Surf fishing books

[strikezone31]

On the Run: An Angler's Journey Down the Striper Coast
David Dibenedetto

Saw this listed on Amazon. Story about a guy who travels down the east coast for stripers. Looks like a good read. I have to add it to my list.

Night Tides: The Striper Fishing Legend of Billy the Greek
Michael G. Cinquemani

This one is about a LI Fisherman, boat, surf and bridge details.

[bababooey]

There is a comprehensive book called striper wars by
**** Russell. Check out the review, worth reading.




Striper Wars: An American Fish Story



2008-04-24 12:03:19 - Striper Wars is an extensive and complete tale of the past fifty years of management practices regarding the striped bass on the Eastern coast.

It is told in the first person narrative by the author **** Russell, a journalist who got his start at Sports ]Illustrated, who spent the better part of two decades using every available resource he could muster to call attention to the striped bass over-fishing crisis. **** Russell began his crusade to save the bass in the early 1970s after
falling in love with the fish years earlier when he caught his first. However, the story Russell tells begins long before his own involvement in the fish's epic journey.

The first story takes place in the 1950s when Consolidated Edison, New York City's electricity supplier, wanted to build a hydroelectric plant at the base of Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River. When it was discovered that this plant was killing tens of thousands of stripers and secretly carting the carcasses off to landfills, state government stepped in to put a nix on Con Ed's plant. In terms of the full story of the striped bass fishery (a story whose ending is still unwritten) the ordeal at Storm King is a mere blip on the timeline. It raised awareness and started a trend of protecting the fishery, but many more monumental problems occurred not too long after.

The main plight of the striped bass was over-fishing. It was early in the 1960s, Russell writes, that the subject of striper over-fishing was first brought up. The scientist that raised the question was Bob Pond, but he was laughed at for suggesting what seemed to be a ludicrous notion at the time to most people. Russell's involvement in the issue began not long after this, first using his position at Sports Illustrated to raise awareness but then branching much further out to really alert people of the crisis. Russell made friends with many legislators, sports fishermen, and scientists who joined together in the campaign.

Russell sat down with scientists like Bob Pond, John Boreman, and Jim Uphoff many times to discuss the striped bass issue and also was present during a lot of the research and sampling that led to these scientists boldly proclaiming that the striped bass fishery was at a near breaking-point. Russell was a main trumpeter of the cause, involving himself in organizations comprised of a wide array of concerned citizens; from postal worker Jim White to bait and tackle shop owners like Joe Mollica. These small organizations fought hard at the local level to try to stop commercial fisherman in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland from taking a dangerous amount of stripers from the ocean.

It was an extremely hard fight for these concerned citizens to win. On one side there were the small organizations headed by sports fisherman and conservationists and on the other side there were the commercial fishermen who needed to extract stripers from the water in order to earn a living. According to Russell tension would really run high at the meetings. At one such meeting lifelong striper fishermen George Mendonsa retorted to a claim that the stripers were diminishing in numbers by saying 'You can't tell me there's no bass around! I caught more last year than my family ever has-130,000 pounds!' A conservationist at the meeting yelled back that if that was true then Mendonsa was personally responsible for the annihilation and destruction of the striped bass. This remark caused people on both sides of the issue to stand up in arms.

These small organizations in the mid-Atlantic and New England states grew in numbers and could not be ignored. Their main goal was to get states that were involved in commercial striper fishing to put limits on size and number of bass that boats could keep. Battles were won in most states that resulted in the minimum size for a legal striped bass to increase from 12 inches to 18 inches. It turned out that this six-inch difference would not be enough to save the fishery however and the smaller organizations turned to the state governments to intervene and place harsher restrictions on the fishery. Russell, among others, spoke to congressmen in several coastal states about introducing legislation that would again increase the minimum length of fish that could be kept. Eventually a complete moratorium was put on keeping any striper of any length from the Chesapeake waters. In Rhode Island and New York fish had to be 38 inches to keep. The moratorium worked and through the late 1980s and 1990s the striped bass fishery miraculously recovered.

That, as Russell writes, was not near the end of the crisis for the striped bass. Now they are facing different problems. In the late 1990s when striper catch peaked again, people began realizing that the fish were thinner than they should be, as a result of not having enough to eat. The main source of food for stripers is anchovy and menhaden, two fish that have an incredible amount of commercial pressure put on them. Most of the menhaden catch is ground up and used as feed for farm animals. Farm animals and farms in general are another cause of alarm for striped bass. There are numerous farms along the Chesapeake, the main breeding ground for stripers, which dump incredible amounts of nutrients into the water via runoff. As a result there are enormous algal blooms in the bay and very poor dissolved oxygen levels, which are bad for striped bass. In the past these algal blooms have been suppressed by the menhaden, which feed them; but with the over-extraction of menhaden (which are being used to feed the farm animals which produce the nitrogen and phosphorus in the first place) not only is there not enough to eat for the bass, but there is very little breeding ground left. It is a terrible cycle that is estimated to cost as much as $28 billion dollars to correct.

The only thing lacking from the book is a happy ending, but that cannot be blamed on Russell. He does an excellent job of holding the reader's interest from cover to cover. His writing style, developed at Sports Illustrated and honed over the past thirty years, is quite readable for anyone. The hundreds of anecdotes in the book are told masterfully and the reader can really appreciate all the emotion that Russell and others have devoted to save this fish that has so clearly impacted all of them personally. The reader does not need to have a background in fisheries to understand this book, nor do they need to have even seen a striped bass before to admire how indefatigable they are; and to begin to understand some of their magic that so many people seem to believe they possess. This book was written for the everyday person so that a larger audience can come to understand the importance of striper fisheries . It is definitely a good thing that Russell is not himself a scientist, but a journalist by trade. In many regards he is just an interested observer that became more involved in an interest than most people normally do.

Striper Wars is a powerful book, and while it is an extremely important account of the entirety of the striped bass fishery it is also a vital compilation of the embodiment of all fisheries stories, and even conservation as a whole. I highly recommend it as a crucial read to any person with no knowledge of fisheries conservation and I also recommend it to those who do have background in conservation, but are looking to expand their library and gain a new view on management practices.

[vpass]

Just finish reading both of Zeno's books. Lots of good info. I recommand both books. I just started reading D.J. Muller books "The Surfcaster's Guide to the Striper coast". It shaping up to be a good book also.

[Great South Bay Bucktails]

On the run is a must read

All Franks books are a must read
DJ"s books also !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!