When 24-year-old bassmaster Porter Bingle hooked what was apparently the first striper of the season this weekend, the catch — and subsequent release — heralded the start of the inshore sport fishing season.
But it's shaping up to be a season awash in questions over the effects of a shortage of two types of herring, a key component of the stripers' diet and the bait of choice for lobster fishermen.
Fishermen and scientists are concerned about the local ecosystem as a huge population of hungry stripers arrives in Cape Ann waters. Because the river herring that stripers instinctively seek for food are almost gone, the fish will take their calories in lobsters and other forage species that share the shallows in the warmer season.
The bait shortage, on the other hand, isn't due to a lack of herring. Area 1A of the Gulf of Maine, currently teeming with Atlantic herring, a related species, is a regulated "no-fish" zone for the mid-water trawlers that usually reel them in. Combine that with the huge increases in diesel fuel prices that will limit searching for fish, and it promises to make fresh herring hard to find and very expensive this season.
Bingle's catch — on a 4-inch plastic squigglie in the Little River, just east of the rockpile behind the Nichols Candy parking lot Saturday — amounts to a catch-certain. Indeed, the verifying witness was none other than Al Williams, Cape Ann's undisputed striped bass guru. Williams, 56, who usually catches the season's first and often largest bass, said he was fishing next to Bingle at the time, as the tide was emptying the basin.
Williams had a legitimate claim to the first fish, but didn't take it.
"I caught one the week before, but it was ugly, and seemed like a straggler (that had wintered in the estuary)," he said, graciously conceding first-fish bragging rights to Bingle.
"Oh wow," said Bingle when informed of Williams' act of sportsmanship.
His bitty bass was rife with sea lice, said Bingle, 24, whose name will forever be connected to that of his older brother John and a 51.85-pound bass that they, as the twentysomething Bingle Brothers, caught in the civilized shallows of Annisquam's Lobster Cove in the middle of the summer of 2005.
The brothers' catch was the largest from Cape waters in nearly 20 years; it was among the largest stripers caught anywhere in Massachusetts that year.
The parasitic lice are a sign the juvenile had just arrived from the open ocean. Williams said a schoolmate he caught just after Bingle's also had lice. The "mangy" holdover Williams caught a week earlier was lice-free, he said.
Schoolies, sexually immature fish, make up the vanguard of the striper migration — a fusion of fish that winter in one of the great Mid-Atlantic estuaries of the Hudson, Delaware or Chesapeake. They pick up the lice on the trip north while their elders are busy reproducing in the brackish river waters.
The big fish — like the giant the Bingles caught amid the Annisquam Yacht Club's sailboat moorings — arrive a few weeks after the schoolies, and usually hole up in crevices, then maraud at night for the mackerel that tend to pass through and around Cape Ann later in the spring.
While this is going on, lobsters are making their way from deep water offshore into the shallows to molt and hide in the rocky crevices. From there, the lobsters will spend the summer investigating the bait in traps that soon will be set out to give the inshore waters a busy sense of color coding, avoiding getting hand-caught by skindivers or devoured by the stripers.
The first arrivals among the bass that are funneled into the Outer Harbor tend to find the Blynman Canal; and if they are at all guided by instinctive memory, they will channel their ancestors' pursuit of river herring all through the Annisquam estuary. The river herring, however, are nearly gone now.
Stripers share with lobsters a taste for herring. Fresh Atlantic herring is the bait of choice of the lobster fishermen.
But this year, for the first time, all of Area 1A — the most convenient and fertile section of the Gulf of Maine that stretches about 40 miles to sea from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Cod — has been declared a no-fish zone for the mid-water trawlers between June 1 and Sept. 30.
Purse-seiners have been granted limited access by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission's Atlantic Herring Section, but Gloucester's herring fishery, the largest on the East Coast, is built around five trawlers, the three, 145-foot boats of Dave Ellenton's Cape Seafoods, which are now quiet, moored along the Jodrey State Fish Pier, and the two belonging to Peter Mullen's Empire Fish Co. at Harbor Loop.
Mullen said the fish are everywhere right now.
"There are 70 miles of herring out there," he said, describing an enormous school that "stretches from Cape Cod to Portland, but the state won't let us catch them."
The school of Atlantic herring is "on the move," Mullen said, heading north as the pelagic fish — such as mackerel and other species that swim higher in the water column than groundfish —- do, and running ahead of the stripers and bluefin tuna that will feed on them in the Gulf of Maine until the water begins cooling and the process reverses.
"The fish are heading to Canada," he said.
Mullen's big trawler, the 165-foot Western Venture, and the 120-foot Osprey, are stuck in port, caught between the ban in Area 1A and the price of diesel fuel, which inhibits the searching for fish in Georges Bank, about 100 miles east of Cape Cod and running up to Canada, where herring can be caught.
Ellenton agreed. Because of the price of diesel — it costs $40,000 to fill up one of the big boats — he said, "the days of spending a week searching for fish are gone. It's so hard to be excluded from 1A," he said.
The impact of the effort to protect the Atlantic herring is inevitable — higher prices for the bait prized by lobstermen, and maybe shortages at any price later in the summer.
"You could have six weeks with no bait at all," Mullen said.
"The bait industry might come down to frozen herring or pogies," said bait dealer and lobsterman Gil Mitchell. But he said local lobstermen will not be able to pass the higher costs on to customers.
Canadian suppliers, he said, control the price by managing supply — the same way OPEC controls the price of oil — and recently dumped lots of product into the market to drop the retail price from $8 to $5 a pound.
'It's going to be a hard season for everybody," Mitchell said.
Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com
