It is June, and this is the month when most schools get out for the summer, but I’m talking about a different kind of school, today. The first full month of the 2025 striped bass season here in New England is now behind us and there have been many takeaways so far. After what I have been calling an “old school New England winter” and a pretty darn chilly April, the stripers came in a little later than what we’ve grown accustomed to over the past several seasons, but I’d say, still within the realm of being ‘on time’.
The troubling bit has been the extreme lack of schoolie stripers. For just about all of my years fishing for these amazing fish, the first one to two weeks of the season were spent trying to pull a ‘keeper’ out of a sea of schoolies. This year, I landed 30-something stripers in the first week of May and only two of them were under 28 inches. Now I’m finding myself trying to will a schoolie out of the ‘keepers’! Just prove that they actually exist.
On one hand, it makes you wonder, were these larger fish always showing up with the first pushes of micros? Maybe they were and the small ones were just too abundant and too eager to strike. But I remember it well. I’d show up at the same little bridge spot every spring and filter in with the same cast of characters. The stories would immediately begin. “Yesterday afternoon, Keith had a nice one on but it popped off before he could land it.” “Monday morning, just before the turn, we had a couple up to 26 inches, no keepers yet!” And this would go on for 10 days, sometimes two weeks, before someone would finally land a legit keeper, then someone would catch a 36-incher, then a 40-incher. These checkpoints along the route of an advancing striper season were celebrated every year and the news within my little group would travel faster than a viral video.
It’s not a surprise that we aren’t seeing appreciable numbers of schoolie stripers, the Chesapeake Bay young of the year (YOY) numbers have been awful over the past 6 years, with the last decent spawns occurring in back-to-back seasons, 2017 and 2018. Since that time, 2019 to 2024, we’ve seen the worst 6-year stretch of YOY results, since the seining surveys began back in 1954! Yes, 2019 through 2024 was worse than the numbers pulled between 1979 and 1985; it was also worse than 1982 to 1988.
The Hudson River spawns have fared a little better, so we can try to hang our hats on that… but the results being seen ‘in the field’ definitely seem to support the belief that a very high percentage of the migratory stripers that swim along the New England coastline originate in the Chesapeake Bay.
This dearth of schoolie stripers is going to become a dearth in slot fish and then a lack of 20-pounders and on up the ladder from there. That means that you and I, and all the other people who love to fish for striped bass are going to feel the squeeze as these weak year classes grow up. It’s going to be tough when the 2024’s are 31 inches and the 2019’s are 40 inches…those are the sizes that make up most of what striper anglers have caught on any given trip over the last decade or more.
This is not meant to be a ‘doom and gloom’ striper story, I’m writing this to illustrate a difficult truth in simple terms. There are lean years ahead for striper fishermen, which makes any of these fish we catch between (roughly) 12 and 25 inches (1 and 5 years old) extremely important to the future of this fishery. I am hopeful, that this year’s cold and snowy winter will produce a good, or even great, YOY number in 2025, but I would urge you all to treat any schoolie bass you catch with great care, because those fish stand to become very important, in just a few short years.
