Striped Bass Emergency Action Narrows Slot Limit

It has been nearly 40 years since fisheries managers took steps as drastic as they took this past week to protect striped bass.

The last time, in the late 1980s, they imposed a total ban on the harvest of stripers entirely, which was actually more about a concern for eating the fish contaminated with PCBs than the fish stock, but it kicked off the drastic cuts to the bass harvest that started the stock rebuilding and one of the great success stories in the history of fisheries management.

But they followed up that spectacular score with one of the greatest fumbles of the ball in the history of fisheries management. And now we are almost back to where we were in the late 1980s — in terms of drastic cuts, not the dire state of the stock, thankfully.

As of July 2 — and possibly a lot sooner, depending on how quickly New York State gets on the ball — it will be much harder to catch a “keeper” striped bass. That is because early last week the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission imposed a blanket rule cutting the maximum size for the harvest of striped bass along the Atlantic coastline to 31 inches.

The minimum remains 28 inches, so only fish between 28 and 31 inches can be kept for at least the rest of this year.

The reason for the drastic measures is a dire assessment of the striper stock over the winter that found the chances of rebuilding the population were dwindling fast after the number of fish killed by anglers last year doubled from the year before.

So fisheries managers decided they had to head off another year of massive harvest of stripers and protect the largest year-class in the population right now, which is solidly in the middle of the previous 28-to-35-inch slot.

Those fish, born in 2015, grew into the slot range a little more than a year ago, feeding the spike in harvest, and they are the best hope for sustaining the stock over the next decade.

The rule-makers were caught in a tight spot in terms of how to react to the need to reduce harvest. Raising the minimum this year, up to, say, 36 or 37 inches, might have gotten the 2015s out of the keeper range, but by next year they would be back in that window. Abandoning the slot and instituting a high minimum size, as was employed in the late 1980s and early 1990s to help the rebuilding, would focus mortality on the large fish that right now are the soul of striper fishing in the Instagram era. They would soon be gone.

The new rules will put a maximum size on the commercial harvest of bass, also. This probably will not be a big issue for New York’s commercial fishermen, since we already had a slot limit, but in places like Massachusetts there was no maximum, and pinhookers and netters were taking the biggest stripers they could to maximize their payouts, and robbing the rest of us of the trophy fish that drive tens of millions of dollars of economic output to charter captains and boat dealers and tackle shops and gas stations.

New York’s representative on the ASMFC, Emerson Hasbrouck, deserves applause for having pressed for the cuts with Connecticut’s representative, Dr. Justin Davis. These states listened to the pleas of recreational anglers who have seen the stock declining precipitously over the last 10 years and have realized that, in some respects, striped bass are more economically valuable alive and growing, even if they can’t be kept, than they are dead on ice.

There certainly are going to be those who see this regulation as working against their best interests — including, no doubt, many in the charter fishing industry here on the South Fork who will have a hard time filling their customers’ limits this summer.

There will be those who will say the rules are ridiculous and that there are plenty of striped bass — again, the South Fork will be home to many of those voices, because we have had relatively good fishing the last several years here. If you fish in Montauk or the New York Bight, you might think there are tons of stripers, because you see the huge schools feeding on the surface.

But what you don’t see is that there are no stripers tucked into every nook and cranny of the Peconics and Long Island Sound from May to December like there used to be. You don’t see that there aren’t huge schools of bass in Block Island Sound, Narragansett Bay, the Cape Cod Canal, and Long Island Sound all at the same time, like there used to be. You also don’t see the epic blitzes of striped bass surrounding Montauk like they used to, and you won’t see many stripers over 30 inches after the third week of October anywhere east of Fire Island.

There are plenty of people who would argue that nothing needs to be done until the stock had dwindled so far that it was impossible to argue — like it did in the 1980s. Back then, a greatly diminished stock, a fraction of what it is even today, rebuilt the population in just a handful of years.

But we don’t know that the stock today would be able to rebound like that again, or at least not as quickly, because the ecological pressures on striped bass spawning now are so great that we do not see consistently good spawns.

Bass stocks desperately need to be rebuilt, and right now desperate action needs to be taken. It may be painful in the short term — striped bass is the favorite fish dinner at my house — but we can be thankful that at least there are a lot of fish to be caught and released this time around while we wait for a more stable situation.

There are lots of very big fish and we’re killing them a lot slower than we used to, so we can expect them to last for several more years, probably. We all have cameras now and can capture the thrill of landing a cow striper and then set it free, and we can have those nights on the sand or on the rocks when we catch 20 to 30 fish in a session — even if we have to walk back to the truck empty-handed.

Catch ’em up — and release them. See you out there.

Another reminder: the Eastern Suffolk Chapter of Ducks Unlimited will host its annual family barbecue on May 21 at the Water Mill Community House on Nowedonah Avenue in Water Mill. Doors open at 3 p.m.

Coolers filled with beer and soft drinks, heaps of food, and tables piled with raffle prizes that will make any waterfowler or outdoorsman drool with anticipation of winning one await all comers. Decoys, hunting and fishing gear, shotguns and more will be up for grabs in one of many raffle options.

Tickets and raffle packages are on sale now at ducks.org, or you can call ESDU’s event chair, Thea Fry, at 631-276-3435 to register in real life.