Big difference between stripers and snook and tarpon. Snook and tarpon are not desirable food fish, so there wasn't any significant commercial fishery for the to start with. so called "gamefish" status only affect commercial fishermen, and we already have that status along most of the coast. NJ, CT, NH & ME do not allow the sale of striped bass. With the amount of fish already being released a slot limit isn't going to have much of an affect and 9% of the additional fish released will die anyway.

Another false assertion, if you dig into the numbers, on a coastwise basis the charter/party fleet is only responsible for about 5% of the total mortality (both fish kept and released mortality). Feel free to go look at the numbers. I looked at 2017, the latest year available.

It didn't last time, what makes you think it will this time?

Look at the chart, for 2017 commercial harvest and dead discards are 10% of the total mortality.

There wasn't a coast wide slot following the last moratorium. The regulations did bring the population to unprecedented levels.

If there were a slot, neither those boats nor the recs would have been out there decimating schools of big fish the way they been for 20 years. We probably would be talking about plugs vs eels and not a potential moratorium.

Mike, I have always respected your opinion and still do but I disagree with your statements about the charter boats. I don't care what the charts say. I have seen boats come in at Noon with 6 dead 30 to 40 # fish. Back out and the same at 4:30 in the afternoon.
So all the boats in all the states I mentioned only account for 5% of the total mortality? I don't believe that for a minute.

I live here. I see what is happening. I totally get that VA and MD and NC at the Oregon Inlet account for a lot of tonnage. That's why I believe gamefish status is the only viable solution for the survival of the species.
My feeling are not self-serving as I sold the boat and haven't fished for Bass in 4 years. I care about the future.

I agree...the charts and numbers cannot account for the poaching which is super out of control...same as the black market crap that goes on.

Regarding the Canal. Throw enforcement at it. Special regs. Minimum fine for poaching or wanton waste is between a 1 and 10K fine. Like you can get fined if you release a fish that floats.

Catch and keep is a counter intuitive regulation. If the Canal was a catch and keep only fishery that was strongly enforced. Most of the facebook yahoos would disappear. Once you catch your limit no matter the size you have to stop fishing. If its a legal fish you can get fined for releasing it. You would need a lot of enforcement but in my eyes...it would generate revenue for the state...keep the tackle shops in business and really cull the misbehavior.

It is also easy to for me to make this suggestion because it is not my home water....but just wanted to throw it into the pot as another idea.

Good thoughts!

What on earth leads you to the conclusion that a lot less people will fish if there is a slot limit?

Hey, I'm with you but I've become something of a fisheries science nerd in the last 15 years. But I haven't fished for them in the last several years. I learned to go by the numbers the scientists produce, sometimes they are wrong but most times they are right. Sometimes I'll quibble about the details but by and large the scientist are right. FWIW I spent three days last week with two of the guys who were responsible for the stock assessment.

Anyway, the statistics show that in 2017 the entire charter party fleet was responsible for 5% of the mortality. I didn't run the numbers for the prior years but I believe they would be in the same neighborhood. Feel free to query the database, its pretty easy to do, and let me know if I'm wrong.

As far as slot limits go, the general consensus at this point among us wonks, is that it will only work if the limits are continually adjusted to protect the few big year classes we have coming into fishable sizes.

could'a would'a should'a that may r may not work, but its not the world we live in.

I get it and really understand the best we can do is remove our own footprint on the fishery....but i just love surf fishing for bass so much that i hope someone comes up with some solution to the problem.

Who is to blame is never been something i get too hung up on. Both rec and coms poach and have impact on the fishery.

I totally understand the government really cares little about the resource as they do nothing to enforce and protect it.

Anyway...i will crawl back into my hole and hope for a miracle....hahaha.
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"If there were a slot, neither those boats nor the recs would have been out there decimating schools of big fish the way they been for 20 years. We probably would be talking about plugs vs eels and not a potential moratorium"

What in the post you quoted from me says that a lot less people will fish if there is a slot limit?

Also, what on Earth were you talking about when you replied to a post about a moratorium and a coast wide slot and said it didn't work last time?

That is what needs to be done in the near term. Good reason to have a moratorium for awhile. After that, a slot of moderately small fish would cut the harvest of breeding females by transfer some of the pressure to males.

