We’re a little past the one-year mark of my last editor’s log on this subject. If you missed it, grab your February 2025 edition and read my editor’s log “Praying for Snow” if you want to get the roundest version of what’s on my mind. In that editorial, I hung my hopes on the idea that a snowy and cold winter might be the missing link in this seven-year dearth of successful striper spawns in the Chesapeake Bay. The snow melted, the fish came in, they spawned, some time passed, surveys were conducted… and the numbers came back well below average, once again. The Hudson River numbers did little to buoy my tanking optimism.

It has pained me to see how things have gone down, and to see how people have fought each other over the regulations in the face of seven years of meager spawns. The idea that a healthy spawning stock biomass (SSB), somehow means that we should be allowed to take more and bigger fish from it makes zero sense when those same fish have shown a lengthy and documented trend of reproductive failure. The fishery is not healthy and only reproductively mature striped bass have the power to turn things around.

Don’t read these words and assume that I am against keeping stripers, I’m not. And I am not one of these people who thinks that everyone should enjoy the fishery, so long as they do it exactly like I do. I have kept many striped bass over my years of obsession with the species, some – like the 50-pounder that won me a tournament in 2012 – I regret killing, I basically sold that fish for a prize and a trophy. But many others that I have harvested, brought people together; friends, neighbors and family. I was able to share my love for cooking and to feel that sense of community that is increasingly difficult to capture these days. And even though I have rarely harvested a striper over the past several years, I still wholeheartedly believe that being able to take a fish home, if you choose to, is an important option to have for anyone that wants to take advantage of it. It’s a part of the lore of the sport and I am, in no way, in favor of taking that away.

However, I am – heart and soul – in favor of doing this with the understanding that relaxed harvest regulations would be a part of a rebuilt and sustainable population of striped bass. I am not in favor of just throwing our collective hands in the air and giving up; assuming that stripers will never reproduce on the scale they once did and with that assumption leading the way, just taking what we can, while we can. We’ve done this before and history doesn’t lie, from the buffalo herds to the passenger pigeon.

But on the other hand, I can understand why some might feel like these regulations are too heavy-handed. If you’re fishing in the right spots at the right times, it can seem like there are more sizeable striped bass around than ever before. But that’s also an easy argument to refute. I always point to the fact that 20 years ago, I used to see commercial striped bass fishermen all over the place during the summers fishing in Massachusetts. Now huge percentages of these guys all makes long steams to the same short list of spots. When boats leaving ports on the Buzzards Bay coastline are passing over the storied shores of the Elizabeth Islands to run through the Canal to fish the waters off of Plymouth or Boston, that should be signaling a problem. Running 45 miles when you used to run 8 to catch the same fish, just doesn’t add up.

Then we have the issue of the looming hole in the fishery. These last few years I have made my annual ‘first striper’ trips hoping to catch an April schoolie, which for as long as I can remember – before the last five years – was a guarantee during the last week of the month. Now, I’m typically catching 30- to 40-inch bass at this time, these fish never used to be here so early! The only sense I can make of this is that those larger fish actually were always here, but the schoolies were so abundant and so eager to bite that they made up the haystack and those bigger fish were the needle. Once in a while someone would catch a bigger fish in April, but with a 7-year-sized hole in striper recruitment, those small fish have become the needles in a noticeably smaller haystack of bigger fish.

And so, here we are again; 2026 has brought a colder and snowier winter than what we saw in 2025. Boston Harbor is partially frozen over as I write this, ice skaters have zoomed through spots only boats have explored in the last decade or more with the Boston skyline spiking the horizon. Even in the face of seeing my optimism crushed in after last year’s frigid and snowy winter. Millennia have proven that the Chesapeake Bay and Hudson River, have the unique characteristics required to spawn stripers. Years of warmer winters have coincided with poor spawns. Maybe last year was just one of those short bars on the chart, surrounded by the massive spawns that gave us the fish we have today. Maybe 2026 will be the next 1996, maybe the melt will be better timed, maybe the water will be two degrees cooler, maybe the flow will be just a hair stronger and it will all come together and we’ll get some big numbers as a result.

To quote Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding from the untouchable Shawshank Redemption…

 

“I hope…”