Coast wide bad news

[finchaser]

Stripers Forever members - with the exception of pockets of large stripers it certainly appears from all reports that the population coast wide continues to shrink. What is worse is that there is little chance of a large scale turnaround in the near future since small stripers are almost non existant. Even if Chesapeake Bay produced a strong year class this year it would be four years before it would do much to help the coastal fishery - and producing a strong year class this year is anything but a foregone conclusion. On top of this bad news we continue to receive increasingly frequent reports of myco even in larger striped bass. One member sent us photos of some good fish taken at night in the Chesapeake very recently. All of the 7 or 8 fish that they caught had obvious lesions on their skin and one had a golf ball sized tumor in its mouth.

It is against this backdrop that the commercial fishing cheerleaders on the ASMFC are trying to push through yet another commercial increase. It was the 40% commercial increase 8 years ago that motivated us to form Stripers Forever. Public hearings are going on right now, and the ASMFC is accepting written testimony. This link to our website http://www.stripersforever.org/Info/Stripers_BBoard/I01498E3B will give you a list of the hearings, and a copy of the full Stripers Forever testimony to the ASMFC is attached for your review. We hope that even if you can't make a hearing that you will read our testimony and write your own letter to the ASMFC in protest to the idea of raising the commercial quota on striped bass.

[lostatsea]

It is against this backdrop that the commercial fishing cheerleaders on the ASMFC are trying to push through yet another commercial increase.

Capt John McMurray -

Regardless, it’s not where the fish are, it’s where they aren’t, and looking at the Northern and Southern states in the striped bass’ range, clearly we’re seeing the stock contract. Even some managers reluctantly acknowledge this when faced with a documented decline since 2004 (the decline on paper isn’t significant enough to trigger corrective management actions), although they conveniently explain it away as the result of those good year-classes such as the 1996 cohort leaving the fishery, and the more recent good year-classes (e.g. 2003) have yet to be recruited into the fishery. Thus, according to the ASMFC Technical Committee striped bass numbers should go up soon.
I hope they are right, but I don’t believe they are. It’s hard to believe that we’re not killing too many fish when you can take a walk to any given marina in Montauk, or Cape Cod or any of the well known striped bass ports and see dumpsters full of big bass carcasses any given day during the season. And this is not something we can point the proverbial finger at the commercial fishing folks for. Recreational mortality accounts for almost 80% of the total. To put it in perspective, just the recreational discard mortality (the number of fish that die after we release them) is double the total commercial catch.

Even so, there is no justification for a commercial increase.