As we wait for the weather to warm and trigger the striped bass spring migration, there are some interesting — albeit troubling — issues to follow regarding the effects of climate change on striper habits.
The data are beginning to suggest that many New England striped bass are not leaving their northern areas for the winter but instead are finding refuge in local rivers and salt ponds and wintering there. This is because our recent warm winters have not resulted in much ice in the back bays and rivers. The unintended consequence of this is a new problem, or at least one that’s unfamiliar to those of us who care about the fishery in these northern locales: poaching.
An incident that has repeated itself over several years and happened again in December on the Housatonic River in Connecticut serves as an example. What’s going on there is something I can easily imagine we might experience in our saltwater ponds and rivers on the Cape.
It turns out that the Housatonic, which flows directly into Long Island Sound, lately has a significant population of small striped bass, some of which are still sexually immature, wintering over. Most of the fish are between 16 and 30 inches long, and there are a lot of them. These fish are congregating in large, dense schools upriver. Don’t forget that, unlike most saltwater fish, striped bass can live and thrive in fresh water. You can catch a whole lot of these bass at once if you stumble upon one of these schools. It’s easy because they’re hungry — they don’t have good food sources in these locations in winter months. Many of these are among the fish that, come spring, will migrate up into our Cape waters.
Connecticut Marine Enforcement officers caught six fishermen with 34 bass ranging in size from 12 to 25 inches — meaning this was not only a size violation but also a bag violation. You are allowed one fish between 28 and 31 inches. To compound this problem further, enforcement capabilities decrease substantially from summer to winter. It’s reasonable to conclude that those who are caught poaching represent just a few of the total number of poachers out there.
Here is where it gets sketchy for us on the Cape: New York and New Jersey have a winter moratorium on striped bass fishing. An unintended consequence of that is that fishermen from there come north to fish in states that have open winter seasons for striped bass. And along with legitimate sportfishermen who come north to fish come the poachers.
As we figure out which Cape waters have congregations of bass wintering over and word gets out about them, you can count on fishermen coming around to check things out. I have little doubt that the Bass River, Pleasant Bay, Stage Harbor, and the Canal are harboring increasing numbers of young bass. The same thing could even be happening in Provincetown Harbor.
The clear and obvious solution here is to impose a winter fishing moratorium on striped bass in Massachusetts consistent with the laws that already exist in New York and New Jersey. It will certainly help with our limited enforcement capabilities. And those capabilities may soon be getting even more limited if the recent government-imposed job cuts to employees at the National Park Service and NOAA continue.
