Article by Marty Gary
Interesting Dynamics Offshore
An interesting trifecta of conditions offshore provided for a diverse array of opportunities for anglers venturing offshore over the Memorial Day weekend. Surface water temperatures in the upper 60s and low 70s in the offshore waters of the Washington and Baltimore Canyons to the Rock pile provided an early bite for yellowfin. Several boats did extremely well, and the 1st white marlin was caught. What a great way to start the season off after last year’s record setting stretch in late August and early September.
A little further inshore at locations like the Fingers and the Hambone, sharks are turning up in cooler waters right on schedule, with threshers, makos, blues and duskys among the species turning up. Meanwhile, divers at the offshore wrecks and reefs from the Great Eastern Reef, the Gordon Cook and the subway cars are reporting bottom temperatures of 44-46 degrees, and Atlantic cod are turning up along with nice catches of black sea bass and some tautog. The weekend’s high pressure and warm temperatures finally chased most of the large, migrant stripers north, and with a long term forecast of warm temperatures, the focus will shortly be turned to summer flounder, bluefish and Atlantic croaker in the coming weeks.
A Quick Visit
After coming down to help our licensing staff set-up new agents with the paper-based fishing licenses, I came back into town Thursday afternoon to drop off extra supplies to the tackle stores for the Memorial Day weekend. It was a good thing I did, as Sue Foster at Oyster Bay and the other stores indicated a brisk sales pace for licenses. I took the opportunity to speak to Chris at the Oceanic Pier and to set the pier up as DNR’s 93rd sport fish citation award center. Citation awards are given out to fishermen whose catches of over 40 species categories on the coast exceed a threshold minimum size. Chris indicated that the first citation award was given to an angler who caught a 43-inch striper off the pier. Striped bass (rockfish) must be a minimum of 40 inches to qualify. I also made a visit to the OC Fishing Pier up on the boardwalk and had a nice visit with proprietor David Horn and his wife Sue. They agreed to become the 94th DNR sport fish citation award center. Sharks are often caught off the OC Fishing Pier on the boardwalk, and in order to get a citation award for any shark species, they must be released and a photo submitted of the catch.
Be sure to bring your camera or a smart phone with a camera on your fishing trip. For a complete list of award centers and the minimum sizes to qualify for thousands in prizes, please visit the Maryland DNR website:
http://www.dnr.maryland.gov/fisheries/challenge/index.asp
As I stopped by Alltackle on Rt. 50 in West Ocean City to drop off their supply of fishing guidebooks, I ran into fellow DNR colleague Mike Naylor. Mike is our Shellfish Division Director, and is an avid fishermen for everything from trout to bass to offshore species. He was in town to fish with Captain extraordinaire, Captain Mark Sampson. They wound up having a great day at the Fingers catching duskys and blue sharks and even had a giant thresher come through the baits at one point. Our staff enjoys getting out and fishing as much as anyone, and you’ll see more of us out and about on the waters around Ocean City throughout the summer.
Question on Weakfish & Spotted Sea Trout
Lee Dochtermann of Ocean City wrote to us: “I have a question for you which I think would make a very interesting article for your readers! Sea trout or weakfish are my favorite ocean going sportfish! I used to catch many of them throughout the years, in and around Ocean City Maryland. The Route 50 Bridge and Shanty Town dock were favorite places for me to find them on incoming tides. I would even catch them in the surf. However, for the past 10 years I have not caught one!? I have heard all sorts of theories. One that seemed to make some sense was that the resurgence of the rockfish population throughout the years has been a problem for the weakfish population...that rockfish are eating all the baby weakfish? As it is I would really like to know:
1. Why have weakfish seemingly disappeared from the waters around Ocean City, Maryland?
2. Is anyone within the Maryland DNR working on this problem or researching it?
I hear that sea trout (at least spotted sea trout) are in and around the North Carolina coast and even Virginia. But what happened to them around the Ocean City area?
ANSWER: I can sympathize with you Lee. I can vividly recall fishing off Kent Island in autumn of 1998, jigging on immense schools of weakfish. At the time, it looked very much like that would be the next species success story after striped bass, but each year thereafter, the catches diminished. The story was the same everywhere, from the Delaware Bay to North Carolina. To answer your question, there are two species that are commonly referred to as “sea trout”. One is weakfish, also known as “gray trout” or “yellowfin trout”, and there is the spotted sea trout, also known as “specks” or “speckled trout”. Weakfish stocks fell dramatically in the mid-to-late 1980s, but started to rebound in the mid-to-late 1990s along with Atlantic croaker, only to sharply decline once again from 2000 on.
For weakfish, a number of hypotheses have been offered up and tested for why this decline has occurred. They range from overfishing (both commercially and recreationally), to by-catch of young weakfish in commercial shrimp trawls, to predation and climate shifts. The latest Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) stock assessment indicates that throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, weakfish stocks experienced unsustainable high fishing mortality rates, which led to a decline in abundance into the 1990s. Fishing mortality rates declined during the early 1990s, and an increase in biomass was evident during the mid-to-late 1990s. Available evidence indicates that factors other than fishing mortality were the primary cause for biomass decline. ASMFC’s Weakfish Management Board has accepted the following five points for management use:
1. The stock is declining
2. Total mortality is increasing
3. There is little evidence of overfishing occurring
4. Something other than fishing mortality is causing the stock decline, and
5. There is a strong chance that regulating the fishery will not, in itself, reverse the stock decline.
The 2009 stock assessment for weakfish went on to state that the preponderance of statistical evidence given supports a predation hypothesis involving enhanced predation by striped bass and spiny dogfish as the primary factor behind the recent and unexpected decline in weakfish productivity. Is someone at DNR working on it? In short, yes. Each of the coastal states within the range of weakfish populations has a member assigned to ASMFC’s Technical committees and management boards. For Maryland, that is Jim Uphoff on the Technical Committee and Fisheries Service Director Tom O’Connell on the Management Board. Resources in the form of DNR staff time, funding, and the data that yields is being contributed to the process of trying to solve the riddle of the decline of weakfish. Maryland is doing its part, but if the consensus agreement of predation is true, a sharp increase in weakfish stocks may not be something we’ll see in the near future.
For spotted sea trout, there is no current stock assessment that can tell for sure what their status across their full range is. It is officially listed by ASMFC as “unknown”. However, over the last 28 years, the recreational catch of spotted seatrout along the Atlantic coast has shown a strong upward trend, increasing from 1.1 million fish in 1981 to 5.5 million fish in 2009, with a peak of 8.1 million fish in 2007. The recreational harvest of spotted seatrout has remained relatively stable around the time series average of 1.3 million fish.
I can tell you that I miss the days of jigging on large schools of weakfish as much as anyone, and hopefully we’ll see this species come back in greater abundance in the future. We continue to monitor the stock along with states along the Atlantic seaboard, and updates are available on the ASMFC website at: www.asmfc.org
Questions From Coastal Fishermen Readers?
I welcome any questions you may have on fisheries management, sport fishing licenses, or any other fisheries related questions. Please e-mail your questions to:
[email protected]
Until Next Week…….Good Fishing!
Marty Gary is Assistant Director/Fisheries Ecologist at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Service.
