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| There has been a glut of schoolies along the RI oceanfront in the last couple of weeks. Here is one of many that I landed this afternoon. |
All year I have been writing on this blog about the lack of schoolies. The poor Young of the Year Indexes from Chesapeake Bay, a barometer of spawning success, has been poor in the last five years. That has fueled this "no schoolies around" belief that most fishermen (including myself) have had. Now, I'm not sure what is going on.
I have seen a glut of schoolies, fish 15 to 20 inches, around in the last three weeks. They seem to be everywhere along the RI shoreline in huge numbers. There are as many as I have seen in some of the big schoolie years of the past. Just about every outing in the last few weeks has delivered big numbers of them. On the other hand, we suddenly seem to have a lack big fish, slots and over slots. I haven't caught or seen one caught in two weeks.
So, what's going on with these abundant schoolies. While we know spawning in the Chesapeake Bay has been poor, other places seem to be doing well. Spawning success in the Hudson River has been good in recent years leading me to believe we are getting a lot of our fish from there. Back when we had the striper moratorium years in the 1980's, I never saw a lack of stripers, particularly schoolies, here in RI. Back then I landed a lot of fish that had Hudson River Foundation tags on them. We knew back then that a good number of our fish here in southern New England came from the Hudson. There are other lesser known spawning rivers along the East Coast that we know little about. So, I think these big numbers of schoolies we are seeing now are coming from places other than the Chesapeake Bay. Wherever they are coming from, the fact is that there has been no lack of small ones in late fall here in RI this year.