I'm not being a flamer here *my font changes are only emphasizing my areas of further confusion*, but I fail to see where the science is in asking people who agree to be interviewed? Sure, if they have a fish in their possession, there's an actual count, but "how many did you release"? Really? How many guys walked away from that interview laughing about the tales told? Not that any agency could ever be accurate enough when it comes to "asking" people, but there are so many flaws in this system. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but how can you say that the only thing they're taking someone's word for is how many times they fish, when you state that they clearly "ask" people,,??? Isn't believing what they tell you, taking their word? The ONLY justifiable number is the fish they had in their possession...or perhaps I'm still missing something?? I surely don't have the answers to getting a factual number...it doesn't exist in the rec. realm...too many variables to consider. So to use these estimated numbers as scientific data is quite bogus in my opinion....but again, I don't have the answers, just opinions...and we know how those go.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Textbook.
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WAIT!!!...maybe I do have the answer...shut it down for 6 - 8 years.
During that time, people can talk about WHY it was shut down and perhaps that'll drive us to be more responsible...again.
I mean, we did get a little smarter since the last moratorium, I thought :eek5: ....let's just keep reliving the cycle, There's definitely science to prove that...:hihi:

Not in the biggest segment of the fishery, the Chesapeake bay stock. Males of the Chessie stock don't migrate out of the bay. Hudson and Delaware males are already being caught. A moratorium is not needed, the stock right now is about twice as large as the stock was when the last moratorium happened. As someone at the meeting last week summed it up, we just need to set the table and wait for mother nature to provide the conditions for a huge spawning year.

You can believe what you like, but those are the figures that rule recreational fishing. It's been reviewed several times by the National Science center and has been subject to some criticisms which were implemented, their last review gave the MRIP program an unqualified thumbs up. I too have some more specific concerns over how its done and how things are computed, but the MRIP numbers are what rules the recreational world. Not just for striped bass but for every species we target.

The data on male migration relative to the Chesapeake comes from some old, limited studies and there has been more recent info that indicates a larger amount of male migration than originally thought. I would have to look for the literature, but it is out there. You imply that none of the coastal fish outside the Hudson range are male and that is not supported.

The point of moratorium now would be to take the pressure off all the year classes to reduce the need for a moving slot. Yes we can just set the table and wait for mother nature, but sometimes mother nature doesn't cooperate. The whole business of maximum sustainable yield got us where we are.

The stock is twice as large as when the last moratorium occurred, but the total pressure from recreational and commercial fisherman is multiple times larger than the pressure in the 60's and 70's that precipitated the moratorium.

Understood....and I'm glad you didn't take my post personally...no one's at fault here, we're just sharing opinions. That system may just be the closest assessment process possible for the Rec. sector.
However, it's severely flawed (IMO) and when I read about %'s on the rec. side, I always shake my head. It just makes matters worse when I see people standing behind those numbers like they're actually scientific facts/data. They're not...they're estimates based on peoples' "reportings" :rtfm:

Interview a "yahoo" who wants attention to begin with, and what do you think he's going to report, that he got skunked or that was the only fish he caught? :scratch: I doubt it.
Seems like a lot more people are looking for a soap-box nowadays and that leads to false information
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I can just hear them now, during a moratorium at the Canal...."I wasn't trying to catch a striped-bass, I was after that one bluefish that I saw jump in the middle of that mass of Bass"...:fishslap:

The CCC must rank high for locales with the highest mortality rates in the NE for SB. But it's easy to forgive yourself when you toss or even carefully release that striped-bass back in the water...he's out of sight and out of mind. You don't realize the damage done because he's only going to wash up further down in an eddy, or simply float out into one of the Bays. As much as it pains me to say this, because I too am guilty (if I can call it that) of fishing the CCC, but they should probably shut down fishing altogether in that place. Some will say, the CCC is but a grain of sand along the entire E-coast, but the impact caused to large schools (of the perfect mating class) at one given time is pretty impressive.

For every conservative advocate, there are 1K who don't give a dam. :huh:

That's the sad truth.
As much as you'd think it's great that more people are fishing then ever before (which equates to cha-ching for the economy)...these people only know the "now"...they've nothing to compare it to. AND, if things do go awry, they'll just pick up their golf bags like Paul did and hang up their rods until this "fad" returns for them.

