Building the barrel... then shooting the fish
A case for making the Cape Cod Canal a catch & release fishery
August 13, 2019
Anglers crowd the shoreline whenever the bite is on.
The Cape Cod Canal should be a catch & release ONLY area for striped bass. It is an absolute no-brainer that does not get nearly enough discussion. It is something that could save a lot of big, important fish quickly and relatively easily, while making a special place even more enjoyable for those who fish there.
The Canal is a truly unique place to consistently see and catch trophy sized striped bass from shore. As a result, it has become a destination for thousands of anglers a year. Social media has further contributed to the ditch’s popularity, as hundreds of photos of 20 to sometimes 50-pound fish hoisted by anglers standing on firm, dry ground fuel the imaginations of the many anglers who have landing a cow striper from shore high on their bucket list.
From a personal standpoint, I spent two very early mornings around a wedding fishing the Canal. While standing in the water on those mornings, I stopped fishing multiple times just to sit back and witness the carnage – schools of large stripers launching themselves at mackerel that found themselves helplessly pinned against the rocks. The bait would shoot between my legs and, on at least one occasion, a large bass slammed itself into my shin in hot pursuit of these eight-inch baitfish. After each blitz, there were numerous mackerel stranded in the rocks or struggling to swim after being battered by the large striper it had managed to temporarily escape. It was, to put it simply, awesome to watch.
I have fished for striped bass for more than thirty years. The majority of my striper fishing has taken place in Block Island and in the Western Long Island Sound, and during that time I have witnessed countless striped bass blitzes. From schoolies on peanut bunker, to cows on adult bunker, to Montauk bay anchovies during the fall run, to crazy attacks on halfbeaks and even flying fish out by Southwest Ledge in Block Island. Every blitz, and every feed, has its own magic. The fish that we chase for countless hours, at times without being able to coax even a look at our bait or lure, launch themselves at baitfish, and the visual effects of large schools of bait erupting to escape a lit up striped bass is something you don’t soon – or cannot – forget.
That said, the blitzes I witnessed in the Canal were in a league of their own. Maybe it is because the fish were swimming between my legs, maybe it’s because I haven’t seen many mackerel blitzes and the bait is faster, or maybe it’s because every fish I saw was 20 pounds or larger and I chose a great weekend. Whatever it was, it was cool. So much so that I don’t remember how many fish I caught those two days, I don’t remember how big they were. What I do, and will always remember, is the way the fish ate and how many there seemed to be.
With that, the Cape Cod Canal sounds like a wonderland. A place to watch nature at its best and to catch the striped bass of your dreams from shore. And, in some ways, it is. In many others, it’s a nightmare. The first day I fished the canal, it took me a ‘quick’ 15 minutes of walking before I found just enough space to sneak down between other anglers to fish. Upon doing so, I had fish by my feet almost immediately. I caught, I watched, I casted, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The anglers to my right and left did not remove a single fish from the water (and they caught a LOT of fish). Instead they quickly unhooked the fish by their feet and redirected them back into deeper water. I was happy and couldn’t wait to come back, despite the crowds, which I viewed and continue to view as absolutely insane.
On Sunday, I arrived at 3:30am, and it took me around 45 minutes to find a spot to fish – not because I was waiting to see fish, but because I was literally unable to find a place that was not already occupied. During that time, I walked at least a mile along the shoreline, and already, at 3:30 or 4am, I saw more dead cow striped bass than I could imagine. There were single anglers with a fish, groups with fish, families – and by families I mean two men, along with two women and four or five young children either asleep or watching ipads – with a fish for each of them. Later, as the fishing slowed, I continued to walk the path alongside the canal, and witnessed even more fish that had been plucked from the morning’s blitzes. Hundreds of them, all 20+ pounds, strapped to bicycles, being dragged back to cars, carried over shoulders, lying in the grass.
