Stripers have not moved to Maine yet according to migratory data, but they are very close. The water temperature has not reached 50 degrees. They arrived in Massachusetts 2 weeks ago and are rounding New Hampshire now. I did not see a single old timer. They know the stripers are not running off Maine presently. The shad are in according to reports. Stripers are imminent.
I was there for a long weekend on family vacation, and hoped maybe there was a holdover striper that had wintered in a nearby estuary with a hankering for a
Tsunami sand eel or
Krocodile spoon, and I wanted to enjoy the outdoors. I have long realized that fishing, unless one desperately needs it to survive, is a delight in itself, an art, and not only about catching fish. Does an artist have to sell a painting to enjoy drawing it? Thoreau said, 'many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.' I have been reading a book called
A Season on the Edge by John Skinner because I have a lot to learn about surfcasting. He says, 'if surfcasters were only interested in catching fish they would buy boats.'
So this entry is about the fish we didn't catch.
Commercial striper fishing has been banned in Maine since the 1960s. Currently striper mortality is higher than targeted so restrictive measures including lowering recreational bag limits and commercial harvest amounts were implimented in 2015 along eastern seaboard states imposed federally to avoid fishing moratorium like that of the 1980s.
