are the fish coming back
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Dunno. The guy yapping on the Chesapeake Angler (the M.D.) board says all of the fish (80%) are gone. Been caught up. And its the VA and NC who's at fault. Go figure.
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6,765 Posts
Not exactly true,He was quoting a N.C. Charter Boat Captain and His obversations from Fishing all along the East Coast.
Ocean Stripers--"The Ha Ha Ride is Gonna End!"
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Capt Aaron Kelly is a top NC charter captain with 15 years of full time salt water guiding for multiple species. He is one of the few winter captains who stayed at OI and did not move to Rudee. He knows every lump, shoal, edge, in the area, plus the effects of the tides, moon, weather and other factors needed to catch fish. He is fully booked even in this severe economic climate. Capt Kelley is very concerned about the diminishing ocean striper population. He puts it at 20% of what it was five years ago.
He is seeing what many of my buds and I have noticed from Cape Cod to Oregon Inlet.
Capt Kelly is so concerned he is considering offering financial incentives to the anglers on his boat who are willing to release the big fish.
Here is an excerpt from his web site fishing reports. He honestly tells it like it is. If you want to check out his site:
Rock Solid Fishing
"The only bummer has been the beach net, drop net, and trawling seasons all have been open. This is the first time ever in NC history to my knowledge that all three are open at the same time. The trawlers have been super whacking them--hopefully they crushed their quota. Everyone wants a piece of the ever dwindling pie. We have to get all this mismanagement in order or in three years there will be no stripers!!! DEPEND on THAT!!! Depend on it!!! Greed is wiping out the stripers.
I do not want commercial fishing out of the picture, but reasonable harvesting techniques and accountable quotas need to be in place. So guys lets try to throw a few back for seed. And to all you high graders... rec and commercial...quit . Seeing floating 15- 20 lb stripers half dying on top of the water because the trawler wants to sell the biggest 100 he can box is wrong. It is good business for him and most of us may do the same in their shoes. Put an observer on the boat, then whack the **** out of em and when the poundage quota is filled, then they go harvest something else. Besides the 15-25 pound fish to me taste better.
I am telling you guys the stock is down, try way down to 20% of what is was five years ago. That is forty million stripers gone. It blows my mind in the year 2009 we are going to finish off the striper stocks to endangered because of greed. Not many in the industry, both commercial and charter, want to admit it openly; but believe me, behind the scenes the consensus is the same--the ha ha ride is gonna end."
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Wild Bill
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I know Aaron well as my slip at OI is only three away from his. He is extremely knowledgeable and I hate to admit it, but I think he may be onto something here. I am not a doomsayer, and neither is Aaron, but we, and I mean everyone, commercial, recreational, netter, or charter boat are catching, and keeping a lot of rockfish. There can only be so many of these fish swimming around. We probably need to figure something out in the next few years or we may well get back to the years when there was not a viable fishery for this species. That will be a huge blow to us all. I do not have the answers, but I do believe it is something we should all think about.
On a different note, if anybody wants a great time and a fun charter for anything from specs to dolphin to reef donkeys, Aaron is awsome. I can not guarantee you will catch fish, you will though, but I can guarantee you will have a ball. I do not know his web site address, but his boat name is Rock Solid.
On a different note, if anybody wants a great time and a fun charter for anything from specs to dolphin to reef donkeys, Aaron is awsome. I can not guarantee you will catch fish, you will though, but I can guarantee you will have a ball. I do not know his web site address, but his boat name is Rock Solid.
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7,846 Posts
I've had several conversations with state officials, federal law enforcement folks and experienced anglers over the past few days, each of whom is much more knowledgeable than me about the Striper fishery. These talks have sent a chill down my spine. I apologize for the long post, but this topic really strikes a nerve as I think about whether my kids will be robbed of a chance to enjoy a fishery that we are so selfishly pushing to the brink right now. I've experienced one moratorium and cannot believe how quickly we are allowing ourselves to stumble like bumbling idiots into another.
VB, you're right to bring up the blaming VA and NC thing. I'm one of those who has made a remark or two about what I see as the irresponsible take of big fish along the coast, particularly in winter when they're most concentrated and subject to overexploitation. I've made remarks about the reports of so many folks down there breaking the law to get fish (either over the limit or over the line). Maybe all of that is even true. But we need to work together if we want a decent chance of having any decent fishery in a few years. All of us...Marylanders like me, Virginians, Tarheels, Yankees up in Mass., R.I., N.Y....if the Striped Bass population is in as much trouble as the combined data and observation are now indicating, then it likely got that way due to the actions (and inaction) of all of us in some measure. So let's stop the blame game and get to work as recreational anglers who presumably all would like a sustained fishery for ourselves and their kids.
