In the July edition of The Fisherman, the feature story “Striper Quest ’24: A Day Of Tagging & New Findings” spotlighted the findings of a fall MinPAT sat-tagging deployment in a striped bass named Tyman 2 in honor of longtime Northeast Striped Bass Study supporter Chuck Many. Following publication of that article, Many sent the following response based on this tagged fish, the past 6 years of the Northeast Striped Bass Study, and his observations from a life spent pursuing stripers.
I have been chasing striped bass for over 50 years and have been following them up and down the east coast from Maine to North Carolina for the past 30. The continued dilemma over regulations is an extremely complex topic and there is no right answer; but I thought I would put a fisherman’s perspective to pen and paper. This perspective and experience suggests that the dilemma facing striped bass is much more environmental than for the lack of spawning size fish.
Read on and draw your own conclusions because the one thing I have always said about our Northeast Striped Bass Study is that the one thing I know is, that I don’t know.
Point #1: The striped bass migration has shifted to the north.
To start I would like to go back in time to the 1990s. Striped bass fishing was on the upswing after the moratorium of the mid-late 80s and the stock was considered “fully recovered” in 1995. In between business trips, I would chase stripers and often traveled to the “Mecca” for striped bass, Montauk, NY during the summer month, and then to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the winter. We use to head out of Oregon Inlet in January and February to gannets pounding the surface and huge schools of bass.
| ‘23 SPAWNING NUMBERS |
| Last fall the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced rather dismal results from their 2023 juvenile striped bass surveys, with the young-of-year (YOY) index at a 1.0, well below the long-term average of 11.1. These annual DRN surveys help track the reproductive success of striped bass in Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay, and results were not good again. In early January of this year, the latest update from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (NYDEC) showed the 2023 YOY abundance index – a geometric mean number of striped bass per haul through weeks 29-45 for striped bass collected in the Hudson River – was also at a near all-time low.
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However, later into the 90s and early 2000s we would have to travel further and further north to encounter these wintering striped bass. By 2005, I had moved my boat north to Rudee Inlet and Cape Charles in Virginia. That area had epic fishing from 2000 to around 2010, but began to tail off, as similar to the North Carolina scenario, as the winter migration seems to move north and east and we didn’t have those massive waves of fish just off the coast of Virginia in the winter. That trend has continued to the present time.
So why is this northerly migration pattern so important? From my personal perspective, the upper Chesapeake and the rivers that feed into it are believed to be the main spawning rivers for striped bass along the East Coast. With the northerly migration, one has to wonder if these bass are truly making it to these spawning rivers, or are a significant number of stripers not spawning at all, or perhaps spawning in unfavorable conditions? An example is our spring ocean fishery; in 2024, my first trip in search of these large post spawn Chesapeake fish was April 27 and I caught along the Jersey Shore. Is it really possible that this fish spawned in the upper Chesapeake or tributaries when conditions were favorable, and then came out of that bay, swam up the coast and was in northern New Jersey in late April?
To keep this in perspective, the Chesapeake Bay from its entrance to the Atlantic and its northern reaches, where the Susquehanna enters is approximately a 200 mile straight line and from the mouth of the Chesapeake to northern New Jersey is approximately 250 miles. That’s 450 straight line miles of water this fish covered between the time she spawned and the time I caught her off the North Jersey coast. Does that seem reasonable? I’m not an expert, but that’s seems questionable to me (though truth be told it’s entirely possible that some striped bass are using the C&D Canal which connects the Delaware River with the Chesapeake Bay in the states of Delaware and Maryland).
It’s also important to consider most recent satellite-tagged striped bass that was caught aboard my boat Tyman off Rockaway, NY in late November of 2023, the MiniPAT device releasing off Ocean County in New Jersey 4 month later in March of 2024. Although that fish traveled as far south as Virginia, according to the data stored in that MiniPAT device retrieved by our team earlier this spring, that fish spent the majority of the winter off South Jersey, Delaware, and the northern Maryland coast. Based on that data, I’d venture to guess this fish was most likely a Hudson River fish.
However, what is pretty clear based on the data we’ve collected during the Northeast Striped Bass Study, and from my own striper fishing experience, is that the Atlantic Coast striper stock definitely intermingle during their migrations, and this is more proof that striped bass are staying much farther north than previously thought.