It was a massacre, which leads me to the point of this post – the Cape Cod Canal needs to be a 100% catch and release fishery for striped bass. Despite my limited time fishing there, it is not hard to see or understand that the fishery is being exploited and, to many, has been ruined. I spoke with one shop owner on the banks of the Canal – someone who relies on people coming to the Ditch for his business to survive - who echoed that sentiment. He said he has not fished the Canal in years and called what has happened to the waterway ‘tragic.’
A solid striper waits to be unhooked and released.
With that, let’s quickly go over why this body of water should be a catch & release fishery, and also why it is uniquely positioned to be just that.
The core reason that the Canal should be catch & release is that it puts fish in an unnaturally vulnerable position. The Canal is, as I am sure you know, a man-made waterway that was first contemplated all the way back during the time of the pilgrims, but finally completed in 1916. It was then widened to its current width and depth between 1935 and 1940. While I have trouble finding many fishing reports from the 1940s, I imagine that, given the deep, moving water creating a conveyer belt of food and shelter, striped bass and other large predatory fish quickly found the Canal to be to their liking. Back then, the technology and fishing gear greatly limited anglers’ ability to target fish that didn’t chase bait to the rocks, but as time has gone on, more and more anglers make their way to the Canal every year and advancements in lines, lures, rods and reels, along with the added accessibility provided by social media, have put these fish in the crosshairs in a way they are not anywhere else during their migration up and down the coast. They are in a confined space, triggered to feed by an abundance of bait and within range of thousands of anglers who know exactly where they will be with little to no work required.
These characteristics of the Canal also, however, present a unique opportunity to protect striped bass:
First, again, it is a very finite area, with paths and roadways lining each side. The fish don’t have anywhere to escape, so the anglers targeting them are confined as well. We read about poachers being caught on nearly a daily basis during the season, but once the fish are dead, it’s too late. The punishments are too lenient to prevent it from happening again and it is too difficult to enforce the regulations given the crowds and sheer number of fish that are kept (legally or otherwise). It wouldn’t take as much man power to enforce the rules if no striped bass could be kept. It would make any dead fish on the side of the waterway or being dragged back to a car an easy thing to spot. No more counting people to fish ratios, it would be simple - if there’s a fish being kept, it is being kept illegally.
Second, the financial impact associated with the Canal becoming 100% catch & release is unique as well. Unlike other areas, there are no charter boats or guides that rely on catching and keeping fish in the Canal, so that line of business does not factor in. In fact, charters would likely see an uptick in business since some of the anglers who fish the Canal with the sole purpose of eating striped bass they catch would need to find another way to do so.
(A quick aside, there is no fishing from boats allowed in the Canal. While this may be viewed by some as an effort to protect fish in the Canal, let’s be honest. With 12-foot surf rods launching 4-ounce plugs from both shorelines, the 480 feet that the canal spans is covered from side to side, top to bottom by those fishing from shore. Prohibiting fishing from boats protects those in the boats more than it does the fish in the water.)
As for shops, hotels, restaurants and other local businesses that rely on the crowds, I’m honestly not sure there would be much of a decline in anglers. I, for one, would consider going back again if it were catch & release, but will never do so as long as it is not. Given that, local businesses might not suffer much at all. Also, judging from the conversation I mentioned with a shop owner, the risk of a potential decrease in sales might be welcomed to protect the fish and fishery that many of the local business owners grew up loving.
Striped bass are overfished and overfishing is occurring. Using common sense, the way to turn that around is to reduce mortality across the fishery and increase the number of large, breeding fish so that more fish can be made to strengthen the population and return it to the sustainability thresholds that have been established. There are few (no) places along the stripers’ migration route like the Cape Cod Canal that puts them within reach of so many anglers with such little means of avoiding capture, and in this case, they are brought there as a result of an artificial, man-made waterway.
These are the fish – the spawners – that need protection now, when the stock needs rebuilding, and this is an easy way to leverage the unique qualities of the Canal that make it such a cool place to fish to save thousands of them a year. Fish that, without our desire to make navigation between two bodies of water easier in the first place, would have never found themselves so predictably within reach of so many lures and baits.