2025 Striped Bass Regulations

[Broad Bill]

Originally Posted by bunker dunker

seems like this is the never ending story,striped bass and regulations.i try to understand why someone,anyone can't sit down and come up with a set of regulations that works for all involved.when i started striper fishing it was 10 fish 18" or over.i understand things change but why are we having the same conversations every year.make a balanced set of regs and that is that.

No different than fluke, both stocks went from being robust for years to a substantial state of decline for different reasons. With bass, female levels as just mentioned have tripled yet recruitment has fallen off the cliff. Striped bass fishery has an environmental issue in the Chesapeake caused by urban and agricultural run off and the unabated harvest of bunker in the bay by one foreign owned conglomerate. Fix those two problems and you will fix the fishery.

The fluke fishery on the other hand has a recruitment problem because the regulations took approximately 60 million female breeders out of the stock and they allow the commercial sector to operate during the spawn without any understanding of the impact it's having on reproduction. Reduce the size minimum for the recreational sector, disallow commercial operations during the primary spawn in mid-september to late October early November and come to grips with the outrageous waste involved with commercial discard and the fluke fishery will grow exponentially. The entire process is broken and will only be fixed if the entire management of these resources is moved from the Department of Commerce to the Department of the Interior or lawsuits are filed representative of the recreational community and fisheries interests which we all know will never happen.

NMFS, ASMFC and MAFMC all have their heads in the sand. You can have as much science as you wish, as much peer review as you want but if data and common sense is going to be ignored in favor of economics, politicians and sectors instead of the health of the stock, there really is no functional purpose of fisheries management.