One bass to rule them all? I realize those are fighting words to UK anglers rightly proud of native bass but across the Atlantic, striped bass (Morone saxatilis) have a sovereign’s grip on the hearts and minds of saltwater anglers from Maine to North Carolina.

It isn’t hard to see why. 

They’re beautiful fish. A long powerful body and big fins for ambushing prey and holding steady in the surf and strong currents; a huge head for opportunistic feeding on forage like menhaden, herrings, smelt, clams, eels, or whatever else is bite-sized and within reach; neat rows of large metallic scales like chainmail, broken up by dark horizontal stripes and a brilliant white belly – a color palette mixed from the surf. 

They’re in the neighborhood. All stripers spawn in fresh and brackish water close to the coast and live out most of their lives in nearshore waters. There are typically two migratory patterns along the Atlantic Coast, though localized populations behave in idiosyncratic ways, even within the same year class of fish. It’s been estimated that more than three-quarters of the Atlantic stock uses the Chesapeake Bay – the sprawling estuary and bay system touching Delaware, Maryland and Virginia – as spawning and nursery sites. When spawning is over the mature adults track the coast north to summer in the waters off New England. In the autumn they reverse course and make a southerly run to the waters offshore from the Chesapeake, in preparation for the spring spawn. It’s this later migration that is the real draw for anglers, none more so than catching a ‘Blitz.’

When conditions are right, huge schools of stripers force baitfish into tight packs and drive them to the surface close to shore: bloody chaos ensues not just for the baitfish – also attacked from above by crashing sea birds – but for throngs of delirious in-the-know shore and boat anglers racing to pitch a lure into the froth. The size of some of these roundups has to be seen to be believed; the title of a popular book about fishing the striper run as it passes Montauk Point, close to New York City, is probably only slightly exaggerated: The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass (Kaminsky, 2010).

The very biggest bass though sometimes disdain all that competition and ignore normal migratory patterns. A few become nocturnal hunters of the very nearshore, leading to thrilling encounters with a hardcore of anglers who purposefully target them, often around bridges. How big is big? A good but very achievable weight for a striper would be 15- to 20 lbs. These holdover fish can be twice that size, even twice that size again.

They’re hungry and curious. Stripers are aggressive, omnivorous feeders and can be caught on a very wide range of methods. Surf casters launch bucktails and diamond jigs, pencil poppers, custom wooden plugs or soft plastic shad and sandeel imitations. Beach and boat anglers find success with chunks of cut bait or live bait, especially freshwater eels, which stripers absolutely love. Fly anglers pitch Clouser Minnows and Surf Candies to cruising bass on the flats of Cape Cod or New Jersey storm beaches. Some anglers drop baits into deep water, some troll with umbrella rigs, some specialize in teasing bass to a surface bite; there’s a unique canal fishery on Cape Cod where anglers roam the shoreline on mountain bikes looking for bass blowups; a few surf anglers have even been known to don wetsuits and swim out into the open ocean with their surf rod; they cast while treading water and ‘waterski’ a hooked fish into submission. Stripers are like that: they’ll make you lose your mind and forget all about drowning or Great Whites or divorce, if you can just hit that sweet spot when the run is on.  

Perhaps the best way to really get a flavor of the striper obsession is through its records.  

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Al McReynolds grew up in a poor working class area of Atlantic City on the New Jersey shore, left school before he learnt to read and write and patched together a haphazard living as a lifeguard and electrical inspector. But his real passion and talent was surf fishing for striped bass. The evening of September 21st, 1982, he and fishing friend Pat Erdman, noting the forecast of an upcoming storm and knowing rough weather often stirs up the biggest bass, edged out on the Vermont Avenue rock jetty with the lights of the casinos and boardwalk in the background. He worked as a shoeshine boy in those casinos when he was a youth and saw stars and celebrities throw around hundred dollar bills as tips for things like fetching a book of matches; he was about to become fishing-famous himself, with more than a little cash thrown in. 

