Paul Haertel has been reeling in striped bass — stripers, as they’re better known — along the Jersey Shore since he was a teen.
The 64-year-old angler from Barnegat lives for a good trophy fish; he’s even mounted two of his largest catches on his wall: one a 50-pounder he caught off Barnegat Inlet in 2003, the other he nabbed in 2011 during a thunderstorm, while chasing bunker fish off the Shore.
“I don’t want a replica of somebody else’s fish hanging on my wall — I want my fish" Haertel said.
Haertel’s sense of striper pride echoes throughout the state: when the bass migrate north in the spring and when they head south in the fall, pictures of monster fish are shared by proud anglers across social media. Stripers are a key component of in New Jersey’s multi-billion dollar fishing industry, too, as charter boats up and down the Shore make their living bringing striper-seekers out into open saltwater.
But trouble now looms amid the churning waves.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an agency formed by 15 states that manages the fishing of multiple species swimming along the East Coast, announced in May that striped bass are being overfished.
The vast majority of that fishing is done by those same eager recreational fisherman. Commercial fishing represents just 10% of all striped bass takes on the Atlantic Coast, according to Toni Kerns, the director of the ASMFC’s Interstate Fisheries Management Program. In fact, commercial harvesting of the fish isn’t even allowed in New Jersey.
“This is one harvest where we really can’t point a finger anywhere else but ourselves," Paul Eidman, who operates Tinton Falls-based Reel Therapy charters, said of the pressure put on stripers.
Now, regulations are expected to tighten in efforts to keep the stock from plunging to dangerously low levels.
For-hire boat captains could be hit hardest by stricter regulations — if customers aren’t confident they’ll be able to bring a fish home, they won’t spend the money to take the trip, the captains fear.
"Over the last 20 or 30 years, the fishing regulations have gotten so lop-sided that it is no longer feasible for many to justify spending money on not just the fare, but the expense of travel, tolls, tackle, ice and food and not have an opportunity to bring home dinner for family and friends,” Robert Bogan, who owns and operates The Gambler out of Point Pleasant Beach, wrote to the ASMFC.
At the end of this month, at the ASMFC’s annual meeting in New Hampshire, the regulators will decide what path to take for the fish’s short-term future.
All the while, anglers wait and worry.
Last Saturday morning, Fishing Beach at Sandy Hook was filled with more than a dozen fishermen casting from the surf. Offshore, boats swarmed near schools of bunker in the hopes of catching stripers that were chasing the baitfish.
The fall run for stripers is just starting: The largest of the fish typically swim in Garden State waters near the end of November and into December.
Irving, who declined to give his last name, was one of the surf anglers at Sandy Hook. He said that for decades he’s driven to the Shore from Rockland County, and he compared the experience of catching stripers at the peak of a run as being akin to bowling a perfect 300 game, or playing golf and getting a hole-in-one at every hole.
“When they’re blitzing, that adrenaline is unlike anything you can describe to somebody unless they come out and do it,” Irving said of the fish.
Brendan Harrison, an assistant biologist for the state’s Bureau of Marine Fisheries, said Garden State anglers, fishing clubs, bait shops, boat operators all have a “significant and vested interest” in the fish.
“It’s definitely an iconic species in New Jersey,” Harrison said.
Robert Sciarrino | For The Star-Ledger
Mickey Melchiondo of the group, Ween, proudly displays the striped bass he caught in the Delaware River in 2011. Melchiondo, aka, Dean Ween, leads a double life as fishing guide/rock guitarist.
Stripers hit rock bottom in the 1980s.
That’s when the stock reached its low point and fishermen faced a crisis, according to Kerns. Throughout most of the 80s, the female spawning stock biomass (SSB) for stripers was less than 20,000 metric tons, according to the ASMFC. That’s far below the current target for striper SSB, which is about 90,000 metric tons.
The ASMFC’s 2018 stock assessment found the striper SSB to be about 68,000 metric tons.
