captains charters and customers what are they saying

[rockhopper]

Thanks for sharing SS. This was a report from Capt Gene at Montauk. Looks like the bite that Montauk had is really dying out.


"The gannets are here. Most years the boats would be getting out the Sabiki rigs to start jigging up some herring for live baits, but not this year. The birds all down on the south side eating small weakfish, snappers and such. And, the herring might be too big for the stripers that are around anyway. Every day is a little different, with one day just about everything being too small and the next day enough keepers around to make the trip worthwhile.

But, they are a long way from the harbor – Ditch Plains and west, and seemingly moving farther away each day. Charter boats are bringing back a half dozen or so fish per day, a long way from what it should be. With the fall being so mild, you would expect the bass to stay around until Thanksgiving or so."

[seamonkey]

Thanks for the honesty Capt!

[seamonkey]

a barnegat report for today pretty bad


11/9 outa BI

In short...no fish. Started outa BI at sunrise and made our way north. Birds and bait everywhere as I'm sure everyone knows by now, but the striped ones are hiding somewhere....

Stopped to jig a few areas off ibsp in the morning where we had good marks but nothing but dogfish. Trolled of the bathing beach and the mansion but no love. We ended up off of seaside in a fleet where we heard there were some blues being caught but I guess we for there after the bite died.

I got a Bad taste in my mouth so far with this season but we still have time

[surferman]

From a guy whos brother went on the Miss Barnegat Light

"Very frustrating to say the least. My brother went out on the Miss Barnaget lite approx. 80 people, there were less than 30 fish caught only 3 bass that were keeper and some blues. This has been a little frustrating for me as the conditions are great for fishing ,but the fish are spotty , not like in the past years."

[captnemo]

"The great fishing that the boats have been experiencing over the past week was totally non-existent today. The only boats seeming to have any success were the ones trolling. The area between the channels where the best fishing has been was a virtual parking lot filled with party boats, charter boats, and a multitude of smaller private boats. I caught the boat's first bass of the day, albeit a short, on our second drift and that would be all she wrote for me. The forty plus fares on board tallied a total of 2 keeper bass, 4 short bass, & a couple of bluefish. Do the math as most fares caught the skunk. "


This was a report from yesterday. Sea hunter. Today in the same area some fish were caught until the fleet arrived and put them down. When the bass have been there in the past and they weren't feeding with all the sandeels its usually because they are not as thick as Capts are claiming. Sandeels are great for consistency when jigging or trolling. It is easy fishing until the traffic shuts it down. I read on another post here about folks arriving late to the party and jigging in the middle of feeding fish. This happens every year. I wish there was some way in the boating safety classes to teach these newbies proper fishing etiquette.

[basshunter]

I cannot stand by and let folks post the mis-information about how healthy the SB fishery is right now....because there is always a good chance others will believe them.....

It's time for some reality and real facts to enter these discussions....
To me, that's more important than whether someone "likes" me, or not.....
Overall, I feel we are probably headed for some sort of short or abbreviated moratorium....with the ASMFC probably not acting until 2015, it may be too late by then......

**The striped bass spawning biomass (SSB) is now 1 Million lbs from the ASMFC being forced to declare that overfishing is occurring.......I'm going to try the best I can to continue raising awareness of this, whether some folks are happy with that....or not.......
.

darkskys how can you possibly correct them when there are so many? by the way I applaud your efforts though I am not sure how many will listen. Keep up thegood work. the misinformation you are talking about goes on every day. Some examples:

the government says its fine.... the ocean never saw so many bass..... WHATS THE PROBLEM !!!

The stocks of striped bass dramatically improved when the Gov stopped the commercial fishing for them. Its not the rod and reel recreational guys that decimate them. I see just as good if not better striper fishing right now than I did 10 years ago. These fish are in no way endangered in NJ..... Maybe we should kill more stripers since its a common theory that stripers are feeding on weakfish and making their stocks lower than years past.

these guys just don't get it. The commerical industry is what will kill this fishery not the recreational guys. I have been fishing these waters since the 70's and have seen highs and lows and right now we are on a high and I may not know everything but I can tell 100% it will not deplete the striped bass stocks by keeping a couple bass! These guys need to get a life or go hug a tree!

[DarkSkies]

The following quote came from someone who has family in the Charter Industry. They were talking about the NNJ 2013 Striped Bass season:

"I know the fish I was catching are the end of the year fish. 17-24inch fish is the beginning of the end. I hope the warm front this week breaths some life into this uneventful fall.
Yea, there have been some good days, but not like it should be. Simply not enough fish around. I do not know the reason because there is still alot of bait, but there is not a big body of fish in our area. Just sucks!"

[DarkSkies]

darkskys how can you possibly correct them when there are so many? by the way I applaud your efforts though I am not sure how many will listen. Keep up thegood work. the misinformation you are talking about goes on every day. Some examples:

Basshunter sorry for the delay in responding. I have been trying to get a lot of projects done I haven't been able to do in a while, and busy with other committments.
I thank you for taking the time to C&P the comments. I am not familiar with the context of the conversation they came from so I don't want to judge the folks who made the comments.

