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Pollution, water quality issues, tournaments, changes in migration paths, trawling, netting, better electronics, bait, anglers, politicians, greed, publicity, carelessness when handling c&r fish are all to blame.
I'm relatively young and its easy to see its def. not what it used to be. Unfortunately many of the factors above will be difficult, if not impossible to correct. In a perfect world I'd love to end all charter boats, commercial fishing, pollution, useless killing, etc. and go 100% C&R. Look what happened to the atlantic salmon fishery in massachusetts. CT and Merrimack Rivers were one of the most epic atlantic salmon runs in the world and they are pretty much extinct now. Set up a couple dams to warm the water up and ruin spawning habitat, pollute the water to standards we deem are clean, hammer the fish in the open ocean in their summering areas and set up nets across the river at the mouth... in a short 200 year timeframe the fish are gone. GONE and never to come back unless we remove all the dams and stop the heavy fishing pressure.
Right now, what we are seeing with the striped bass is how much we are impacting them year to year. We know that a few good commercial outfits can clean out an area over a couple years. Recs lining the canal are doing damage may-july. Spawning habitats are in trouble. WE found the winter over areas and are pounding them. Stripers are much more resilient than salmon, but still. There is only so much!
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