Point #2: Our spring striper season starts much earlier, and fall stripers come later.
Us “Old Timers” remember when we use to start winter flounder fishing in early April and didn’t really target striped bass until late April/early May with our ocean run of Chesapeake stripers arriving sometime around the end of May and sticking around well into July in the NY Bight. Today, the striped bass season starts in March at the Jersey Shore, we have almost no flounder fishery to speak of, and our Chesapeake ocean run of striped bass usually slows to a trickle by mid-June. This change seems to have created a very short concentrated spawn in both the Hudson and Chesapeake River system.
With the Chesapeake spawn being from early April to early May and the Hudson spawn from late April to mid-May. This is a definite contrast to the old days when it seemed we had fish in both the Chesapeake and Hudson until June. Once again, I am no expert, but this concentration would seem to make it much more reasonable to expect bad spawns when river conditions are not ideal and good spawns when conditions are perfect. But the concentration would definitely put stress on specific year classes since your likelihood of “okay” year classes are slim.
Point #3: The lack of very small fish is alarming.
Since the return of the striped bass in the 90s, we have always had excellent “small bass” fishing. What I mean by this is fish under 25 inches. For years I used to take my summer jaunt to Monomoy Island, MA to chase schoolie bass with the fly rod and jig striped bass across in Montauk. More recently I would pull small Yo-Zuri plugs in the Navesink and Shrewsbury rivers in North Jersey, or cast to breaking bass by the heliport by the South Street Seaport off Manhattan. In the fall from November thru December we would jig 100 to 200 fish a day. All these scenarios had similar size fish from 15 to 25 inches. Today, I just don’t see many of these fish.
When I catch small stripers – whether in spring, summer or fall – they are typically 24- to 40-inch fish. Nowadays, fish in the fall run are 30-inch-plus fish, much bigger than what we use to have. So where are those little fish? My experience suggests that our fish are getting bigger, but there are not nearly as many smaller fish as there were in the past.
| STUDY SPONSORS |
| Major sponsors of the ongoing Northeast Striped Bass Study partnership with Gray Fishtag Research and The Fisherman in 2024 include American Fishing Wiring (AFW), Berkeley Striper Club, Caterpillar Marine, Fin-Nor, the Fisheries Conservation Trust, Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, LBI Surf Fishing Classic, the Many, Glassberg and Nova families, Montauk Surfcasters Association, New York Sportfishing Federation, PENN, Raritan Bay Anglers Club, Ross Brewery, Seaguar, Simrad, Southernmost Apparel, Yo-Zuri, and Van Staal.
If this study is interesting to you, if you’d like to see more research like this, and if you believe that gathering more data about the striped bass migration is important, then we hope you come aboard. For a $25 tax-deductible charitable donation to Gray Fishtag Research, you’ll receive a custom decal from marine artist Carey Chen that allows you to show your support for the Northeast Striped Bass Study. Contact Roxanne Willmer at 844-824-8353 or Roxanne@grayfishtag.org or go to grayfishtag.org. |
Whether right or wrong, the conclusions I take away from the three main points above is that our large fish (30-plus inches) fishery is very strong, but spawning success is clearly a major problem. Our short term outlook, next 10 years, seems bright, but the long term outlook seems in question. This is perhaps bolstered by the recruitment numbers coming out of the Hudson and Chesapeake surveys.
I know most people believe fishery management is screwed up, but it does seem like the regulatory steps they have taken with the implementation of a slot would be correct, if my real world observations from following our striped friends are correct. By protecting as many spawning class fish as possible, when conditions are optimal, we could have very successful spawning classes. The key word however, is could. There really are no guarantees in nature and it does seem like our environmental issues are expanding.
Who knows, maybe nature will solve its own issues. Maybe more stripers will spawn in the northern reaches of their range, like the Delaware and Hudson rivers, or maybe the stripers will adapt and expand their spawning into rivers to the north such as the Connecticut and Merrimack, among others. Only time will tell, but I sure hope for our children’s sake something changes because they deserve to have the same opportunities to catch these wonderful fish as I did.
As I said, I definitely don’t have any answers, only 50 years of observations.