Kerns said the trouble in the 80s was caused by a combination of “very heavy” fishing pressure, poor habitat conditions and periods of poor spawning success for the fish.
Before the population bottomed out, New Jersey anglers were able to keep up to 10 fish, as small as 18 inches, every day, according to a New York Times report at the time. Up and down the coast, strict regulations were put in place to allow the fish to recover.
Eventually, the stripers did bounce back. Kerns said that recovery began in the late ’80s and the stock grew into the early 2000s. As the population grew again, the limits placed on fishermen were gradually loosened.
New Jersey fishermen are often slow to trust the data collected by regulators, citing doubts about the methods used to assess the health of fish populations. Still, many of the state’s anglers feel that the striped bass population has declined in recent years.
In a letter to the ASMFC earlier this month, Jersey Coast Anglers Association President Mark Taylor wrote that while his members are split on how drastic the drop in striper numbers has been, all agreed that there is a problem.
“Though there have been isolated areas such as Raritan Bay and the Cape Cod Canal where the striper fishing has been fabulous at times, most of the East Coast has had very poor fishing,” Taylor wrote.
Haertel said that trophy anglers like himself are most frequently blamed for the striper decline. But he points out that every angler targeting stripers is part of the problem. Even people who never keep a fish may accidentally kill a few.
“With striper fishing, everybody points the finger at somebody else," Haertel said.
Roughly 90% of stripers caught by recreational anglers are released alive, according to the ASMFC, but 9% of those die later as a result of being caught in the first place.
A number of New Jersey fishermen feel that dredging near shore and beach replenishment work have taken a serious toll on the habitat once enjoyed by stripers and other fish. If the stock is declining, they argue, then that work deserves some share of the blame.
“Beach replenishment has done a lot of damage, not just to the animals that live near the surf, but has devastated fish habitat where the sand was dredged — what were once hills are now holes!” Bogan wrote. "If this practice was done in a forest, there would be public outcry.”
Right now, New Jersey anglers are limited to one striped bass per day that is between 28 inches and 43 inches long, and one per day that is 43 inches or longer. Anglers that obtain a bonus permit are allowed to keep one fish between 24 inches and 28 inches, from September 1 through December 31. Those regulations have been in place since 2015, Harrison said.
But now that the ASMFC has determined stripers to be overfished, those regulations are likely to change.
The ASMFC’s technical committee estimates that a 18% reduction in total striped bass removals will be needed to allow the fish to rebound and reach healthy numbers again.
The commission will take the first step toward that goal next week, when it considers a number of potential regulation changes and then votes for one. The regulators will consider a number of variables, including various size limits, possible equipment regulations and how to treat the commercial fishery.
But whatever choice the ASMFC makes, the individual states will have the final say on what their regulations look like.
If a state is not satisfied with the regulations chosen by the ASMFC, it has the option of creating its own rules. The catch is that those state-written rules must cleared by the ASMFC as being equivalent from a conservation standpoint to the ASMFC’s chosen path.
That’s what happened with summer flounder in 2017. After months of vocal opposition to ASMFC plans, New Jersey refused to go along with the commission’s regulations and created its own set instead.
The ASMFC declared New Jersey to be out of compliance, opening the Garden State’s fluke fishery to the threat of being shutdown. The fight went to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who eventually decided that New Jersey’s rules could stand.
Taylor, in his letter to the ASMFC, wrote that his group is not satisfied that any one of the commission’s proposals will be fair to all kinds of anglers — from strict catch and release fishermen to those exclusively seeking trophy fish to keep. Taylor wrote that he hopes New Jersey will write its own regulations instead.
“We are hopeful that our state will develop options that will affect all sectors equally while meeting the anticipated mandatory reductions,” Taylor said.
The ASMFC is scheduled to vote on its new regulations on Oct. 30. Whatever New Jersey decides to do after that, it must have new regulations in place by the start of the 2020 striped bass season.
Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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