Menhaden (Bunker) Management
By
The spring of 2010 will be remembered by many anglers along Long Island’s south shore for the excellent action with large striped bass feasting upon schools of menhaden for over a month as the fish made their eastern migration. Just about every day in June and into July had south shore anglers catching their personal best stripers, all pulled from beneath schools of bunker the likes of which have not been seen along the Island in recent years.
As good as this action was, those of us who search the Great South Bay and local canals for these same baitfish can tell you that finding them was a difficult task at best. For each day the schools were easily found there would be several days without a sign of them anywhere. The bunker were just not in the back bay areas in the numbers of years past.
The lack of bunker in the bay this year had me thinking way back to the days where Great Cove on the north side of the Great South Bay in Islip would be paved with the schools from one bank to the other, the State Boat Channel Drawbridge would have the schools of baitfish the entire width of the span. In the evenings, the 3rd bridge on the Meadowbrook parkway had schools from shore to shore and as far out as you could see into the darkness. I could go on but the bottom line is the bunker were everywhere.
Consider this graph from http://savemenhaden.wordpress.com/ website
I understand that it is very easy to talk about the old days and how the fishing for virtually everything was better back then. However, we also need to consider the fact that this very key species numbers have been declining for a very long time now. The menhaden is a key ingredient in the diets of many of our favorite gamefish. Studies performed in recent years are linking certain diseases found in striped bass of the Chesapeake Bay estuary to the scarcity of menhaden.
Plenty of further information on this matter is available on the Save Menhaden site listed above. Striped bass anglers are asked to keep an eye on this matter
Tight Lines.........
Capt Paul Mandella
captpaul@maybetonightcharters.com
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