First, let's admit that we likely have a problem. Of course, fisheries science isn't perfect. Maybe all the fish are simply "outside the line." Maybe not. All we can do is go on what information we have, and that information is not presently encouraging. ASMFC's own data shows that two years ago adult Striped Bass were declining at a significant rate while fewer juvenile Stripers were being recruited into the system. Have we been catching s smaller percentage of the big fish population since then? Has Striper spawning success improved since that time? You and I know the answers to that.
Very recently, the NOAA trawler that conducts an annual Striped Bass survey along the Virginia and NC coasts caught exactly THREE striped bass out of over 80 net hauls. That's three, TOTAL, up and down the VA and NC coast. Past numbers have been in the thousands.
Some of the region's most experienced charter, guides and private anglers are saying the same thing: the numbers of large Stripers are decreasing dramatically from a peak in around 2002-2004. Their catch reports line up strikingly well with where the ASMFC's chart points.
To top it all off, the assumed commercial take -- which was thought to be significantly smaller than the rec take -- turns out to be much larger than the officials thought, thanks to rampant poaching. The total commercial take, it turns out, is really anyone's guess at this point. In addition to other recent high profile busts, I have a good feeling that some NC trawlers are in for a rude awakening soon, but they may have already done so much damage, if half of the rumors turn out to be true, that the resource could take a decade to recover from that alone.
Yet we hear the same tired chorus that is sung each time someone sounds the alarm about a popular species. The most popular tune is to blame a down year (or two, or three) on the weather. "We have just as many fish, they're just somewhere else." "It's too cold," "too warm," or in the upper-Bay, "too fresh" or "too salty." Funny thing is, '03 and '04 were colder than this January according to VA Beach weather records, yet the NOAA boat and anglers alike seemed to do pretty well inside three miles and at the CBBT those years, unless everyone was lying back then.
The other major excuse is to blame the problem on someone else. For us, it's easy to blame the comms. One net haul can catch more Stripers than the best charter captain can get in a week, even if the charter cheats. Plus, we're finding out about rampant poaching in the comm industry. To be sure, the comm industry probably IS a huge problem.
But we will have trouble making our case about comms if we're not also willing to share some of the blame and adjust accordingly. Comms or no comms, what fishery has ever sustained the type of kill pressure on its largest breeders that we recs put on Stripers from Maine to NC, from beyond 3-miles to above Annapolis, twelve months per year? Name one fishery that withstood such an onslaught over any extended time.
And we cheat ,too. We make a game over federal regulations designed to give the fish the smallest of breaks for a short portion of the year. We keep more than our limit or turn a blind eye to those in our ranks who flaunt the rules.
If we want to keep this fishery, then we need to begin by acknowledging our own shortcomings. We also need to give a little back. Maybe two large fish per day is not realistic. Do we honestly need to keep two large breeders per day? Will charter parties cancel if they can keep only one...are charter captains such poor marketers that they cannot book trips based on 1 large fish per person? Should Maryland allow so many juvenile fish to be caught? Should NJ have put comms out of business, only to allocate the entire commercial quota to recs?
Some folks will always be around who contend that the Striper population is just fine. At best, they will argue that we should not surrender an inch of our "freedom to fish" without very strong data indicating an imminent collapse. Those people ignore the fact that the hard scientific data -- the colorful tell-all charts -- lag years behind its collection. By the time the chart shows that a collapse is imminent, the collapse in the real oceans and bays and rivers will have already happened.
Fisheries don't slowly die. They decline for a few years, then fall off a cliff. To have any chance of success, we need to react early, when the troubling trends first appear, when the concerned reports from experienced anglers confirm those trends. Wait much longer and we won't be arguing about limiting our take....we'll be arguing about how long the moratorium will be and whether the charter and commercial Striper industries deserve a taxpayer bailout.
And if we're wrong and the Striper population turns out to be fine, then the worst that happens is that we've allowed the population to become even stronger. I don't know about you, but I'll take a few less fish in the cooler and more, bigger fish in the water over a moratorium any day.
