Striped Bass Hearings a Mix of Sensibility and Stupidity

Sort of as expected, the New York edition of the public input portion of the striped bass addendum process was a showcase of stupidity, greed and cluelessness — but also a reminder that there are some savvy fishermen out there who are paying attention to what has happened, and is happening, to the striped bass population.

I’m sure this was the case at the hearings in every state, but in New York the stupid has a special ring of insult to it that is just a chef’s kiss.

The blue ribbon for jackassery went to the Nassau County party boat captain, who shall remain nameless, who attacked the young Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission staffer who was running the hearing and her colleagues with “your comfortable jobs” for proposing cuts to the striped bass harvest, instead of figuring out how to “fix” the complete striped bass spawning failures of the last six years.

Yeah. He wanted them to make fish spawn more.

Moving on.

Jackass No. 2 told this young staffer that he thinks the ASMFC and the scientists who count striped bass have their assessments of the dwindling striped bass fishery all wrong. There are more striped bass than ever before, he claimed, because he personally has had the best fishing of his life the past five years.

I’d love to have asked him how long he’s been fishing and what portion of the season he based this assessment on. I’m guessing he’s a New York Bight angler who has seen spectacular fishing in May and November the last several years, and had never really paid much attention to striped bass before Instagram, and doesn’t realize that there used to be fish in the bight for eight months a year.

And he had probably never been to Montauk in the days when blitzes of striped bass covered acres of ocean, and there were hundreds of surfcasters lining the shoreline, and dozens of charter boats working the rips — and he had certainly not been there in the last five years to see the contrast of no blitzes, no surfcasters and only a handful of charter boats.

Jackass No. 3, another party boat skipper from Nassau County, declared that this poor ASMFC staffer didn’t know what she was talking about as far as striped bass spawning (despite her repeated explanation that she was not a biologist who studies striped bass life cycles and is only a logistical facilitator), because he knows for a fact that large striped bass do not spawn, since he has filleted them and says they carry green eggs, which means they didn’t spawn and the eggs were just dying.

His point being that the slot limit is pointless, and he should be allowed to kill those big bass because they are doing nothing for the health of the striper stock. He, of course, trotted out the ignorant, sexist trope that the slot limit is relying on “Bea Arthur and Betty White” (literally, that’s what he said … because this moronic analogy has been around since those women were alive) to reproduce the new young-of-the-year stock.

This, of course, throws out the numerous scientific studies that have shown, unequivocally, that large striped bass produce vastly more eggs than smaller striped bass do, and it ignores the fact that it was the surviving few very large striped bass that resurrected the striper stock from the brink of collapse in the 1980s.

The best (worst?) part of these three idiots’ rants was that they came during the questions section of the hearing, not the statements section. Stupid doesn’t have to read the instructions.

Moving on.

A tip of the cap to the Montauk charter boat captains Dan Giunta and Jill Ruiz, who asked pointed and relevant questions about how the proposed options that the ASMFC is workshopping will be implemented and what they might mean for their businesses.

And I think that Captain Anthony D’Arrigo of the Ebb Tide party boat in Montauk made perhaps the most salient point about the conundrum facing the striper fishery and the regulators trying to save it. He noted that his customers fish for striped bass with single-hook diamond jigs that do far less damage to striped bass that are going to be released than a treble hook on a surfcaster’s pencil popper or a Mag Darter down their gullets does. And the charter-party boat industry is estimated to represent only about 3 percent of striped bass mortality.

The ASMFC is considering whether charter and party boats should have a special expanded slot to make it easier for them to fill their limits so that they will have fewer interactions with fish of all sizes.

If the striper fishery is regulated with an across-the-board measure, he and other fishermen who are targeting a “limit” of stripers and will then stop catching fish and risking killing them accidentally are going to be lumped in with a far more destructive segment of the fishing population.

However, to the point of critics, charter-party boats are a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of the total number of fishermen fishing for striped bass, and their customers remove fish from the population at a far higher success rate than a typical fisherman, so they certainly account for a vastly outsized per-capita share of the harvest.

There are no good options, essentially.

It sounded from the ASMFC side of the discussion over the last few weeks like we are headed for a closure of striped bass harvesting of at least several weeks, probably at two different times of the year, summer and late fall. When, exactly, these closures land, and where in their migration the striped bass happen to be at that time, could greatly impact fishermen who want to take stripers home for dinner.

I have come to the conclusion that the striped bass harvest should be shut down entirely, year round, in every state. Now. It’s hopeless to wait two years when we find out from the next stock assessment that the stock is cratering, and we’ll only have dug the hole deeper.

Doing so will be a kick in the shins to charter and party boat fishermen who are already struggling to keep their heads above water, as more and more species become pointless to target. But it’s coming, regardless, and the sooner we take our medicine, the shorter the amount of time we’ll have to suffer and, hopefully, get back to the point where those charter and party boat captains can once again rely on striped bass as a moneymaker.

The ASMFC is considering “no targeting” closures, which would mean nobody would be allowed to even fish for striped bass. This, of course, would go the furthest toward stanching the dead discards problem. But it basically would be unenforceable, as the ASMFC’s own advisory committee has told them.

But I think that a no harvest closure would reduce the number of people who would bother to go striper fishing substantially enough that it could make a big difference in the number of dead discards.

We fishermen, especially we surfcasters who catch a lot on swimming plugs with multiple hooks, need to do our part. It starts with eliminating two sets of trebles on any artificial lure.

There’s tons of albies in the waters between Moriches and Fisher’s Island. Fluke fishing is still great in Shinnecock Bay, and the bass are starting to stir in the ocean. Lots of good fishing to be done these days.

Catch ’em up. See you out there.