As soon as they arrived they saw numbers of big stripers crashing into baitfish. After Erdman hooked and landed a good fish, Al cast out a 5.5-inch Rebel lure designed to look like a small mullet and had a hit from a very big fish that met his strike by just pausing in the roiling surf and shaking its head powerfully. Against just 20 lb. test line the big bass was able to run into deeper water and get the better of the fight for an agonizingly long time as the storm began to lash the jetty. Eventually, with his friend hanging on to the back of his clothing to stop him getting swept away, he slid down the rocks into the frigid water just far enough to make a grab for the exhausted fish. He later recalled: 

“My friend comes over and shines the light on this fish. I’m laying on the rocks, soaking wet, beaten, exhausted, hurt, cold, shivering. And when the light hits the fish, it’s the most beautiful fish you ever seen in the world. It is almost too big to believe.”

They lay the fish in the back of the car and put a wetted blanket over it, and as they’re driving through the city in the early hours a cop pulls them over and asks if they have a body on the backseat. Atlantic City in the eighties is a mob town, so the question is not too off-the-wall, but the cop recognizes Erdman and knows that striper fishermen love to be out at night in nasty weather and he lets them on their way.

After drying off back at Erdman’s house they take the fish to Campbell’s Marine and Tackle, owned by a guy they know is also an official weighmaster for the IGFA. He confirms the weight at 78 lbs. 8 oz., a new All-Tackle World Record. Then good and bad things begin to happen quite rapidly: word spreads that a local angler has just landed the biggest ever striped bass on rod and line, right here off the boardwalk, and the shop begins to fill with fishermen and onlookers; the outdoor writer for The New York Times calls and tells Al if the fish is officially accepted he will be in line to win $250,000 from Abu Garcia, and he will use the influence of the paper to make sure they follow through on the prize; the owner of the tackle shop takes charge of the fish for verification and eventual taxidermy and says he’ll insure it for $100,000; over the next few days Al is besieged by a flood of media requests and outreach from tackle companies dangling money and product.

According to Al at least, the prize money (equivalent to about three quarters of a million today) and other financial incentives began to ruin his life. He lost his job as a lifeguard because of time he took off to deal with the record claim; as soon as friends and relatives heard about the money coming his way they sought him out for loans and business ventures; the fish was mysteriously destroyed before an original skin mount could be created, with a heavy suspicion that it was sold on to a collector; jealousy ruined his reputation in the Jersey fishing community and he fell out with Erdman, his fishing partner that day who had shared the experience and coached him through the long fight. Al was presented with his check in a big ceremony at the Explorer’s Club in New York and went on to live an itinerant fishing life up and down the East Coast chasing the bite, blowing the money, but never quite shaking off the enmity of people who thought the record should have fallen to someone more ‘worthy.’

Born to Fish

Trophy striper specialists tend to be a physically tough crowd – rough weather, heavy tackle, big fish –  but it’s the mental game that sorts the men from the boys. They need the determination and drive to ignore easy fish and bluebird skies. They tend to be independent thinkers who spend most of their time fishing at night at marks they’ve identified for themselves. Greg Myerson was born to the life. 

Like Al McReynolds, Connecticut-born Myerson found in striper fishing a means to anchor an early life that was often chaotic and in his case, regularly exposed to violence. As reported in the excellent book about his life and fishing exploits Born To Fish: How an Obsessed Angler Became the World’s Greatest Striped Bass Fisherman, Myerson recounts wild teenage years working as a bag man and sometime enforcer for his mafia-connected father. A promising defensive player in his high school American football team, Myerson turned down scholarships to some of the best football programs in the country so he could attend the University of Rhode Island, just a short drive from excellent striper fishing. 

Before dropping out of college, Myerson took a part-time job working for an electrical contractor in New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven is most famous as the home of Yale University, one of the premier seats of higher learning in the world. In very stark contrast to Yale however, the town itself struggled for decades with poverty, gang violence and addiction. One of Myerson’s jobs for the contractor was to sweep up all the crack vials that appeared overnight in the company parking lot. Like many obsessive anglers a part of his brain was subconsciously always working through fishing problems and one morning the tinkling glass vials gave him an idea that would lead directly to breaking the bass record. 

He’d begun to examine the stomach contents of the largest bass he was catching and noticed that many of them contained bits of lobster. He theorized that only the biggest, deep-dwelling fish would be able to hunt and digest whole lobster, and that they must be locating their prey in the gloom by keying on the sound they make scuttling across rock and stone. By inserting ball bearings into the crack vials and then pouring lead molds around them he found he was able to closely mimic the sound of the crustacean (tested in a 200-gallon saltwater tank with live lobsters and a stethoscope). 

