Stripers advance from Chesapeake: schoolies reach Casco Bay. Big 'uns following.

After wintering  in the Chesapeake Bay and inside the Outer Banks  striped bass are  reaching Maine in great schools. The young'uns (aka "schoolies") are rushing into  southern Maine - with their elders following at a more dignified pace.  

Fish for them?  Be careful. NOAA says they are "Significantly below target levels".  It's important to follow the rules.  Maine Striped Bass Regulations currently require the use of circle hooks when fishing with bait in both the striped bass and bluefish fisheries.  See Video: using circle hooks to catch  Striped Bass, 

Circle hooks are designed to hook fish in the corner of the mouth, which makes the fish easier to release than gut hooked with a traditional J-hook. Circle hooks have been used successfully with both dead and live baits.

The key difference between using traditional “J” hooks and circle hooks? You don't strike to set the hook when using a circle hook rig. Just let the fish hook itself.  Don't yank. Just start reeling her in.

Sears Island causeway, 25 years  ago

STRIPER FAST FACTS

• Striped bass live up to 30 years.
• Growth depends on where they live.
• Striped bass can grow up to 5 feet  and 77 pounds.
• Males are sexually mature between the ages of 2 and 4 years old.
• Females are able to reproduce when they are 4 to 8 years old.
• Females produce large quantities of eggs, which are fertilized by males as they are released.
• Larval striped bass feed on zooplankton (microscopic animals).
• Juveniles eat insect larvae, small crustaceans, mayflies, and other larval fish.
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* Adults are piscivorous (fish-eating) and eat almost any kind of small fish as well as several invertebrates, particularly crabs and squid.
• * Bluefish, weakfish, cod, and silver hake prey on small striped bass.
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• * Adults have few predators, with the exception of seals and sharks.

Remember Maine striper fishers: you are now required to use circle hooks when using natural baits. Do your best this season to make sure that the stripers you release swim away healthy.

Coastal current chaos coming if wind industry sets up in Gulf of Maine

In Homeric myth the priest Laocoön warns the Trojans against accepting the wooden horse presented them by the suddenly cheerily departing Greeks. Serious FAIL ensues when he is disregarded.

Likewise, Maine fishermen - beleaguered already by a host of corporate and governmental enemies - now find themselves being courted by big energy companies and their hangers-on  consider windmills a sort of "gift" from them. bringing new vertical habitat to marine life to cluster, and causing upwellings, where nutrient-richer seafloor water is pulled to the surface by the energy differential at the surface below where the energy is being extracted frmo the natural environment

But canny fishermen are increasingly wary of the potential for offshore windfarms to put a lasting crimp in Maine's lobster fishery, for these artificial upwellings can wreak havoc by fomenting current-diverting "chaotic excursions" at the interface where the normal lively surface waters of the Gulf of Maine meet the "harmonized" low-energy surface waters that make up  the aquatic 'half-dead zones' found downwind of ocean wind turbine fields.


What could be taking an excursion are the surface currents transporting lobster larvae and other zooplankton down the Gulf of Maine coast from Lubec to well beyond Cape Anne.The so-called "coastal current chaos" may divert larvae-bearing currents AWAY from the coast.

These predictions - and similar dire warnings for the Chesapeake Bay's famed blue crabs - come from an analysis of the results of  the study "Chaotic behavior of coastal currents due to random wind forcing"  by researchers at the National Institute of Standards & Technology in Gaithersburg Maryland, as well as other reports mentioned below.  Those results suggest the possibility that  persistent reduced-energy zone "footprints" could appear downwind of energy-extracting offshore wind removal operations, with implications for current flows. 

Normally, prevailing strong oceanic  winds keep coastal currents close inshore for much of of the Gulf of Maine.  But, diverted even slightly off course by the clash between upwelling  'harmonized' waters surrounding  proposed Gulf of Maine offshore windfarms,  and the normal  Maine Coastal Current, portions of that current may veer offshore many miles prematurely, to expend itself and its luckless planktonic passengers in the deep Wilkinson Basin.  There, a lobster larvae's typical fate is to become prey for the basin's native species.  

But don't worry, the government, the industry and the eco-yuppies are working out "community benefit agreements" in which lobstermen will be paid off for their wandering resource.  The lobster buyers, marketers and retailers, alas, will just have to find new work.


The lobsters, too, will have to fend for themselves.

UPDATE:  Offshore wind power could alter ocean currents This report by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute's Goran Brostrom concurs with the earlier NIST study. 

 "Extracting energy from wind changes regional air currents, which can in turn affect how the nearby ocean circulates", Brostrom told MSNBC. "Generating wind power at sea may disturb ocean currents and marine ecosystems."

Indeed, the upwellings Profesor Brostrom describes as resulting from the removal of energy from  a comparatively small but intensively harmonized  sea surface area in and around a windfarm of the types proposed for the Gulf of Maine are the very chaotic excursions described in the National Institute of Standards study, cited above.