Tarheel State striped bass have suffered boom/bust cycles

Nobody in North Carolina is old enough to remember the glory days of coastal striped- bass fishing in this state.

Striped bass numbers today — even with a notable revival that began in the 1980s — are only a fraction of what they once were.

Rockfish once were so plentiful in state coastal waters that early explorer and artist John White in 1585 rendered drawings of stripers and wrote of “some 5 or 6 foote in lengthe” that were an important part of Native Americans’ diets.

With the settling of the state by Europeans, striped bass became a target of commercial fishing and nets. By 1876, reports indicate a single Albemarle Sound haul seine snared 35,000 stripers, some weighing 80 to 90 pounds each.

But during most of the 20th century, outboard motors, better equipment and increased pressure quickly devastated striped bass numbers.

North Carolina’s major striper spawning river, the Roanoke, suffered a drastic decline in fish numbers starting in 1966 and extending during the 1980s when illegal netting and sales of rockfish skyrocketed, declining water quality hurt reproduction and annual spring floods stranded millions of striper eggs in swampy lowlands.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ended the illegal fishing with a multi-year sting operation that ended in the late 1980s. The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission worked out a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that controlled extensive Roanoke River flooding and destruction of striped-bass eggs. The Commission also set minimum-size and creel limits for stripers, which further reduced mortality, and federal laws of the 1970s improved water quality.

As a result, striped bass have rebounded in most northeastern coastal rivers, particularly in the Albemarle-Pamlico system.

However, rockfish will likely never recover to levels that amaze observers as they did John White in 1585.