First yesterday the report of a low young of the year index for Maryland Striped Bass and now an email I received from Stripers Forever about three miles of dead striped bass off Cape Cod. There were unfortunately no pictures which just gives the commerical fishing fraction reason to suggest it was a false report. If you witness anything like this you should document it with pictures, even if you take the pictures with a camera phone. A picture says a million words more then just a letter. Having said that we commend this angler for reporting the incident and taking the time to write a letter to the New England Fishery Council.

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From Stripers Forever: Recently we received a copy of a letter from an eyewitness referring to discarded bycatch of striped bass in an area east of outer Cape Cod.  You can read the letter by clicking on this link.  This bycatch, whether by mid-water herring trawlers or groundfish draggers, is well known to be an annual occurrence during the peak of the fall migration.  This kind of waste, combined with the bloated take of the legal and black market commercial striped bass fisheries, certainly contribute to the numerous reports we’ve received this season about poor striper fishing from many areas along the Atlantic coast.

These dead fish should certainly be counted towards commercial striped bass quotas, but they are not.  In fact, we think that they are uncounted not only for quotas but also when calculating the overall fishing mortalities that fishery managers use in setting harvest levels.  The bottom line is that this is just another important reason that there should be no commercial striped bass fishery.

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