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Tim Coleman: The coming striped bass collapse | Contributors | projo.com | The Providence Journal
Tim Coleman: The coming striped bass collapse
01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, September 11, 2010
By TIM COLEMAN
The Rhode Island state fish is the mighty, beautiful striped bass. Sometimes weighing over 60 pounds when caught, the striper is a prize to many Rhode Islanders. For some, it’s one of the main reasons they choose to live and work in the state.
Back in the 1970s, lack of sufficient management led to a drastic decrease in our striper population. The decline was so great that eventually conservation measures were implemented that brought the fish back to levels of abundance starting in the late 1990s into this decade.
However, many New Englanders once again are voicing concern over our striper stocks. These are people who fish from the shore. Their willingness to step forward is similar to that of shore anglers in the mid-1970s who voiced worries about the decline of the cod stocks, a decline that continues today.
Shore anglers may be considered the canary in the coal mine, the first sign of something wrong, voiced by the “small” people without benefit of academic pedigree. What they do have is many decades of experience fishing our waters, and they often keep detailed records of their declining catches. Will anyone listen?
Andy Gagarin’s family has owned a home in Watch Hill since the 1920s, and he’s lived in it full-time since 1975. He looks out his front window at the surf and its population of striped bass. At the height of the striper resurgence, he caught an astounding 1,500 smaller stripers from the lighthouse rocks. By 2009, that number had dropped to 150.
Steve McKenna of Cranston is a lifelong Rhode Islander, now retired after 27 years as a state parole officer. He has fished all over the state from Little Compton to Napatree, always from the shore. He estimates the decline in his catch over the last five years as “at least 50 percent,” and also said he is catching fewer large bass over 30 pounds and is seeing an alarming drop in very small stripers — the seed stock for the future.
Five seasons ago, he caught 600 to 700 bass a season, with one or two of those in the 40-pound class and seven or so in the 30-pound class. Today, he struggles to catch a few 30-pounders during the year and his records show he landed 248 bass in 2008, and only 189 in 2009. His catch this year will be at, or even lower than, his worst season since 2005.
David Pickering of Lincoln is a retired schoolteacher and a well-known freelance writer whose articles on Rhode Island surf casting have appeared in many regional magazines in New England. In the bass heyday, he landed roughly 1,500 stripers fishing in upper Narragansett Bay and the south shore. This year he predicts he will be lucky to catch 500 fish. He also said he has never worked harder to catch fewer fish. The reason is obvious to him: We are killing too many stripers.
Dennis Zambrotta lives in Newport and works at the Navy base on Aquidneck Island. He is a lifelong surf fisherman, fishing both lower Narragansett Bay and the scenic rocky beaches along the Cliff Walk and Ocean Drive. His catch declined by at least a third the last five seasons: fewer big bass and on the other end, fewer smaller bass coming up the line. Dead fish cannot spawn, so there are fewer little ones to populate the future.
Surf-casting friends of his on Aquidneck Island all saw the same decline as reported in other parts of the state. It’s a situation that reminds Zambrotta of the last time stripers went into decline — late 1970s into 1984.
Meanwhile, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, charged with keeping bass at viable levels, maintains that striper stocks are healthy and do not require fishing cutbacks at this time. The panel said last fall that the striped bass “stock assessment update indicates that the resource remains in good condition. . . .”
All the above residents are aware of the difference in estimates of the health of the stock. One local summed it up by saying the government agency gets its data in a computer in an office a long way from the Ocean State. Locals get numbers from years and years of watching what goes on in the ocean off our coastal towns, some of them fishing the same waters as their fathers and grandfathers. They know when fish are increasing or decreasing, and the striped-bass catches of those who fish from the shore are going down.
If your neighbors are correct, as they were in the 1970s in predicting the cod collapse, will anyone with the power to change course listen to their concerns?
Tim Coleman is a Westerly-based writer specializing in fishing and other coastal matters.
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