From north side of the cape to Maine?... not likely... lots of large not enough small....the probelm becomes more eveident the farther north you go...the less fish in the biomass, the less you have to migrate...

I agree with Mike P's take.. .. pointing fingers is no way to go about management... those of us that have been around the block a few times have seen this all before.. including the playing of the blame game...the problem lies in management... I also believe in fixing the bait problem... we havent had a school of pogies (other than for a single tide) in the Merrimack in almost two decades.. .. and in the mid 80's there were so many of them, you could snag enough for a mornings fishing in a half an hour...EVERY morning..

Overfishing again.
 

After reading and watching what went on in North Carolina and Maryland with massive amounts of stripers being killed from legal and illegal fishing, the downward trend is simply commercial operations have become very efficient at killing fish. What we saw was a small sample of the total. Those were all spawning aged fish. We keep knocking that number out of the spawning mass year after year and you get less baby stripers.

I'm not buying that North Atlantic crap. Massive slaughter leads to massive slaughter.

Also, it is not pollution. The Clean Water Act was enacted in the early 70's. Additional federal and local clean water regulations have been enacted since. The Chesapeake was a dirtier place in the 80's and 90's when spawning was more successful than it is now.