'Striper Wars’ . . They’ll never end

By Will Barbeau

Interest in striped bass fishing is incredible. People pour into the hobby. The annual East Bay Angler January fishing seminar plays to full houses every year. That’s 600 people! Interest in striped bass fishing has never been higher.

Dick Russell entered the Striper Wars in 1982.  A few old mutts left in Rhode Island remember that the war to save stripers started four or five years earlier.

As Dick Russell explains, the striped bass problem was states’ rights – amplified by differences in state cultures. Each state had its own ideas on what to do. Every spring, bass leave their Chesapeake Bay and Hudson River breeding grounds to travel up the coast as far as Nova Scotia. They come back in the fall.  Midway through this voyage lays their biggest hazard: Rhode Island’s coastal fish traps -- politically entrenched since Colonial times. Even before leaving ‘home’ in the Chesapeake, bass face a hazard: the bay Watermen who traditionally harvested them before the fish achieved sexual maturity.  Stopping that was a war in itself.

Dick Russell takes readers into the minds of protagonists. We witness the thinking of George Mendonsa, Newport’s infamous trap operator.  We hear the thoughts of Jim White, a Coventry postman who became an eloquent spokesman for the species. Dozens of other biologists, politicians, fishermen and bureaucrats flow through Russell’s pages – honored or condemned by their words and deeds.

One hero is Bob Pond, the Attleboro lure maker who started “Stripers Unlimited.” He was the first to sound the alarm. He was also first to examine striped bass eggs – earning the resentment of biologists. He was scoffed at by sportsmen and rebuffed by bureaucrats -- but he persisted – and lived to see his views acclaimed.  Other heroes included the late Rhode Island Senator John Chafee, whose research program broke the states rights logjam. Chafee’s legislation started the catch limits that now control the fishery.  And of course, Russell himself traveled up and down the coast keeping everyone informed of what they should be doing to keep the program in place.

Surprises leap from Russell’s pages. One was the fact that striped bass breeding amidst pilings of abandoned piers on New York’s west side stopped construction of the multi-billion dollar Westway highway project.

Sadly, Striper Wars is not all good news. Bass now carry undiagnosed diseases. They are starved by food shortages. Habitats deteriorate under loads of chemical runoffs from farms and suburbia’s.

But through it all, the message in Striper Wars is that striped bass are a magical fish -- which induce the love and support of thousands of sportsmen. We who fished them in the 70’s often prided ourselves in how many ‘pounds’ we caught (and sold). Today’s striped bass fisherman releases most of his catch.
It’s a different world, but hopefully one which will protect stripers for future anglers.