The Striped Bass Chronicles: The Saga of America's Great Game Fish - Hardcover

Reiger, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155821478X ISBN 13: 9781558214781

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 1997

Synopsis

The striped bass sustained American colonists through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and went west with nineteenth-century pioneers. During the past one hundred years, however, Atlantic coastal stocks have been over-fished three times to the brink of recreational extinction. Today, the stripers are back in such numbers they're the center of a saltwater fly-fishing revival. George Reiger recounts his own relationship to the striped bass and traces the history of the great sportfish through such angling writers as Henry William Herbert and Robert Barnwell Roosevelt in the nineteenth century to Joe Brooks and Lefty Kreh in more recent decades. The book also demonstrates that the striper is heading for another collapse unless prevailing fisheries turn to better conservation policies. The Striped Bass Chronicles is a paean to a remarkable fish - and a prayer for its future. (61/4 X 91/4, 212 pages, illustrations)

About this title

About the Author

George Reiger is conservation editor of Salt Water Sportsman, conservation editor emeritus of Field & Stream magazine, and federal commissioner for the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin. He is also the author of more than a dozen books on fish, fishing, and outdoor recreation, including The Complete Book of North American Waterfowling, and the Pulitzer finalist, Wanderer on My Native Shore.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Striped bass own the surf. False albafcore and bluefish may charge a beach, but their frantic movements express anxiety at being in such surging, shallow water. Other species--notably weakfish in the North, and red and black drum in the South--are comfortable near shore, but they don't cruise in and out of the breakers with quite the elan of striped bass.

Bill Feinberg, my son Christopher, and I had been fishing from the beach at Deal, New Jersey, for less than ten minutes when I saw a striper's fin rise through a breaking wave. The fish continued cruising parallel to the beach even as the wave boiled into foam around it. The fin was in view for just an instant, but the fish's indifference to the sea's energy caused hair to rise on the nape of my neck. . . .

A friend and occasional angling companion, Frank Mather--who back in the 1950s developed the"M" tag used in marine researc to track pelagic gamefish--feels the striped bass is the most overrated sportfish in the world. He prefers bluefin tuna. While there's no question that tuna grow larger, swim faster, and in some other respects are more spectacular than stripers, context is everything. The same striper that wrestles and rolls in confusion when hooked from a trolled boat--especially one whose skipper only slows, but doesn't stop, the engine--will stubbornly and skillfully resist a surf fisherman's every effort to bring it ashore."--from the chapter, The Jersey Shore

Edition details

• Publisher: Lyons Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 155821478X
• ISBN 13: 9781558214781
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 194
• Illustrator: Reiger Christopher