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you want more stripers you better come up with something to feed them and give them clean water. plain and simple. acres of stripers in jersey still why leave the dinner table. chesepeake is so polluted do the eggs and fry survive anymore ??? get some scientists to take water samples and you will see why the bait and fish stay 12miles out. only surge of fish inshore is when they enter and leave. n c striper population decimated by the hurricanes couple years ago that flushed all the sewage into the rivers and sounds.....no manns harbor fishery since and very little on the shoals or offshore since .another couple years they will be 40 miles off like the bluefish
The water quality of the bay has stayed relatively constant over the last 25 years. During that time, the striper story went from a state of devastation to moratorium, to "recovered" to steady decline. Water quality did not cause the issues.
This is all about harvest.
Paxfish,
You are in error as relates to your statement that the water quality of the bay remaining the same over the last 25 years. It has gotten worse each and every year. Pollution and farm fertilizer run-off and the excessive taking of menhadden from the bay have all contributed to this worsening condition.
You are in error as relates to your statement that the water quality of the bay remaining the same over the last 25 years. It has gotten worse each and every year. Pollution and farm fertilizer run-off and the excessive taking of menhadden from the bay have all contributed to this worsening condition.
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Getaway, can you provide data for that? I've fished the same place on the upper Bay since summer '81. The dead zones, water quality and SAV were much worse in the mid-80s than they are now. I'm not saying that water quality is not a significant factor, but it's not an excuse for inaction, either. As for bait, again, it's a problem, but we had more Menhaden -- including large ones -- in the Bay this year then I've seen in at least ten years. All the Rock I caught were stuffed with bait. The last several years have been nothing like the skinny fish years of '03, '04 and '05. We can and should address water quality and Menhaden, but let's not make it an excuse to continue business as usual on our own part.
Racn, just because you sometimes run into big pods of fish doesn't mean the overall population is doing well. I hope that I and others are wrong and you're right, but it's hard to ignore so many consistent reports from NOAA, charters, guides and some of the areas most expereinced anglers all saying the same thing....these pods of fish are getting tougher and tougher to find, and simply "disappear" for long periods of time. Did they disappear so much in '02, '03, 04? Not according to their records.
Racn, just because you sometimes run into big pods of fish doesn't mean the overall population is doing well. I hope that I and others are wrong and you're right, but it's hard to ignore so many consistent reports from NOAA, charters, guides and some of the areas most expereinced anglers all saying the same thing....these pods of fish are getting tougher and tougher to find, and simply "disappear" for long periods of time. Did they disappear so much in '02, '03, 04? Not according to their records.
Hmmmmm!!!!
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Anyone else think its funny that the Maryland guys are pointing the finger at VA and NC for over harvest and illegal fishing? In the last 3 weeks, it was Maryland commercial operations in the news for illegal harvest...not VA or NC.
Illegal fishing charged; tons of rockfish seized -- baltimoresun.com
Rockfish regulators withhold judgment on Md. -- baltimoresun.com
Illegal fishing charged; tons of rockfish seized -- baltimoresun.com
Rockfish regulators withhold judgment on Md. -- baltimoresun.com
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3,586 Posts
Protecting them all over 36" would not hurt my feelings one bit...
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how about 1 fish per person. that way people can still keep a big or smaller fish if they chose and the harvest gets reduced.
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I was thinking the same.
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I was thinking, why are you two trying to rekindle animosity? Had you bothered to follow-up on these links, you would know that one deals with both a Maryland trawler captain and a NJ company. The latest commercial bust, according to DOJ, involved 3 Va commercial fishermen and a DC buyer, in addition to the Maryland guys, and was a combined effort of U.S., MD and VA authorities. And let's wait and see what else shakes out (in NC, Va and elsewhere). Like I said, it's hard to find clean hands in this mess, but each state has good guys and bad guys. Let's try working together.
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Whooooooh Silver! Slow down. Creating animosity? I think that you forgot about the last sentence of your post on the Ches board.
Originally Posted by goose70
I agree that the dead fish, hanging scale pics look ridiculous. The color is usually all wrong, the fish look more like a cheap rubber prop and also tend to look smaller set against the background of a building.
You should post this on the VA and NC board, but you may want to use an assumed name (e.g.- Wild William). Those boys don't seem to take kindly to having their God-given right to destroy their own resource questioned.
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Work together huh?
Seems like VA has been working with MD for years...letting them come and fish on their own license. Did VA guys get the same treatment in MD waters?
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