Last year was a turning point for me. I have for the last twenty years enjoyed November fishing on the Cape and Islands ( Elizabeths). Last fall was a decided drop from the previous ones. Why? I have my theories but since I am not a scientist, fisheries biologist, Icthyologist I will keep most of them to my self. I am very, very concerned about the future of Striped Bass though. My concern is the lack of bait both large ( pogies) and small ( grass shrimp etc,) and anywhere in between. I have been raving for years about seals and thier un-controlled population growth. Yesterday morning as I was walking off of a Truro beach I met a nice guy named Dave Landry. Pleasentries aside he mentioned how he had only one fish on in the morning and that fish was grabbed and taken by a seal as he was fighting it. An hour before that My bud LaPorte had a seal eat his needlefish. On the outer beach the fishing, except for relatively few instances, has been about as bad as it got in the early eighties.
For instance, the year before along the Elizabeths we did not see seals in Lackeys until mid-November. And on the Sunday after Thanksgiving with the air temprerature at 26 degrees and spitting snow we took numbers of bass along Naushon, Pasque and Nashawena. Bassmaster was with us on this trip. This year with 67 degree water we had fifteen in Lackeys on September 17th. Every fall I fish Fisher's Island , New York in November up to the week after Thanksgiving and always catch fish. Last year they were gone for the most part by Columbus day. They say that there are loads off bass just offshore along the outer Cape and boatmen have benn doing well with them all season. I know this to be fact having experienced it myself. There are miles of sandeels and herds of bass out there moving south along the coast. But they are not and will not come into the shore for fear of the seals. This years beach fishing reminds me of the canal in 1982. I fished several nights a week there for May, June and September and October and caught two bass all season in the ditch. That's right just two, inumerable Bluefish but two bass.
Then it was reproduction hazards in Chesapeake now it's predation and competition for forage species by the fish themselves, marine mammals (seals), commercial pogie fishing and thus the lack of sustainable numbers of those forage species to sustain the bass.
Something has to be done. The chain reaction to all this will come about as the Sporstman's dollars spent in travelling here will dwindle, an important factor in the outer capes economy at the seasons end. No house rentals, no motel rentals, no visits to gas stations, restaurants and tackle shops, convience stores etc,.
I feel no remorse when I see a dead seal or hear about one washing up on the beach dead of mysterious circumstances. The seals have killed the great inshore surf fishing at Monomoy and they are quietly and efficiently killing the rest of the surf fishery along the outer Cape. The bounty that was once held on a seal was there to protect the inshore fisheries that made up the economy of the cape in the years before the marime mammal protection act. That economy was driven by the inshore cod, flounder, mackerel, herring and Striped Bass fhisheries. Those inshore stocks, important to the commercial fishing fleets of the outer Cape is once again being menaced by a junk science protection act without regard for the shared resource and the livelihood of those involved in those resources.
Right now I say without any reprehension that a good seal is a dead seal. There are way too many for the food resources at hand and hopefully the lack of or wiping out of the forage resources will start to affect thier population by forcing them to move to better grounds to the north or causing a blight brought on by poor nutrition with the lack of forage needed to sustain a herd in the number of over 6000 individual seals.
Yeah I can hear it now that seals have a right to live here as well. That may be true but we humans, the bass, the mackerel, the flounders and sandeels and codfish have a right to the share of the resource as well and right now we are on the losing end of that deal. It's seals 80% and us and the other creatures 20%.
Hybrid Mode
