercial over fishing of menhaden, a key food source for stripers, is so profound that in the Chesapeake Bay “a substantial part of the striper population is starving,” Williams said. Illegal black market kills are thriving. Efforts in Congress to make striped bass a gamefish are shouted down by commercial interests.
Al Ristori, who writes a Conservation Watch column for The Fisherman Magazine, reported that an annual 10-day National Science Foundation survey off Virginia and North Carolina resulted in only 146 bass being captured and tagged last winter. The 21-year average is 2,124.
The Chesapeake Bay Ecological Foundation says it has completed a study that reveals a depletion of baitfish -- namely menhaden -- and this means stripers 6-to 24-inches are unable to maintain weight and health and the population is collapsing. Thirteen of 15 Atlantic states prohibit industrial fishing for menhaden, but in Virginia it is big business managed by legislators rather than scientist.
A Washington Post story reported that three men were charged and jailed for over-fishing about $2.15 million worth of striped bass in Maryland’s upper Chesapeake Bay and tributaries.
Claims that fishing is slow because stripers are offshore or elsewhere are insufficient to explain the widespread gloomy reports, said Fred Jennings of Stripers Forever, an organization fighting to gain game fish status for the striped bass. “A more likely explanation is that this fishery is in trouble again,” he said. “Commercial fishing for striped bass should end by declaring this species a game fish, just as was done many decades ago for waterfowl, trout, deer and other formerly market-hunted species. The recreational fishery also ought to be managed to encourage catch-and-release by requiring single barbless hooks and circle hooks for bait.”
The young of the year index, an annual measurement of the number of juvenile stripers in the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay, was the lowest last year since 1990. The index was 3.2 compared to the long-term average of 11.7.
Progress to clean up the Chesapeake Bay has been so slow that any gains being made are offset by additional sources and volume of harmful runoffs. Twenty-five years have been spent on the effort with minimal success
