Question for the guys who live in NY and fish the Hudson. Do you eat the bass you catch in the river? I'm new to the area and hope to do some fishing in the Hudson. I was driving over the Tappanzee today and the river looked pretty brown. Do you think they are safe to eat if they spend a significant amount of time in those waters?

I forget what they recommend but I know it's not more than once a week.
The bass are in the river from October to April but have to swim through a lot of pollution including the GE pcb clean up to get to the upper spawning grounds.
The River has been cleaned up a lot, the brown water is from the muddy bottom,
you'll never see it blue unless you go above Kinston, and even than, not so blue. :)

mercury and other pollutants are raining down from the sky coming from as far away as China...
"in every body of water",
so the older the fish the longer the exposure
is basically the rule ...
so a 28.5 inch fish has had the least exposure than anything larger.
Better to eat some Alaskan fish and return the game fish back to Spawn.

What Raven said has merit. Hudson River bass used to have high levels of PCB's as well. Of course, given the migratory nature of stripers, one may catch a Hudson River fish in RI or MA for that matter.

We use to have a very good place to fish holdovers ...........ya can still fish it , but won,t catch what isn,t there .

I was asked by a good friend to take someone there that was into tagging & i guess there was a contest for most tagged in a season .........it was December .long story short . 158 fish were tagged . he ran out of tags / all his tags were LS tags .

The three tag fish that I caught from that place over the years were all hudson river tags ><.:huh:

FWIW, NY state tries to prevent any Hudson river fish from entering the food chain, by prohibiting commercial striped bass fishing west of a point on central LI. The theory is that most of the Hudson river fish stay within 50 miles of the river.

Concentrations of PCB's in striped bass not good for women in their child bearing years or kids....stripers along the east coast contain both groups from the Chesapeake Bay and Hudson River area as far north of Maine and southern Canada.

http://www.clearwater.org/pcbs/slideshow/slide26.html

http://www.chesapeakebay.net/blog/post/you_can_eat_more_striped_bass_from_chesapeake_bay

FWIW, NY state tries to prevent any Hudson river fish from entering the food chain, by prohibiting commercial striped bass fishing west of a point on central LI. The theory is that most of the Hudson river fish stay within 50 miles of the river.

Old outdated study is where the 50 miles number comes from.
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Easy way to look at it, is "would you allow your children to swim in that water?"

If you think the water is too polluted to swim in, then it is a good rule to not eat fish that live there.

Wow, thanks for all the thoughtful responses. I think catch and release is the way to go.

The eastern version of "Big Muddy" is just that, muddy. Other stuff is invisible. PCBs were laying low in the river bed until the government decided to make an example of GE. Nothing logical about it beyond "mine is bigger". Would you, could you expect anything less ...or more.

Hudson flows pretty good, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario....not so much.

Went to a Chinese restaurant tonight. My wife wanted a steamed whole fish. Asked what kind.......striped bass. Said, no thanks.

I have told too many people this.
Every time i fillet a fish my outlaw ( a.k.a mother in law) begs me to save scraps for the cats which translates into every itty bitty bit of red meat. Like the dark red meat blood line that runs down the middle. She heats it up in the micro for them and it looks like a freakin lightin storm like either your put a fork in the micro or some little gremlin is wavin a sparkler around. Scary. Thank god the dark meat tastes like donkey peepee anyway
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Whoa! That's crazy redlite.
Mercury must be doing that.
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FWIW, NY state tries to prevent any Hudson river fish from entering the food chain, by prohibiting commercial striped bass fishing west of a point on central LI. The theory is that most of the Hudson river fish stay within 50 miles of the river.

might be the case now but 25 yrs ago we used to catch Hudson river fish in ri and ma.

As we all know stripers spawn in brackest water in the Hudson around the months of May and June there after the adults migrate to the atlantic ocean...there is no way that the state can prevent them from going up the coast to where some fishermen commercial fish for stripers....:)

Just a couple of comments:
That study is not outdated, unless the fish have changed their habits ovr the last 20 years or so.

It didn't say all fish stay within 50 miles of the river, it said that "most" fish do so, so it wouldn't be that unusual to catch a Hudson river fish in RI or MA.