Striper Recovery: Not

The Atlantic Ocean was full of striped bass in the early 1970s when I fished with master electrician-curmudgeon Jak Knowles. If they were over 16 inches in length, you could kill as many as you wanted. We did. He would insist that we toast each big fish with SS Pierce Red Label, which was okay except in blitzes.

We didn't believe in selling our fish, but we sure believed in eating them. And after our spring trip Knowles would give one to each of his customers, then claim as income tax deductions the cost of tackle, gas and near-weekly repairs to his ancient green Willys. Once an IRS agent visited him, then backed out of his house, hands in the air and shouting: "Okay. Okay. Okay." That's how it was when you argued with Knowles.

Carrying our fish was impossible, so Knowles would order me to tow them through surf and estuaries. I didn't argue. I can still feel the rope cutting into my shoulder as I raced the ebbing tide under gaudy Nantucket dawns that seemed endless as youth and the great, silver fish strung out like stars across the continental shelf from the Carolinas to the Maritimes.

No one told us you could kill too many stripers. In fact, the managers told us you couldn't. In 1973 when I complained to a high-ranking official of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries about the commercial harvest of striped bass, which peaked that year at 15 million pounds, he declared that there would always be "plenty of striped bass for both commercial and recreational fishermen."

With that, the Atlantic Coast striped bass population crashed. By 1980, instead of catching 40 fish a trip, you might catch five a season. Basically, they were gone. The states had proven their inability to protect the resource, so in 1984 Congress approved the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, which required the Secretary of Commerce to impose a moratorium on fishing for striped bass in any state not in compliance with a management plan hatched by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).

The result, for the first time ever, was striper management. Suddenly there were highly restrictive commercial and recreational harvest regulations. For most states there was a recreational bag limit of one large fish a day. Over the next 11 years stripers proliferated. Knowles, who died on the dock with his boots on at 86, lived just long enough to see stripers start to come back. In the early 1990s, throwing long flies from boats, I began having 40-fish outings again. But with the size limit set at 36 inches, I was lucky to eat one fish a season.

All the gushing and oozing in the hook-and-bullet press about the managers' impressive "success story" made about as much sense to me as decorating a company commander for busting up drug traffic in his barracks. Then in 1995 ASMFC declared the stock "fully recovered" and approved Amendment V to the Atlantic Striped Bass Fishery Management Plan, thereby significantly increasing recreational and commercial harvest. When I told the managers that it was a reckless decision, they assured me that there would be plenty of fish for both commercial and recreational fishermen.

They didn't have it right this time either. Managing a healthy stock for abundance instead of maximum sustained yield--that is, maximum dead poundage on the dock--is utterly alien to the way fisheries managers think. Never have they attempted it; never has a constituency asked them to attempt it. The sensible, laudable and politically hopeless crusade by recreational anglers to win federal gamefish status for striped bass along the Atlantic Coast repulses managers. "It's wrong-headed," proclaimed one official of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.

But what was wrong-headed was Amendment V. It might have worked had the number of recreational striper fishermen remained constant. (The commercial harvest has not increased as rapidly because it's mostly controlled by quotas.) In the 1970s, even before the crash, striper anglers were secretive and scarce--at least the serious ones who caught the fish. Few used boats. You saw them mostly on darkened beaches, hunched along the foam line like black-crowned night herons.

Even as stripers came surging back, populations of bluefish, tautog, winter flounder, scup, sea bass, sharks and tunas were bottoming out. Both commercial and recreational pressure shifted to stripers because they were available. In all other regions of the country recreational fishing pressure is falling off. But on the Atlantic Coast, thanks in large measure to the resurgence of stripers, it's increasing. In 1999, 13,218,936 pounds of striped bass were harvested by recreational fishermen--more than any other marine fish. Angler striped-bass-trip expenditures, adjusted for inflation, increased from $85 million in 1981 to $560 million in 1996--an annual growth of 35 percent. During the same period the number of directed striped bass trips increased from roughly one million to seven million--an average annual increase of 38 percent. The Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey, administered by NMFS, estimated an increase in sportfishing trips for striped bass from 247,000 in 1990 to 691,000 in 1997.