Barry Catlin knows a lot about fishing.
He makes his living as a commercial lobsterman operating out of Cundy’s Harbor on his 45-foot boat, Miss Quahog. He is also an avid angler, pursuing striped bass in the area’s bay and coves, as well as bluefin tuna offshore. And this summer he is launching a new business, Maine Offshore Fishing Charters, tapping his knowledge of local waters to help others catch fish.
Catlin grew up in Sebec, but his family’s roots in Harpswell go back six generations. That meant he could spend his summers in Harpswell, where he learned to fish under the guidance of his grandfather, Skeet Catlin, a lifelong lobsterman. In the mid-1980s, 5-year-old Catlin was with his grandfather when he hooked his first fish while trolling a lure behind their boat.
“I remember the first mackerel I caught,” he said. “I got it by the tail.”
As a teenager, he pursued bluefish. “There was a ton of bluefish around,” he said. “That really ignited the flame (in me) for fishing.”
Until the early 1990s, he had never caught a striped bass. That’s because at that time, there were very few striped bass to be caught in Maine, or anywhere else for that matter.
Striped bass, Morone saxatilis, are a migratory species that moves north and south along the coast with the seasons, much like birds. Once abundant throughout its range along the Atlantic coast from Florida to Canada, the striped bass population crashed in the 1980s. That collapse was blamed largely on overfishing.
In response, the states along the Eastern Seaboard adopted strict conservation measures, including tight restrictions on commercial fishing and limits for recreational anglers on the size and number of fish they could harvest. These efforts were led by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an organization formed by the coastal states and chartered by Congress. Those measures seemed to have had the intended effect. By 1995, the commission declared that the striped bass population had recovered.
As with that first mackerel, Catlin was with his grandfather when he caught his first striper in 1993, when he was 14. At first he did not know what he had on the end of his line. “I asked my grandfather, ‘What the heck was that?'”
There were many more stripers after that. “I watched it all happen,” Catlin said. “There wasn’t anything. Then, bang, bang, it was like an infestation.”
In 1995, when Catlin was 16, his grandfather died. Catlin inherited 50 of his grandfather’s traps and began lobstering on his own. He didn’t find just lobsters in those traps. The bait in the traps also would attract stripers. In the late ’90s in Quahog Bay, “if I hauled 20 traps, I’d get five stripers. It was ridiculous,” he recalls.
Catlin sometimes hears people say there aren’t enough stripers around anymore. He doesn’t buy it.
Back in the ’90s, “There were too many then,” he said, and “I think there still are.”
Judging from estimates of the number of striped bass harvested in the last few years by Maine fishermen, Catlin may be right. The Maine Department of Marine Resources estimates that Maine fishermen harvested almost 13,000 striped bass in 2021. The following year the harvest more than quadrupled, rising to more than 57,000 fish, according to the state estimates. And a year later, the numbers rose again, to just under 63,000 fish.
However, those numbers may not reflect more fish in Maine waters so much as more people spending more time outdoors, fishing, in the pandemic era.
“People were fishing where you never see people fish,” said Craig King, a fisheries biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
So are the stocks of striped bass in Maine and states to the south rising, holding steady or falling? That’s a complicated question, but there are some troubling signs on the horizon.
In 2022, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission concluded that striped bass were being overfished. In 2023, the commission took emergency action to tighten the size restrictions governing fish harvested by recreational anglers up and down the coast. Currently that means that states prohibit anglers from keeping any fish in the migratory population that are shorter than 28 inches or longer than 31 inches.
Recreational anglers account for 90% of the striped bass harvested each year on the Atlantic coast.
In Maine, where no commercial fishing of striped bass is allowed, recreational fishing accounts for all of the harvest. Maine has adopted a “slot limit” conforming with the commission’s rules: only fish measuring between 28 and 31 inches may be kept, and each angler may keep just one fish a day.
There is no closed season in Maine, with one exception where special rules apply: the Kennebec River and its watershed. To see Maine’s regulations, go to tinyurl.com/striper-regs.
Management of the striper population is complicated by the fact that they are born in tidal rivers, but as adults, they migrate hundreds of miles up and down the coast. In technical terms, stripers, like salmon, are anadromous: inhabiting salt water as adults but ascending rivers to spawn.
After hatching from eggs, the young fish spend two to four years maturing in bays and estuaries before joining the adult migratory population. Males begin to spawn after reaching the age of 2, females after reaching age 6. Striped bass have been known to live 30 years or more.
Only a few bodies of water provide the spawning grounds for almost the entire population. The great majority of striped bass are born in Chesapeake Bay (in Maryland at the northern end and Virginia to the south). Other contributing spawning areas are the Hudson River in New York and the Delaware River in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Maine’s Kennebec River has a small spawning population.
Most of the fish caught in Maine originate in the Chesapeake. The first of these migrating fish show up in Maine in mid-May. The last to leave head south in late September or early October.
To gauge what the future holds, biologists need to know how many young fish are surviving, especially in Chesapeake Bay. To do that, they estimate the number of fish that have reached one year in age. This is called recruitment.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has found that recruitment was high in 2015, 2016 and 2019, but below the long-term average in 2018, 2020 and 2021. This suggests possible trouble ahead.
King, the state fish biologist, is not worried yet. “I wouldn’t expect any drastic changes this year,” he said of anglers’ prospects. “There are too many variables to say anything but that.”
Jason Bartlett, also a fisheries biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, agreed. “The majority of the fish in Maine are migratory. It’s kind of tough to predict what’s going to be caught.”
In addition to being a biologist, Bartlett is a recreational fisherman. He said that last year was a good year for him as an angler. Told that some fishermen reported catching bigger fish but fewer schoolies than in past years, he said, “I saw the same thing. You’re seeing fewer and fewer small fish. That doesn’t bode well, doesn’t paint a good picture.”
King cautioned that from a scientific perspective, to understand what’s going on and what needs to be done, you have to take a longer view, not just data from a few years.
Fishery management strategies are generally aimed at preventing overfishing by limiting the size and number of fish harvested. “The only thing we have (as a management tool) is to change and modify regulations,” he observed.
But what if overfishing is not the problem? What if wider environmental issues pose threats, such as rising water temperatures or changes in the salinity of spawning grounds because of rising sea levels?
Striped bass might be able to adapt by shifting to spawning grounds with the preferred temperature and salinity, but that might take generations of adaptation and evolution, according to King.
“It takes a long time for a fish species to adapt,” he said.