Rather than address them all, it seems there are several mis-interpretations evident here......I'll try to address them one by one....and hopefully this way, folks reading will not see this as criticism of others, but some broad based observations I have come to see, about when and why folks can easily mis-interpret what they see out there.........


1. The commercial industry will kill this fishery.
This is a common statement, repeated over and over throughout the internet.



What are some of the reasons folks have this interpretation?

A. They see videos of commercial bycatch, dead striped bass, laying by the thousands on the ocean surface after gillnetters have thrown them back dead.

B. They see videos of commercial beach netting operations off of Hatteras, which is a limited and specific fishery every year....

C. nonetheless, these types of videos induce horror and anger among fishermen as they come to believe that this is what is causing the real problems when bass fishing seems to decline in an area.

**We react to these videos, IMO, because they naturally provoke an emotional response.....no one likes to see dead bass floating on the water, a complete waste of the resource....

D. Poaching/Overlimit catches of striped bass by Commercial netters.....
It's no secret commercial netters are involved in many illegal poaching operations every year....a Google search will reveal dozens of prosecutions of watermen from VA to RI, being caught with bass they are not allowed to have.

This also will produce an emotional reaction, causing some of us to think that the commercials are killing thousands of unpermitted bass....and they are......

Is that where the biggest numbers of dead bass comes from?







**The Sum Total....of the harvest, illegal and legal, by the Commercials, is less than what we are now taking from the Recreational side...
If (and when) another moratorium is declared, fault will rest squarely on the shoulders of us, the Recreational fishermen.

[DarkSkies]

2. "If I can see bass in front of me, by the thousands, then they are not in danger!"

This is a common mis-perception by charter, private boat, and party boat anglers who go out amidst thousands of feeding bass, get their limit quickly, and honestly cannot understand what these other "whiners" mean when they claim striped bass are overfished.

In the past I have come down hard on folks making statements like this....it has usually ended in arguments.....
In looking back, over when and why we argue, I have developed a less confrontational outlook.......

A. Some of these folks, fishing amidst thousands of feeding fish, do not realize they are in the "middle" of the action.

B. They (incorrectly) assume that the action they witness, is the same up and down the coast (as it was 8-15 years ago) without wanting to understand what they are seeing may be limited to a specific area.

C. They don't have much of an understanding of Striped bass migration, or how long it takes a bass to develop to legal size (in most cases 6-7 years)

D. When they see folks ranting on the internet about there being less bass, they don't realize that most of the folks who feel that way, are fishing on the edges...or fish quite often....
The Biomass is contracting...but they cannot see it, fishing in the middle.

E. When the fishery is healthy, fish will be in the middle, as well as the edges.....there will be good representations of all the year classes through the range of catching and harvesting....
When the fishery is not healthy (like it is now), you will start to see it first, on the edges
(do a Google search for
"m&m theory" striped bass
to learn more about this.)



**Many fishermen, if they are catching, just don't want to take the effort to get that involved in thinking about bass....so to them, as long as they are catching, the fishery is healthy.....

[DarkSkies]

3. With all the bass we saw in front of us today, there is no way rod and reel fishermen could put a dent in the striped bass fishery!


Another common mis-conception.
A good friend got into an intense argument in a tackle shop with a party boat mate who made that statement. His assessment was there are more bass than ever before.....followed by the above statement.





This fails to take into account, the fact that there are severe gaps in the striped bass year classes.

1. Many of us on the northern NJ beaches have noticed a lack of smaller ocean fish in the fall. In the past, even before the "fall run" was officially declared, many of us could catch a few small bass, salvaging the trip. Lately, that isn't the case.

2. In the last week, some smaller fish have moved inshore....these are commonly known as the "death rats" because the smaller fish, being more tolerant of colder water, generally signal the end of the run..,,this is a pattern we have come to rely on every year......

3. However, the fish in point 2 above are not the ones I am talking about.....it seems that many of our resident fish in NJ, are no longer there in numbers.....
To learn more, do a google search for
"NJ's resident bass, why have they abandoned us?"

4. This decline in smaller fish, correlates with a decline I have been noticing for the last 6 years in my fishing logs.....and a decline in YOY totals for each of the last 6 years, except 2011.

[DarkSkies]

This fails to take into account, the fact that there are severe gaps in the striped bass year classes.

.

4. "Can't wait to catch my next trophy bass! Looking for a 60 lber!"


The grim truth is....many of those bigger fish are dead........
With the heavy emphasis on catching trophies in the last few years....fever over Greg Myerson's record bass from the CT rockpiles...we, as Americans, still have the "bigger is better" mentality in a lot of things we do.....

Bass fishing is no different....
Weighing in a 25 lb bass or posting a pic on the internet....garners some praise.....
But we all know...that weighing in a 40lb, or posting the pics......gets much more attention...

So much attention that fewer and fewer bigger bass are being caught regularly....
We have "over-harvested" that segment of the striped bass population.

