‘We slayed fish with reckless abandon’: grizzled Long Island fishermen bemoan the damage they’ve wrought on the East Coast striped bass

Striped bass fishing has been Bill Jakob’s passion for more than 60 years, and he remembers an era when he’d spend all night casting his line into the crashing waves off Montauk and get eight or nine fish ranging up to 40 pounds (18 kilograms), a big catch by anyone’s standards.

Then, after years of heavy fishing, the big runs of stripers stopped.

“I’m part of the problem, back in the years. I ran party boats, we slayed fish with reckless abandon,” said Jakob, president of the Montauk Surfcasters Association on the easternmost tip of Long Island.

Increasingly, fishermen like Jakob fear the good days of catching striped bass are coming to an end. The fish aren’t showing up like they used to, and young stripers are becoming harder to find.

Scientists who study striped bass say anglers on the East Coast are right to be concerned, and they say years of overfishing are just part of the problem. The fish have experienced eight consecutive years of poor reproduction in their most critical habitat in the Chesapeake Bay, regulators said last week, and the population has declined along much of the Atlantic coast.

Factors like years of warming waters — a prime concern cited by many scientists — poor river flow, drought, pollution and possibly increased predation from seals and sharks have left experts and fishermen asking whether tighter fishing limits would even be enough for striped bass to recover. Losing these higher-level predators, which help regulate smaller fish, would threaten an $8 billion fishing industry and tens of thousands of jobs.

Striped bass fishing is a long-standing East Coast tradition

“Stripers” are prized in part because they put up a fight and can be fished right from shore. From the slippery rocks of Maine’s coast to the warmer waters of the St. Johns River in Florida, anglers wearing headlamps can be seen casting into the predawn darkness,........

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