I picked up some interesting stats sifting through that-


1.Two of the best and most experienced striper guides on the East Coast are Capt. Doug Jowett and Capt. David Blinken. Jowett, who has the perspective of guiding both in Maine and Massachusetts, offers this: “My contacts all the way to North Carolina are singing the same song—striped-bass fishing is in dramatic decline due to poor numbers
of fish in every year class out there.

The decline isn’t just a one-year event. The biomass and year-class distribution have been declining for the past five years.

2. And this from Blinken, who guides in New York and Massachusetts with forays into Rhode Island and Connecticut: “I think stripers are in massive decline. I saw fewer fish on the flats in 2008 than in any of the 17 years I’ve been guiding. Montauk (N.Y.) fishing was magical, but if you distribute those fish across the [migratory] range, that’s not a lot.

3.
A:First, the managers need to sharply reduce the fishing mortality
rate, which (because they’ve plugged it into a logarithmic equation) they call “F.” But convincing ASMFC to do this is a task no less challenging than summoning Neptune from the deep. Currently F is .31, which
equates to removal of maybe 27 percent of the population. That’s above what the managers claim to be the safe target of .30 but below what they claim to be the danger threshold of .34. It’s a tight squeeze, but
this is how managers think—maximize protein extraction.
This shows that the ASMFC is not managing for the future, they are managing for yield.

B:However, ASMFC allows a large harvest of smaller fish in the producer areas. That doesn’t get you there. You can’t kill fish twice—when they’re young and when they’re old. You’d be surprised how many
managers want to do this. They want to maintain a high population level, which implies lowering F, then allow this smorgasbord of size and bag-limit slots up and down the coast so you can’t see what the population’s doing.

4. By far the biggest commercial slaughter occurs off Massachusetts,
where half the population of Atlantic striped bass summers.
At the stubborn insistence of that agency’s director recreational
anglers can send in their lousy $65 and kill off and carry breeding-age females at the rate of 30 per day....“The commercial [striper] fishery,” he writes, “has also changed by attracting thousands of non-traditional
participants who are lured by the thought of subsidizing an expensive hobby.”...All they have to do is fork over that money, and they can
legally transport up to 30 big striped bass at a time. Instead of requiring tags Massachusetts uses the honor system. It escapes any reasonable thinking to imagine that there isn’t terrible abuse. On top of not wanting to report their catch and hitting their quota they want to avoid income taxes. Only 102 [recremercials] reported catching at least 3,000 pounds of stripers which, at $3 a pound, is $9,000 in gross income.”

(Only 102 out or 3000 registered commercial anglers reported catching at least 3000lbs of stripers? What about the other 2898? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that some of these guys are underreporting their catches.)

Eye opening.