A fter an intense two-hour pick of stripers, 30 inches to 38 pounds, during which we ran three wires and had at least one fish on at all times, I’m grateful for the certainty that even the craziest tide boils itself slack eventually. Now, our six guys are trying to poke holes in some sea bass, but it’s been slow so far. I remove my oilers and shed the sodden sweatshirt I couldn’t find an idle minute to take off during the bite, then head for the freshwater wash-down hose to rinse the opaque sheen of slime, salt, and blood spatter off my polarized shades—my Stevie Wondervision Pro Series. The routine’s almost automatic at this point in the season.
As I lean forward to turn on the freshwater, I note the big, familiar center console parked about 40 yards off our starboard side on a lesser-known rock pile that was rotten with fish an hour ago, and spot one of the boat’s occupants side-stepping toward the high-sided bow, a bend in his too-light spinning stick that starts at the reel seat. I’ve seen this particular boat many other times before. Its owners have spent recent seasons shadowing some of Block Island’s sharper stripermen, recording the various all-important “spots within the spot” that are the difference between stumbling into an occasional 30-pounder and breaking 40 consistently. Like so many modern-day cow-bass specialists, they have experienced no need to evolve further than the Island standard live eel, save by swimming theirs off very light spinning tackle.
As I give our cockpit a quick “lick and a promise” with the deckhose, I monitor the man’s progress. Judging by the number of laps he’s made around the rail—and the slow, steady bucking of the rod that broadcasts each sweep of a tail the size of a snow shovel—I gather that this fish is not one of the 20-somethings that had buried the rockpile to a depth of five feet when we hit it. This is one of the behemoth linesides that have ranked Block Island near the top of the heap in big-fish production.
Where fighting fish is concerned, time estimates are pure voodoo—even the best fishermen seem to lose any sense of the space-time continuum during battles with big fish. Just for amusement, I ask one of our charter clients to keep time. As the three-minute mark approaches (not counting whatever time had elapsed before I noticed the fight in progress), it’s becoming clear the angler has no control over the fish, whatsoever. At regular intervals, he stops reeling—the rod action at those points suggesting he’s losing line against what I assume must be a milk-toast drag setting. At seven minutes, the boat’s second occupant peers over the rail in the port quarter, then turns and dashes forward, disappearing momentarily below the gunwale, and reappearing with a landing net about the size of a hula-hoop.
Another minute evaporates while the angler alternately cups the spool and leans on the rod (to the extent one can lean on such wimpy gear), and eventually I spot a massive dorsal fin breaking the surface just off their transom. The man with the net scoops the fish but does not remove her from the water immediately. The angler, meanwhile, slacks off his line, racks the rod, and returns to the stern to help his partner haul the fish up and over the gunwale. I hear a distinct “thud” as the fish hits the deck.
Final time-check puts fight time around ten minutes—or, “at least 25 minutes,” given standard barstool inflation rates. I guess the fish to be somewhere around 45 pounds, and without another second’s thought about the event, I accept a customer’s rod and begin to dig out a minor backlash.
A few minutes later, we run back up on our drift and set in again. I settle into a brief middle-distance stare, snap back into focus when I notice that same high-end center console coming across our port bow at idle speed—apparently with no one at the helm. Looking more closely, I note that the two men are folded over the far side of their stern; one is kneeling half in the engine well, while the other leans all the way over the starboard rail, one foot on the deck. With twin outboards blocking my view, it takes me a second to comprehend what I’m seeing: The monster fish is back in the water, and the duo is struggling to maintain a solid grip on her massive jaw as they drag her slowly in the wake, apparently trying to prepare her for release. Their efforts continue for another five minutes, until they release the fish. Even at quite a distance now, it’s only a matter of seconds before I see a silver-white shape bob to the surface in their wake; they double back, landing net at the ready, and begin the charade again. The second release satisfies their concern, and I watch a high-five on the distant deck.
This event is a daily operation in the areas around the region that still have numbers of big fish, but I’ve witnessed lots of it at Block Island—primarily around the Southwest Corner/Ledge. I assume the practice is unusually frequent there because the publicity the place has gotten in recent seasons has made it a major destination for passionate sport fishermen, a good percentage of whom hold strong opinions about fish conservation. But I also see a great deal of ongoing finger-pointing within the larger current debate about the status of our striper stocks and the myriad stress factors involved in what most agree is another period of major decline. The finger-pointing—so long as it continues—tells me we have yet to give proper consideration to our own role in that downturn.
Some of the most vocal critics of the commercial striped bass fisheries also preach catch-and-release. What few seem ready to acknowledge is that even catch-and-release fishing, as some practice it, can have serious impacts on a discreet population of migratory bass like the ones we’ve seen at the Island in recent years. Some continuously portray catch-and-kill fishermen, charter captains in particular, whose clients expect to have some fillets in hand at a trip’s end, as greedy resource pillagers.
