Striped Bass, Looking Forward

ASMFC met on Tuesday in the next step to finalizing striped bass management for the coming years. State's conservation equivalency proposals were examined and poor decisions were made, and ASMFC again solidified their disfunctionality. basically, there's little good coming to striped bass management, but miraculously a lot of good to come in menhaden management in the form of ecosystem based management. I wasn't there, I haven't been in this game very long, so I'll pass this off to someone who was there and has been in the game for a long time, Captain John McMurray.
Fissues
If you continue reading this without first clicking that link and reading the article, if you haven't already, I'll be extremely disappointed. Go on, I'll wait.

In other news, the famed Martha's Vineyard Derby has removed striped bass from its targets for the foreseeable future. That's big because the last time they made the same motion was before the moratorium was instituted. When I first saw that the derby made this move, I was very pleased, and I thought it showed some foresight and responsibility for the future of the fishery. Now I'm not so sure. The Derby is a kill tournament expecting to be operating under a slot limit on striped bass. The slot limit makes their system of scoring and awarding prizes for striped bass pretty much useless. So I'd tend to believe that the Derby organizers were just as apt to remove striped bass from the species the Derby participants will be targeting this season and beyond for convenience as they were for the sake of conservation. There was angler and sponsor pressure to cut striped bass out of the Derby pre-moratorium and that pressure exists now, but pre-moratorium there weren't regulations going into effect that would make it harder for them to run a striped bass kill tournament, so to me this current move is just not as impressive as removing striped bass from the Derby was back then.

CT DEEP is holding a public meeting to outline what the striped bass regulations are likely to be in the coming seasons on the 13th  at 7:00pm at the following address:
CT DEEP Marine Headquarters
Boating Education Center (rear building)
333 Ferry Road
Old Lyme CT
I highly suggest you go if you can. Attendance is notably poor at these meetings and that reflects apathy towards the health of the striped bass population of the part of anglers.

To get away from what the regulatory councils and the tournaments are doing, let's get to what we are doing as individual anglers. What am I doing to help keep these fish around? That's what we should all be asking on a regular basis.
Here's my answer to that. These are the things I'm going to do or continue to do in the coming striped bass season to minimize my impact on the fishery.

I'm going to be much more conscious of fishing barbless hooks. I am extremely hyper-focused on my quest to catch large striped bass on the fly, and much of that revolves around large flies with very large hooks, and I am not willing to file my barbs down completely on very large hooks because I've done it and I do feel I lose more fish because of it. I do file down my barbs one all my big hooks to a smaller size both for easier hook penetration and easier removal, but this season, I am committing to fishing entirely barbless for striped bass any time I'm using a hook size smaller than 2/0. I genuinely feel it makes no difference anyway with hooks smaller than that, if you are experienced at hooking and fighting striped bass you shouldn't be losing fish because of barbless hooks.

I'm going to limit my catch. This is already something I do, but I'm going to do it more. I don't need to catch 100 schoolies in a day anymore, I've done it and I've done it too much. Whether it means going a little ways off the blitz and focusing on finding a cow or just sitting on the beach watching instead of fishing, I don't want to unnecessarily catch fish. If it gets to the point in a day where I am catching stripers hand over fist and not taking a moment to realize how special each individual fish is, I need to take a step back and think about what I'm doing and whether it is worth potentially killing some of those fish if I barely even care that I caught them at all.

I'm going to continue diving into my ghostly side... last year if I was on big fish eating herring in the creeks, you didn't know about it until I knew those fish had moved on. If I had a great day fishing a blitz on the beach, you didn't see any photos until a week later when those fish were somewhere else entirely. I try to make sure nobody can see what I'm doing via social media and simply go where I went, do what I said I did in a post, and catch the same fish I was catching. That means I delay, that means I obscure some details, sometimes that means I even lie. I'm sorry if you're one of those people I've lied to, and honestly if you've read enough of my striper posts you've read something that wasn't true. But I'm not going to stop doing that. If you want to get striper content at all from me that's how it's going to be, and I don't want to stop sharing my experiences with these incredible and extremely special fish. I was too open at times in the past, not careful enough, but I'm intent on not falling back into those old ways. If you are a striper fisherman on social media yourself, I implore you to do the same. Hold your cards close.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

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