over 50 nights all up and down the RI shoreline so far this year, not ONE SINGLE BLUE yet... not even an eel chop...

And that is no exaggeration

Pete, I'll have about the same amount of nights and have 1 blue this year. Prob. no more than 5 last year.

My friend and I were outside Plymouth harbor just in front of the long jetty and big gators were pushing bunker and actually creating decent size waves you could almost surf. It was a great time to fish and a good thing I was pouring all the plastic those bastards could shred.

The first time I went up there, early 80s, like maybe 1983, me and a couple of my Canal buddies, we scooped some dead pogies from the harbor side of the jetty into a bucket. We walked to where was a little space for 3 guys and chunked up a couple of the pogies. I grabbed a chunk, hooked it, made a cast, and was thumbing the spool until the sinker hit bottom---except there was no bottom. I said to one of the guys, "man, this water seems awfully deep." Guy replies, "Mike, it can't be more than 15 feet deep." I threw the free spool lever on my Squidder closed, and almost had the rod yanked out of my hands. :rotf2:

Like the song says, "don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone" Same with the great bass fishing of the 1990s and early 2000s. There was always a cycle---bass died out, blues moved in. Old timers told me that it happened in the postwar era, then again in the early 1980s. But now the cycle seems broken, and who knows if it'll ever come back?

Yeah, used to be you’d have one or the other or both; now you don’t have either. So what has moved in to take the niche of both? Is it hard tails? Saw a bunch of albies breaking last week; is that what there is now?

Light tackle Sea Robins are the new frontier.

The ocean cock roaches AK sea bass have eaten and destroyed everything in buzzards bay for sure. We have been experiencing surface blitzes of them in 50 ft of water so many
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R.I. is in similar shoes.... I wrestled to get out front today but the wind was honkin' just a tad too much, sat just inside targeting rubba-lips, but the damn roaches you're talking about were beating the Tog to the hook . ..:nailem: .....; pissed through 3 qts of greenies in no time -

[QUOTE=redlite;1242938]The ocean cock roaches AK sea bass have eaten and destroyed everything in buzzards bay for sure.

While here in RI they're also everywhere but have to be 16.5" to keep one.

So maybe Black Sea bass have taken much of the striper niche. They would both live in rocky structure near the bottom. I don’t actually mind them all that much; they’re easy to catch, tasty and sizable. I don’t think they’ve actually pushed the stripers out; they’ve declined for other reasons. So what’s displaced the bluefish?