Then again, compiling reports for more than a decade, I constantly hear about lights-out trips during which guys allegedly—and I have no reason to doubt some of them—caught and released 20 or 30 or 60 fish in a single tide. There’s a self-congratulatory element to some such reports—as though those involved were somehow better than what I’d call “conservation-neutral” by virtue of targeting fish with the express intent to release them. I want to be perfectly clear that I am in no way a fish-hugger—I’ve no use whatsoever for the PETA contingent. But I still tend to think that the best way to help an individual striper is to hold off on burying a 6X treble in its face, regardless of stated intent to send it back at battle’s end.
A bigger problem inherent to pure catch-and-release sport fishing is the silent, largely unseen impact of release mortality—that is, fish dying from stress factors directly related to having been fought and landed—that skyrockets during the high-heat months, when water temps inshore exceed 70 degrees, a period that coincides with most of the best big-bass fishing at Block Island and other key grounds around the Northeast. If the charter fisherman carries responsibility for a legal limit of fish landed and filleted in a given trip, what about the guy who fishes six straight hours, racking up a final tally of 60 fish on light gear, the majority of those fish between 20 and 35 pounds, one scorching July day?
Protracted fight times at any point in a season can do a job on striped bass—one reason I’ve always advocated use of ballsy rods/reels, heavy leaders, etc. and maintained that if you have any honest-to-god interest in striper conservation, you ought to catch a reasonable number of fish (i.e. a handful, or whatever legal number of fish you plan to kill and eat) then go work on something else.
For the record, I’ve witnessed some truly nauseating abuses of the resource over the last decade in almost every segment of the bass-fishing population—black-market fishermen slaughtering dozens of fish night after night; charter guys high-grading until they’ve got a full limit (at present, that’s two fish per person on the boat, captain and mate included, for a grand total of 16 fish) of fish north of 25 pounds; commercial pinhookers landing 30-fish Massachusetts commercial limits at Block Island among other places; and, more to the point here, various pure “sport” anglers catching ridiculous numbers of big fish on too-light gear just for bragging rights—releasing a shocking percentage of those already severely taxed fish to die, victims of lactic acid build-up, total exhaustion, and hot water, then congratulating themselves on another big moment for conservation. As we all know, the fact that a fish swims away after a 10-minute fight, an eternity out of the water for photo ops, and another 10 minutes of reviving in no way guarantees that fish will survive.
It’s not that light tackle is bad, that commercial fishing is inherently wrong, that charter fishermen are greedy, that catch-and-release is a bad idea, or that the real problem for our bass is some network of Evil Black Marketeers whose impact cannot be verified or quantified. The point is that if you care about the real-world health of our striped bass resource two or five or 20 years from now, this is the time to pull back on the finger-pointing, start taking a long, unflinching look at your own role in this mess and being sure—above all else—that your own attitudes and fishing practices aren’t contributing (in even a minute way) to the problem.
The tragedy of what some fishermen see as another impending collapse is that it was less than 20 years ago when we were all marching out of the oft-discussed and little-considered moratorium into a period of tremendous recovery, a decade and a half of record-breaking bass abundance. Then, we were all saying there was no possible way—not in a million years—that we’d ever let ourselves abuse these fish the way we did in those last couple years of the 1970s and early 80’s, before a long-odds campaign by a tiny and widely scorned band of future-minded stripermen got the moratorium in place. We knew better. We’d learned our lessons.
And yet, somehow, the bass in our fore here in 2013 are under a wide array of stress factors, the overall stock is lopsided and full of alarming holes, and still we are waiting for some divine intervention by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) that will save us from ourselves. All eyes are on the stock assessment due out this fall.
Whatever its conclusions about the state of our stripers, the future is going to present some complicated issues for the sport fishing community as a whole. Not least, we are going to have to figure out how to lessen the insane amount of pressure we’ve put on bass.
How are some charter boats, after almost 20 years convincing customers striped bass is the only thing worthy doing, going to weather the possibility of a one-fish bag limit? In the 1980s, there were still cod south of the Island, pollock on the East Grounds and elsewhere in big numbers and huge sizes, a canyon tuna fishery in its infancy, bluefin limits that made them not just a viable, but an ideal target on offshore trips, bluefish in droves at a time when folks still appreciated them some.
When you start to look at what has happened in the regulatory realm since the last striped bass crash, it starts to look more and more urgent that we get a handle on the situation, bring the down-turn of the last five years up short of a modern-day collapse that could well put an entire industry on the rocks.
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