When I've taken friends or family out on the boat with me, they often ask.."why can't we just fish right here?" There is a mind-set out there, where many people see this ginormous ocean and think there are fish everywhere. :huh: very misleading to those who don't really care or know as some do.

Care to provide a cite for those "more recent" studies? I haven't been able to find them.

The striped bass stock is NOT managed for MSY, its managed for abundance, check out the ASMFC FMPs and pay particular attention to the reference points. MSY is a substitute for "Optimum Yield" in the MSA and the MSA does NOT apply to he ASMFC.

If mother nature doesn't cooperate, there is almost nothing we can do to recover the stock.

Like it or not its our best and only estimate of the recreational sector and the NSC says its a good estimate. We will never be able to get a count of the fish in the recreational sector as a whole, thought we do get a very good estimate of the catch in the charter/party fleet. There we have a specific survey aimed at the customers of that sector which is backed up by the VTR reporting of the vessels themselves. Kind of a double check on what's being reported. On the commercial side we have an actual counting of fish, required by the dealers. Backdoor sales by poachers (both recreational and commercial) are almost impossible to quantify.

It has been a few years since I read the literature, so I would have to dig in my piles to get it. The quote below, which comes from the link, has what I have understood for several years to be the current understanding. It isn't that they don't leave, they tend to stay around longer. They still leave and are harvested throughout the range of other bay fish. https://www.fws.gov/chesapeakebay/striper.html

"After about 3 years, at the juvenile stage, the females begin to migrate to the ocean where they mature. The males tend to remain in the estuary longer than the females."

I will read the details of how abundance targets vary from msy. Pretty sure they come from the same nest.

From the FMP-
Here is how the reference points (BRP's) you reference... come from

TOR #5 is “Update or redefine biological reference points (BRPs; point estimates or proxies for BMSY, SSBMSY, FMSY, MSY). Define stock status based on BRPs by stock component where possible. (these are all relative to maximum sustainable yield)

When you say it is managed for abundance, that is sort of like saying the amount of people is measured by how many there are. All of these things are measures of levels of abundance. You are correct that they are explicitly saying the goal is MSY, but in the 2018 plan, there are some key questions some might find interesting:

Does the Board want to manage the stock to:
– Maximize yield
– Maximize catch rates
– Maximize the availability of trophy fish

What is the acceptable level of risk when it
comes to preventing stock collapse?

and...
The Board has raised concern that the current
BRP’s are too conservative for various biological,
ecological, and socio-economic reasons and may
be restricting fishing unnecessarily.

That should give us all confidence in the process :doh:

And you have honed in on the critical issue, we know an awful lot about the striped bass, now what will the managers at the ASMFC do with that knowledge? There are really only two questions, will they abide by amendment 6 and reduce the mortality to the levels necessary to rebuild the stock, or will they move the goalposts, aka target biomass and mortality figures to avoid doing anything that would further restrict fishing? My bet is that they will act to rebuild the species, but we won't know for sure until after the board meets in May.

Found this Migrations: Striped bass migrate north and south seasonally and ascend to rivers to spawn in the spring. Males in the Chesapeake Bay may forego coastal migrations and remain in the Bay."

From:https://chesapeakebay.noaa.gov/fish-facts/striped-bass

And this: Kohlenstein
(1981) showed that approximately 50% of the 3-year-old female striped bass in Chesapeake Bay, and a smaller percentage of 2- and 4-year-old females, moved to the coast to join the migration annually. In contrast, few males of that age were migratory."

Fromhttps://www.nwrc.usgs.gov/wdb/pub/species_profiles/82_11-008.pdf

I wish I had the same faith in the ASMFC as you do mike (in thinking they will act to rebuild the species). I don't think their actions and decisions are based on whats best for the health of a fishery as their first priority... They may be acting in the best interest of a group... but it's probably not a group of fish.

Yeah, I came across the "may forego" too, but there wasn't an explanation or source. It probably comes from that Kohlenstein paper, which I think was the one that lead to the assumption that males stayed in the bay. That is the right time frame. My recollection, and it's been probably 15 years since I actually read a lot of the related literature, was that they looked specifically at the young classes and it was extrapolated that males don't leave, but later studies determined that they just don't leave until they are older. I don't know if/what reasons were hypothesized, but my first guess would be linked to differences in time to mature between males and females. It is a critical consideration when evaluating benefits of a slot.
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