A waste of time?

Probably the world record bass.

This season is a record one for the Atlantic Striped Bass on the New England coast. As evidence, each state puts out a free newspaper for holiday anglers and the cover picture is usually of some lucky man with a big fish. The New Hampshire and Maine editions are sporting pictures of huge bass this year but the daddy of them all is an 81.8 lb bass caught off Connecticut using a live eel as bait. Sadly this may not be the new official record because of a long delay before a weigh-in, but it's a very big fish by anyone's reckoning. And it looks in good shape, apart from being dead. Big fish are still coming in and September is probably the best month to go for them. Good luck to you.

Amid all this excitement, I'd like to point out that, although big fish are a good thing, you also need to have a lot of small fish in the water that will grow on to be the next big fish. These schoolie bass seem to be missing, at least in Maine. Down in New York's Hudson River, the stock is also giving cause for concern and is now protected from commercial fishing until 2015, but it's really hard to get an honest estimation of the situation. After all, we are talking about fishing here. It's all rumour and hype. Boatmen and fishing guides want you to believe that if you go out with them you will catch fish. Each tourist association and tackle shop wants you to fish in their region and spend your money there, and the commercial fishermen want us to think all is OK with the stripers so they can fish for them. Politicians don't want to hear that there might be a problem, especially when the old chestnuts about jobs versus conservation float to the top. Scientists simply don't have the data they need, or they don't agree with each other, or they don't feel free to speak out, or all three. People who expect straight answers are bound for disappointment.

As is always the case in fisheries science, there probably isn't a simple, single cause or a simple single solution. Climate change, declines in prey availability (especially menhaden) and commercial fishing interests have all been blamed by those who accept that stripers are not recovering in numbers as they should. Anglers don't trust the scientists or the politicians. Their own eyes tell them the fish aren't there.

On the Kennebec.

I can only tell you that 12 years ago I could catch a few bass on the fly each morning and now I can't. As a visiting angler, my evidence isn't worth a dime because my snapshot view and knee-jerk assessment may not represent a true indication of the wider situation along the coast, or even reflect a short term trend on the Kennebec. The people to talk to are the guides who take people out bass fishing week after week.

My key informant was Capt. Forrest Faulkingham with whom my son and I spent a morning on the Kennebec in August. It was our last day in Maine after two weeks of not catching a bass and I was so desperate to catch one that we forked out the cash for a guide. We met up at 6 am on the public boat launch south of the Maritime Museum in Bath ME.

Forrest uses a flats skiff  like the ones used to fish for bonefish and permit in the Caribbean. It's the perfect vessel for fly-fishing in sheltered waters with no clutter to snag your line and a good all-round view. The lack of superstructure also helps with photography.

We shot off down towards Popham at the mouth of the river, casting flies at likely spots as the tide fell. My son Nick threw rubber lures with a spinning rod. Neither of us drew any interest but we did see some huge fish leaping and splashing. They weren't stripers though; they were Atlantic sturgeon which seemed to be thriving. I had seen them every day.

In a very shallow bay which even the flats boat couldn't enter, we saw a good striped bass patrolling, but simply couldn't get to him  Meanwhile the water teemed with shoals of sand-eels and other bait fish which would normally attract some bass, but 'nothing doing. At this point I put the fly rod away and started chucking rubber lures which I could lob further. Nick switched to a heavy bucktail lure with a rubber eel attached: Still nothing, and our time was running out..

Looking for Bass

Just upstream of the Bath Iron-works and the Highway-One bridge there is a little jetty with a shed on it. Lidded bait-buckets are suspended on ropes from the dock and you are encouraged by a sign to haul them up. They contain live eels of various sizes and you are expected to pay $1 each for them using the honesty box. Forrest selected a few of the smaller specimens and paid up, then we headed upstream above the town towards Merrymeeting Bay.

I'm pretty much a fishing snob. I think I'm better than everyone else because I use a bunch of feathers instead of bait so, at this point I was pretty downhearted because I had resorted to throwing rubber lures using a fixed spool reel like a red-neck fishmonger and, worse still, I  hadn't caught a fish. Now I was going to use live bait; a thing I hadn't done since about 1964, but I was willing to try dynamite by now.

Captain Forest shows me a circle hook.

Forrest explained that we were to use circle hooks. These are good because they don't snag the bottom and only hook the bass in the lip. About a foot above the hook was a pierced ball of lead that would bounce along the bottom. The bait was a lip-hooked live eel, fished in about 30 feet of water as the boat drifted towards the sea. We could feel the ball bouncing along the bottom, especially as we reached shallower water, but we both lost our eels without detecting a good tug.

And that was that. Was it a waste of time? Hell no!

You can learn why in the next blog. Meanwhile, if you want a better review of what's going on with striped bass, read this article by Ted Williams.