Striped Bass Are Here Now, But The Future Is Dark

You may not know it judging by the numbers of striped bass that we have off our shores in the past week or so, but things are looking grimmer and grimmer for the striper stock these days.

This past spring was another poor year of “recruitment” — as in, not a lot of new baby stripers were born — the latest survey results from Maryland have shown, and the climatological conditions that are clearly metastasizing in the Northeast do not bode well for a major reversal of that trend.

The 2021 recruitment was the third year in a row that paltry numbers of stripers came out of the upper Chesapeake Bay, where the largest number of striped bass spawn each spring. The Hudson has had a good year here and there, and some runs in places like Nova Scotia (which may be the future of striped bass fishing) are seeing big spawning numbers, but those are still faint glimmers of what the Chesapeake can produce when it has a good year.

Right now, the fishing world — and Instagram world — is riding two waves of stripers that can make for some great fishing when you’re in the zone. One is the trophy-sized fish from the big “year classes” from the early 2000s and the big class of 2011, and the other is the huge schools of smaller fish from the above-average 2014 and 2015 year classes.

There are lots of stripers off Montauk and the South Fork beaches these days. The waters off Montauk teemed with acre-sized schools of fish feeding much of last week. But we get a distorted view of the overall picture, because we live at a crossroads of the striped bass migration, where basically the whole stock gathers at one point or another.

A lot of folks have seen the new Simms Products video “Hardlined” on YouTube that came out recently. The video discusses a lot of what I have mentioned above (with some amazing aerial footage from last fall to paint the picture) and also spotlights the segment of the sportfishing community that is calling for a complete moratorium on the harvest of striped bass.

That position is extreme, perhaps, and puts an unfair portion of the blame on commercial harvesting, but I can understand where they are coming from. Drastic changes might need to be taken to protect the striped bass we have now — and the industries that they support — because the ability of striped bass to rebuild their numbers is clearly being hampered by climate change.

Striped bass have an amazing ability to explode their numbers almost overnight, as the recovery in the late 1980s and early 1990s, from the point of collapse to historic abundance in less than a decade, showed.

But the conditions have to be right, and if they aren’t right, it almost doesn’t matter how many stripers there are; they are not going to produce the kind of big young-of-the-year numbers that are needed to rebuild the species.

The right conditions for a successful striped bass spawn, decades of tracking shows, depends largely on cold winters and rainy springs. When you get both, big recruitment years are pretty much assured. But cold winters in the Northeast, especially the southern part of the Northeast region, are increasingly rare, so the chance of the right conditions aligning is declining steadily.

It’s not hard to look back at our own recollections of what winters were like just a couple decades ago and match the correlations to the spawning successes in the Chesapeake. Remember 2002-2003, when all of Peconic Bay froze so solid you could ice skate from the Hampton Bays to Cutchogue? Yeah, that was a monster spawning year for stripers, ones that today’s anglers are still posing for photos with.

Over the last decades, most ponds don’t even freeze enough to walk on them for years at a time.

What does this mean for striper regulations? Well, that remains to be seen.

It’s a difficult problem to address when you look at it from all angles. We can’t outlaw warm winters and mandate more spring rainfall. And we still have a fairly large stock of striped bass, certainly many, many times the size it was in the 1980s, so you can’t really say that the pieces aren’t there for a recovery if the meteorological stars align. And we’ve seen that even a huge stock of fish, like we had in the early 2000s, can fail to produce good spawns for years at a time.

So it’s sort of hard to say that completely halting striped bass harvests, which would have an enormous impact on a lot of fishing-related businesses, is warranted quite yet.

But there are some tweaks that just sort of make sense. I’ll get into that next time!

Catch ’em up. See you out there.