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Making Waves 2016 Making Waves Summer Fall 2020
CORA-RONA: MEET OUR 2020 “SAT” TAGGED STRIPERS By Jim Hutchinson, Jr.
After overcoming “COVID” related obstacles, the groundbreaking Northeast Striped Bass Study is underway again! "I don’t know Chuck, I think you can get a bigger one.” The striper in the net was 46 inches long, a solid 36-pounder. She was a good fish by most standards; but perhaps in relative terms, she was nothing like either the 52- or 54-pounder caught the day before aboard Tyman, a 28-foot True World run by striper fanatic Chuck Many. Affixing a green Gray FishTag Research spaghetti tag just to the port side of her dorsal, angler Dave Glassberg named the fish Ellie and safely slid here back to swim again. Minutes later, Many netted a second good fish for Bob Bowden, a 43-incher. Looking over at Chuck, I asked, “we can go bigger, right?” Superstitiously speaking, sending that fat upper 30-pound striper named Bella B over the side of the gunnel was probably worse than pulling a bunch of bananas out of a canyon bag on an overnighter. Not one personally to bet on the favorite pony in the big race, I pushed for the trifecta. Our Gray FishTag Research tagging team set 38 inches as our minimum size for the 2020 Northeast Striped Bass Study; from the looks I was getting onboard Tyman after the first two qualified candidates were set free without a satellite tag, I began to wonder if we weren’t pressing our luck.
DOWN, NOT OUT The inaugural Northeast Striped Bass Study successfully deployed a pair of high-tech satellite tags on two post-spawn striped bass leaving the Hudson River last spring. It was the morning of May 21 that a trophy-hunting team comprised of the nonprofit Gray FishTag Research, Navionics and The Fisherman stepped aboard Rocket Charters in lower Manhattan in search of quality tagging candidates. The trip would include an onwater transfer to the Highlands, NJ based Fin Chasers Charters crew for a successful double-tide of striper fishing in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. While upper 40- to lower 50-inch stripers were a strong possibility, the team set the 2019 size limit for quality candidates at 34 inches. Before the day was out, a 34- and 42-inch pair of striped bass named Liberty and Freedom were released with Wildlife Computer MiniPAT devices attached. The tags archive data on water temperature, pressure and light conditions; programmed to stay affixed to the fish for 5 months, the tags by design will float to the surface at the end of the cycle where they relay summaries of stored data via Argos Satellites back to the staff at Gray FishTag Research. PSATs have been used only on a limited basis in striped bass research, typically to track a week or two of post-release behavior for gathering mortality estimates. But 5 months of tracking with the latest, greatest technology on the market had not been done before. By last fall, both tags had mi-
