Striper World
Tracking Striped Bass Migration, and the Bait
Tagged Striper: Best Catch Doesn’t Have to be the Biggest Fish
By Steve Donohue
NEW YORK -- A bit of panic set in when I spotted the pink strip of plastic sticking out of the striper’s belly as I pulled it over the railing at our regular fishing spot on New York’s East River.
   The fish, a healthy looking 15-inch striped bass, looked like many of the other stripers we had pulled out of the river that morning in late April. But what was that piece of plastic sticking out of its belly?
   “I think you’re supposed to throw those back – that looks like a fish tag,” Chris, one of the regular anglers at the river, said as I held up the fish, still hooked to my fishing line.
I’d caught dozens of stripers in the last two years at Horns Hook, the body of water off New York’s East 90th Street and the FDR Drive, where







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the East River and the Harlem River meet the entrance of the Long Island Sound. That morning, we had already caught more than a dozen small striped bass, well short of the 28-inch minimum length New York State requires for keeping a striper. (I’ve never kept an East River striper, but it’s nice to catch a keeper).
   We were using bloodworms as bait. Bloodworms are the most expensive bait for striped bass, running $9 for a dozen worms at Joe’s pet store on East 102nd street in East Harlem, which also stocks menhaden (bunker), clams, squid and other bait used by East River anglers targeting striped bass and bluefish.
   The tagged striper struck a bloodworm, and as it breached the water near the river wall, I thought I had wasted another pricey worm on a short fish. But once Chris and I spotted the tag, the fish became the biggest catch I ever had at the river.
   But now what? Someone had gone through the trouble of surgically inserting a tag into this fish, making it more special than any other fish I had caught. But what do I do next?
   Do I pull the tag out? “No, you idiot, that will probably kill it,” I thought.
   Should I throw it back? “Of course you should, but see what the tag says first,” was the next reaction.
   The goal was to record the tag number, take a picture of the fish, gently take the hook out of its mouth, and throw it back into the river before it died. I’d seen stripers live for 40 minutes or longer after anglers on party boats in Brooklyn left them lying on the deck, but I wanted to get this tagged striper back into the water right away.
   But nerves kicked in, knowing it was a special striper, a fish that was part of someone’s scientific study. That made a simple task like recording the tag number and releasing the fish look like a comedy routine.
   Chris helped me hold the fish as I brushed away some algae from the tag, revealing the number 454652, and a phone number to call. But I didn’t have a pen; neither did Chris.
   The cell phone, I thought. I grabbed my phone, called my voicemail number at work, and blurted out the tag number into the receiver.
   Then a quick picture that Chris took with his cell phone.
   Now to release the fish. Luckily the tagged striper was hooked cleanly in its lower lip, and the hook came out easily. Leaning over the rail, I dropped the fish head first, six feet down into the river. It disappeared in an instant, heading back down to the rocky river bottom.
   Catching the fish, recording the tag number, shooting a photo of the fish and releasing it took less than a minute, one of the fastest, but most stressful catch and releases of a fish I ever had.
   Although the fishing that morning was hot, I called it a day, heading through Carl Shurz Park, past Gracie Mansion, and hurrying to my apartment five blocks away on 1st Ave., eager to report my tagged striper.
Calling the phone number on the tag, I reached an answering machine at the Annapolis, Md., office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
   The next morning, I received a call from Margaret, a Wildlife Service employee.
   “Do you still have the fish?” she asked.
   “No, I threw it back,” I responded, proud that I had released the tagged striper. Even if the bass had topped the 28-inch minimum, I would’ve released it – not because it had been swimming in the polluted East River, but because it had been tagged.
   Margaret explained that many people that call with info on tagged stripers are employees at fish markets that discover the tags before filleting the fish. (Commercial fishermen aren’t required to follow the same rules concerning the length of stripers as recreational anglers).
   Throwing the fish back with the tag still in is OK to do, Margaret said. So is cutting off the tag with scissors. But pulling the tag out could kill the fish, she explained.
   While I must’ve sounded giddy on the phone, proud that I had caught a tagged striper and successfully called in the tag number, helping track stripers for some scientist’s conservation program, Margaret was dispassionate. She must get dozens of these calls each week, I thought.
   And she informed me that I would get a prize. A $1,000? A trophy? Not quite.
   “Do you want the hat or the striped bass lapel pin?” Margaret asked.
   I went with the pin (few hats fit my big noggin well). 
   Margaret also told me to look for a certificate in the mail that would contain the details of where my striper was first caught and tagged.
   About six weeks later, my striped bass certificate and lapel pin came in the mail. The certificate said that the striper, which I caught in April 2005, had originally been tagged in East Hampton, N.Y., in spring 2004. It also said that the fish was wild, meaning it didn’t come from a hatchery.
   When I caught the tagged striper, it was only 15 inches. The certificate didn’t say how big the fish was when it was tagged and released one year earlier. But from reading about the striped bass life cycle, I would estimate that the fish was about two years old when I caught it.
   East Hampton is on the South Shore of Long Island, a little more than 100 miles from the spot where I caught the tagged striper in the East River.
   Eyeing a map, I figured the tagged striper could have followed two different paths from East Hampton to the bloodworm that I hooked it with in the East River. It could have headed directly west along the South Shore of Long Island, through New York Harbor, and up the East River.
   Or, after being released in East Hampton, the tagged striper could have headed about 14 miles east to Montauk, swam around Montauk Point, then swam west through the Long Island Sound, through the entrance to the East River at Hell Gate, where it landed at end of my fishing line.
   Of course, it’s impossible to tell where the striper had gone during the year after it was tagged. But I hope one day, if another angler catches the tagged striper and calls in the tag info, I’ll know where the fish ends up next.