Not only did it prove extremely effective, because the rattle was buried inside the lead and no product like this existed at the time, it was also a secret edge that began to help him win some big betting pools on the large charter boats that operate up and down the striper coast. 

Striper tournaments and competitions are a big part of the fishing scene in the Northeast, none more so than The Striper Cup run by the Northeast fishing magazine On The Water. This is a five-month long trophy tournament that culminates in StriperFest, a celebration of all things striper fishing attended by thousands of anglers. 

Though he was obsessed with catching big stripers, Myerson was definitely not a record chaser and didn’t even know what the record stood at. He won The Striper Cup in 2010 weighing in three bass over 60 lbs., an amazing feat. The following year, fishing in Long Island Sound and still using his secret rattles and live eel as bait, he hauled in a striper that made even those look small. Though he felt pretty sure the fish would win him the Cup for a second time and he obviously knew the fish was exceptional, that was the extent of it. He and boat partner Matt Farina fished on through the evening and then went to celebrate at a local bar. He drove home feeling sick and exhausted from the night’s exertions and did a quick weighing of the fish on a digital scale at 83 lbs. He texted a local tackle shop owner to say he’d bring the fish by for an official weighing in the morning and then collapsed into bed leaving the magnificent fish out all night on the bed of his pickup. 

When he woke late the next morning he heard on a local radio station that the world record striped bass had been caught the day before and he had no idea they were talking about his fish. That soon became apparent when he went to Jack’s Shoreline Bait and Tackle in Madison, Connecticut to have the fish officially recorded at 81.88 lbs.

Myerson’s journey after breaking the record had some similarities to Al McReynolds. Though he also suffered through a predictable round of jealousy, gossip and rumors, the real negativity he experienced came from a deep personal regret in killing such a fish to win a tournament. From that point onwards he became a vocal advocate for catch and release of all trophy stripers, and in 2013 backed that up beyond argument by unofficially measuring and releasing a fish which according to a standard length x girth weight calculator would have weighed 106 lbs. In terms of monetary gain from his achievement, Myerson did manage to commercialize his sinker invention, eventually appearing on the very popular TV show Shark Tank (the US equivalent of Dragon’s Den), where Mark Cuban, billionaire tech entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, made a substantial investment.

The Future Monarch

We’ll give the last word to Al McReynolds. Catching the record bass did nothing to diminish his love and drive for trophy striper fishing and in an interview with The Press of Atlantic City, he gave at least one reason why: he and his two sons were night fishing a secret bridge location somewhere in New Jersey and they’d been exceptionally lucky to hook a huge 50 lb.-plus striper. As the men stared into the dark water the hooked fish passed through the reflected glow of a streetlight and they all saw a truly mammoth bass ghost up behind it. 

Al could hardly believe what he was seeing: “It had to be twice as big as mine. It had eyes like oranges. Its tail had to be three feet long.” He estimated the weight at 150 lbs. and confirmed it had taken up residence in the area by sighting it again the following year. 

The reporter asked him if this was a classic fisherman’s story. He replied: “I’m as sure as God gave me the record fish, it’s true.”

Striper Conservation

Much like European bass, the health and viability of the Atlantic striper fisher is a complex issue with multiple stakeholders. Most observers though are in agreement that it isn’t heading in the right direction. After stocks were decimated in the 1970’s through overfishing, a massive lobbying effort led to an act being passed limiting the striper catch across multiple states, with the threat of closing the entire commercial and recreational fishery if numbers didn’t recover. Over the next several years, the fishery staged a dramatic comeback. In a predictable pattern however, this eventually stirred commercial interests into agitating for opening the fishery back up. This duly happened with what many felt were overly generous harvest limits based on bad fishery science, and stripers are now threatened again. Recreational anglers are not free from blame in this depressing cycle, but they’ve undoubtedly taken the lead in conservation efforts to protect this magnificent fish over the decades. Through organizations like Stripers Forever and the Coastal Conservation Association they’re fighting to end the commercial striper fishery entirely along with much tighter slot limits for sport anglers.