For those of us that cover the striped bass fishery, 2023 has been a tumultuous year. We’ve seen the unprecedented; the ASMFC took emergency action, citing a mortality rate spike in 2022 that was deemed unsustainable if they (the ASMFC) wanted to achieve their goal of a stock rebuild by 2029. This goal is a lofty one, perhaps even unattainable, but I’m not mathematician, and hey, you have to root for them to succeed because it would be a good thing for everyone if they pulled it off.
The emergency action has been lauded by many—mostly recreational anglers—and condemned by many others—largely charter captains who make their living taking people fishing. There’s also mixing in the middle here, there are plenty of recreational anglers who measure a successful trip in fillets and finding a keeper inside a 3-inch slot is a tough needle to thread over and over again. There are also charter captains who have told me that the new regs have had little effect on their business—most of these guys are fly and light tackle guides that release most of their fish anyway.
I had an interesting conversation with a charter captain about the slot limit and the further tightening of the slot. He was vehemently against the emergency action but was more or less ‘okay’ with the former slot limit. He was quick to add, that many of his trips during the years since the slot limit produced numbers of large striped bass and his clients were hooting and hollering and taking photos in the moment, and then were kind of despondent after the trip because they didn’t catch any keepers. They enjoyed the experience but were left empty-handed at the end of the trip. I then asked him what percentage of his trips that got into that kind of action expressed disappointment, he estimated that it was probably 50 percent. Fifty percent may seem like a wash at first, but remember, this still leaves the door open for the other half of his business to disappear the following year because they felt that they couldn’t justify the cost of a guided trip if there were no fillets to take home.
The thing that I can’t wrap my head around is why or, maybe a better question is ‘how’ it was deemed okay to make this emergency declaration forcing the implementation of emergency laws, because the stock was found to be in trouble and yet, the commercial striped bass fishery was allowed to continue, status quo. This is not me lodging a personal attack on the commercial striped bass fishery, I believe a fully-rebuilt striper stock could have a commercial component to it, but I don’t believe that the recreational and for-hire segment of the fishery should have to shoulder all of the weight of this rebuild!
I have followed the Massachusetts commercial striped bass fishery for almost 20 years. Massachusetts’ commercial licenses are available to anyone with a bank account and they have a large quota at 700,379 pounds, I remember when it was over 1 million. But even at this level, 700,379 pounds of stripers – assuming a median weight of 25 pounds – checks out to more than 28,000 individual fish. They also have a daily limit of 15 fish and can keep anything 35 inches or larger.
Then we come to the issue of abundance and how clearly the Mass commercial season illustrates that it’s not what it used to be. The quota can be tracked on the MA Division of Marine Fisheries website, which I have done pretty religiously over the years, back in the mid-2000s the quota, which was considerably larger, used to open and close in 3 to 5 weeks, in more recent years (and with a smaller quota), it takes two to three months and there have been years when they had to extend the season because so much quota was left unused! You’re gonna need all your brain cells to unravel the logic used to come up with that sparkling plan! But that’s what they did.
Furthermore, the commercial fishery has become a caricature of itself. What was once a widespread thing where the pressure exerted on the fishery as a whole was spread out through the entire state (in both Rhody and Mass), it has now become a buffalo hunt. For at least the last 10 years, boats have been making long steams to get on one of the few hot bites going on. I knew it was bad back in 2015 when the fish were piled up off of Sandy Neck on Cape Cod, there were 70 boats fishing that one school, and through my binoculars I saw boats out there that came from Martha’s Vineyard (45 miles), Woods Hole (30 miles) and New Bedford (35 miles)! Those treks are equivalent to making a canyon run! Twenty years ago, those boats wouldn’t have had to leave sight of their home port to boat 15 commercial keepers. In 2022 the hotspot was off of Plymouth, I’d be willing to bet there were big boats from faraway ports steaming to that bite too. And that doesn’t even factor in the number of boats I have personally seen rum-running back across the border after a successful trip to Block Island to sell their load of poached stripers.
What’s the solution? I’m not sure there is a perfect solution, but I do think a corresponding change to the commercial limits and quotas would be a logical first step. Over here on the recreational and ‘for hire’ side of this issue, our arms are growing weary from holding up the weight of this rebuild and my brain hurts from trying find the logic in leaving the commercial fishery unchanged. If we’re going to ‘fix’ this ‘problem’ we should all have to make a sacrifice.