Don't believe me?
Do a search of fishing reports of headboats, charters, private boats...on any major fishing site.....
Even at Montauk, you will see the average size of the bigger fish being caught is 20-25 lbs.

Are there bigger ones caught?
Absolutely....but if you fish regularly, you have to have noticed the average size is declining every year......
One reason being that we are over-harvesting the big girls......and they are not being replaced quickly enough.......it takes a 35lb bass an average of 15-20 years to mature to that size.....many folks are not understanding that part of the equation.....they are not like Doritos...ya just can't make more......

[DarkSkies]

5. "There are no bass inshore because there is too much bait offshore!"


There are times when the above statement makes logical sense.
It would also make sense to say that the bass are not close in some areas because of the extensive beach replenishment.

However, this statement doesn't take several instances into effect. The years 2011 to 2013, some areas of NJ coasts had miles of bunker just 1/4 mile offshore for several late Spring months into Summer. In some cases these vast schools of bunker stretched for up to 20 miles.

Bunker is arguably one of the best and most desirable food sources for striped bass....and a preferred food source.....









**For the above statement to always be true, the converse - that when there are miles of bunker in close, there should be thousands of bass on them - should be true as well....
For parts of 2011- 2013, it was not.......what we had in the late spring, after the first wave of bass moved north, was a dead sea filled with miles of bunker.....and not many bass at all under them........

This fact supports the statement that the biomass is declining......and I offer it as proof in the argument here in hopes that some who don't get out there to fish a lot, will begin to re-assess their thoughts and think of the other possibilities why they are not seeing bass in front of them......

Thanks for reading.....

[jigfreak]

Sorry ds that dude is absolutely not in the loop. Didn't you know there is a big body of fish still coming down from MA? Yessir, they are all staging in MA and will be here next week according to what the latest internet genius said. I can't believe the lack of intelligence of some of these posters.
check it out - hot off the presses

A friend of mine on the southeast side of Long Island has tired arms from reeling in all of this bass. He said one day they were virtually beaching themselves. We are also not hearing negatives from CT or MA either. Nonstop action.

[nitestrikes]

check it out - hot off the presses


A friend of mine on the southeast side of Long Island has tired arms from reeling in all of this bass. He said one day they were virtually beaching themselves.

This is why you can't trust the internet or 3rd party reports. When you say southeast side of Long Island you are usually referring to mecca. I was at montauk this past weekend and got one rat. A few others were caught on bucktails they were about 20". The action was slow at best. As for the other beaches the south shore has been dead for almost 2 weeks now. Fish beaching themselves? I think someone is smoking too much crack.

[surfstix1963]

There are herring around now and no bass on them as far as the northerly reports they are heard every year just to stir the pot even if they were coming they may migrate the same path as the others 60-70 ft. of water the Mecca boat I fish on called it quits 1 week ago surf has been dead for at least 3 weeks the party is over other then the rats.And as to the charter Capt. if he doesn't know why there are no fish he shouldn't be in the business they are getting wiped out.It is either moratorium time or 1 fish at 36" that's my opinion I'm not getting into the numbers game I'm done with that,I have a family that is growing quickly and need to spend time with them.

[SharkHart]

I came over from another website to post and it seems like something already being discussed kind of. A charter capt was saying WOW look at all these short bass out there, the future is bright. But said it at a lengthy or rate and as if to say look everything is OK........I am thinking C MON MAN, every single year there is shorts at the end. Some of the stuff they come up wit is so weak. I didnt really see any shorts all Nov. As we know the biomass has to stretch long parameters, shorts at the end is zero indication, and i am fairly sure the guy knows it

[hookset]

I think I read that post. Capt sal cursi. According to him every time it rains stripers come down from heaven.

[jigfreak]

I think I read that post. Capt sal cursi. According to him every time it rains stripers come down from heaven.

Wow unbelievable.
This is his original post:

We have been invaded by small stripers!The talk early in the year was "Wonder were all the small schoolies are''?Seems like they don't show up as much on the clam beds like they did a few years ago.It is a great sign to see them in mass quantity as the future looks good.It is a changing fishery with multiple year class stripers at different times of the year.I would much rather eat a 28" bass then a fat 43" spawner.In fact I wish we had the slot fish and could keep one 26" for dinner.No matter what with the hughe mass of small stripers in our waters is a good thing.All the fish we have been jigging are released with out being harmed.Great sport and and an occasional keeper for dinner!Looks good for my grandchildren.
__________________


I can't believe hes a captain. Where did he get his captains license a box of cracker jacks? All the talk about the bass numbers being around and this chump is talking about numbers of small bass as being a sign from Allah that all is well. These small rats show up every year how could a professional capt not be aware of that? He has no credibility. Absolute fool.

[storminsteve]

That captain is a joke his business is off because they're only shorts around and he wants to push for keeping smaller fish He's about as transparent as a window pane

[cowherder]

I think I read that post. Capt sal cursi. According to him every time it rains stripers come down from heaven.

. Lol!!!!!