Chesapeake Light Tackle

It’s winter: it’s cold, it’s wet, and it’s snowy.  A lot of the ramps are iced in.  It’s a great time of year to sit inside by the fire and read a book or watch a fishing video.  I don’t know about you, but that keeps me entertained for about 15 minutes, then I gotta float a boat or something.  Fortunately, winter is also a great time to catch and release striped bass.  Rockfish are a lot more likely to survive when they’re released in cold weather.  Science proves water and air temperatures greatly influence striped bass mortality.  In a seminal catch & release study taken on the Susquehanna Flats in 1999, fisheries biologists Rudy Lukacovic and Ben Florence found that 98.4% of released rockfish live when they are turned loose in water temperatures of 57 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit.  Stripers become more vulnerable as the weather warms and water temperatures rise, but their mortality percentage is still less than 4% in water temperatures of 62 degrees and less.  Proper handling, good catch-and-release practices, and fishing in higher salinity waters can further improve catch-and-release mortality so that it’s possible to reduce the number of fish we kill to less than 1%.  That makes winter a pretty awesome time to fish for those of us who are in it for the experience and not the meat. Read More!