Striper Disaster in Chesapeake; New Rules Will Be Debated This Winter

Striped bass fishing has been pretty darn good locally in the last two weeks and is fixin’ to get a lot better, maybe just between the time I’m writing this and when you’ll read it a couple of days later.

A good-sized body of fish moved through the area early this month, and another one seems to be hot on its heels, with some nice weather and lots of bait that, hopefully, will keep them in a feeding but not a migrating mood.

There are sandeels in the surf zone, finally, and lots of bunker, bay anchovies, mullet, mackerel and baby weakfish in the near-shore ocean to keep them fat and happy, hopefully, for a few weeks.

The one bit of bad news for local anglers is that it seems that the main slug of real trophy fish, 40- and 50-plus-pounders, have already passed us by, probably during one of the big storms in late September or early October, and have moved into the New York Bight already, where they are getting pounded on by a huge crowd of boat and surf anglers. Hopefully, catch-and-release skills are better there than what I see around here. Doubt it.

Certainly, there are still some good fish in the migration pipeline, but the way the striped bass population is aligned these days, that body of big fish is really the bulk of the 2011 cohort of big, old fish.

But that brings me to the other bit of news this week: Addendum II.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has approved taking up Addendum II to the Striped Bass Management Plan, with an eye toward adjusting fishing regulations to, hopefully, get the rebuilding of the striped bass stock back on track.

They will schedule it for public comment, probably starting next month and running through the end of the year or so, which certainly will spark a firestorm of head-butting between competing interest groups and those of us who just hate regulation in any form when it means they will be told they can’t just do whatever they want, like their mommies used to tell them.

The draft options that will be on the table will include setting the new slot limit for recreational anglers. The talk in the early-going is that they are leaning toward a 30-to-33-inch slot for next year, which is just about the dumbest idea I’ve heard yet — more on that below.

The addendum will cut the commercial harvest, which I know a lot of recreational anglers will rejoice at, but it is really a tiny drop in the bucket and a minor point in the grand scheme of things.

This year’s emergency shift midseason from a slot of 28 to 35 inches to just 28 to 31 inches has been a big failure, in my estimation.

First of all, I know a lot of people didn’t follow it, or didn’t even know it had happened. I watched a ton of anglers in the last two weeks intently measuring stripers and then keeping fish that were clearly 33 to 35 inches.

New York State has done a horrendous job of getting the message out about what its fish regulations are for all species. There should be clear, easy-to-decipher — that means in any language — signs that explain fish regulations year to year. It doesn’t even have to be in a language — just graphics could do it: a picture of a given fish species and a ruler showing what the size range is.

And they should be everywhere. Put them at every beach access, in the window of every bait shop and municipal building and post office. There’s little point in having rules if people don’t even know what they are and enforcement is scant, which it is in a state like New York that has no fishing license revenue.

Secondly, the 28-to-31-inch slot really failed to do what it was intended to do, which was to protect the large 2015 year class of stripers that are the best hope for the spawning stock in the years to come. The 2015 are mostly between 29 and 33 inches, the fish scientists have said. So if you split that down the middle, only about half of them were not keepers since July. And those 28- and 29-inch fish are from the reasonably middling classes from 2016 and 2017, so we’re really hammering the one cohort of fish that we are depending on.

I said from the beginning that we should have pushed the slot well above where the 2015s are, into the upper 30 inches. That would reduce the number of fish killed in general — setting aside dead discards, which is a tragic and almost completely intractable issue for the recreational fishery — and mean that each fish that died went to better use, feeding more people than a 28-inch fish does.

But everyone is obsessed with making it easier to catch a keeper for the novices, thinking that is better for business. That’s shortsighted thinking by folks who must not remember the 36- and 33-inch minimums of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Catching a keeper striped bass should be a reason for celebration of time and expertise, not an entitled result from a half-hearted fishing effort.

It may have been sad coincidence, but the move by ASMFC came just a week after the release of some really, really bad — but not wholly unexpected — news regarding striped bass.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources released the results of its annual juvenile striped bass survey, which counts the number of young-of-the-year striped bass that came out of the Chesapeake Bay in the spring.

It was the second-lowest number on record. That bears repeating: the second-lowest number on record. That means fewer than in many of the years in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the adult striped bass population was being devastated by rampant overfishing.

It’s the fifth straight year that the Chesapeake spawn has been a disaster. The only five years that even compare are the 1983-1988 years, the absolute bottom of the barrel in striped bass history — and even those years were not as bad in sum total as the last five years have been.

The “problem” with the striper stock is that it has two big cohorts in it, and they move through the biggest population centers in their migration path, and that can make people who are not looking very far past the tip of their rods think that the striper stock is fine.

If you are from New Jersey or western Long Island, you are getting in on some spectacular fishing for huge striped bass and large numbers of striped bass every spring and every fall, and a lot of anglers dismiss the talk of striper stock problems, because “there’s tons of stripers — the fishing is great.”

How we keep those people’s voices from influencing how the ASMFC makes its rules will be the challenge of the next several months.

In the meantime, while the stripers are here, catch ’em up. Handle ’em carefully and release ’em right. See you out there.

Tight Lines Tackle Now Open in Southampton Village

Southampton Village now has its first dedicated tackle shop since … well, I don’t even know if there has ever been a full-fledged tackle shop in the village, to be honest.

Kenny Morse has completed the move of Tight Lines Tackle Inc. from Sag Harbor to the village and is now open for biz at 260 Hampton Road (that’s the little shopping center next to Ted’s Deli, or where The Outdoor Store used to be, if you’ve been around that long).

While Kenny’s departure is a great loss for Sag Harbor, I think it is a big boost for a lot of Southamptonites looking for access to tackle in their backyards or near their places of business.

Please patronize all of our great local tackle shops — Haskell’s, White Water, East End B&T, Mrs. Sams, Paulie’s — because we all want them and need them to stay in business.