Fish Report 8/26/25
Opening sea bass reservations from Sept 4th to Oct 15th..
Scientific support for the hardest of my three main tenets for marine fisheries restorations in our region -- a study that shows increased production when fish are forced to spawn young..
Fishing Sea Bass (with Maybe a few fluke) Five Days a week through Oct 15 if weather allows. Will likely announce my Sun/Mon 'day off' trips via email and facebook..
My long time friend and reigning Reef Queen (handles reef matters & mail!) - Marisa has taken over the helm on my reservation line.
Truly a sharp gal; she is still but a one person operation - & with a toddler at that. My anglers have enjoyed many more live answers and faster voice mail/text responses than in recent years. Have had many positive comments about Marisa already. If she cannot pick up, (she might be putting her 1 yo very handsome future angler down for a nap or any other Mom duty!) leave her a message or text her. She's been getting back to folks quickly.
Reservations at 443-235-5577 - The line closes at 8pm and reopens at 8am. Marisa won’t take reservations for trips that are not announced - but she can note & pass along your desires.
If you want a spot for a summer sea bass/flounder or mahi trip call Marisa on the reservation line at 443-235-5577.. Emailing/FB messaging me is no good. I have plenty on my plate without following the blow by blow of reservations. I won't have real time info on what's available (probably no idea!) - but Marisa knows exactly. I do check email for questions, however, & Facebook messenger from 'friends' too..
Fishing Sea Bass Tues through Friday from 7 to 3 - $145 per spot with an 18 angler max.
Fishing sea bass Saturdays also but from 6:30 to 3:30 at $165 with 18 anglers selling out.
Spots are numbered with a chart at morningstarfishing.com - portside aft is spot one - #7 port bow - #15 stb corner & #18 port corner. Makes for a lot of room per angler - something I'd wanted to do since 1984.
Am now charging 10% gratuity for parties of five or more as a failsafe for crew. Most will surely see robust effort and sweeten that figure..
Be a half hour early! We always leave early!! ..except when someone shows up right on time.
Clients arriving late will see the west end of an east-bound boat. Seriously, with a limited number of reserved spots, I do not refund because you overslept or had a flat.. If you’re reserved and are the last person we’re waiting on - you’ll need to answer your phone. I will not make on-time clients wait past scheduled departure because of a misfortune on your part.
Sea Bass Size limit 13 inches - 15 per person. Catching a few summer flounder (aka 'fluke' north of DE Bay) most days also - 17.5 inches on them at four per person.
There is no size limit on mahi but we encourage release of truly tiny ones.
I try to always leave a half hour early (and never an hour early!) I rarely get in on time either. If you have a worrier at home, please advise them I often come home late. It’s what I do.
Website shows latest Fish Report and is searchable for waaayyy back reports. It was also shows Facebook posts for those who cannot bear to even get near it...
All trips are announced via email from the sign-up at
Trips Are Also Sometimes Announced on Facebook on my personal page & at Morning Star Fishing..
I post after action reports (or lack thereof) (and sometimes detailed thoughts on fisheries issues) for EVERY TRIP on my personal FB page and Morning Star page. Posts including OC Reef Foundation work will be included on those pages as well. Most should also post to my website now. You do not need to be a registered FB user to see my posts and should soon be able to see them all on my website morningstarfishing.com
Bait is provided on all trips. Jigging is always welcome - it doesn't always work, but when it does? Fun and productive - we'll have jigs you can borrow too.
No Galley. Bring Your Own Food & Beverage.
If You Won't Measure & Count Your Fish, The State Will Provide A Man With A Gun To Do It For You. We Measure & Count — ALWAYS — No Exceptions!
It's Simple To Prevent Motion Sickness, Difficult To Cure. Chewable Bonine seems our best over the counter preventative because it's (supposed to be!) non-drowsy. It's truly cheap & effective insurance. If it makes you a bit sleepy - but not suffering extreme reverse digestive disorder? That's a great trade!
"The Patch" -Scopolamine- however, is an anti-nausea prescription that beats all comers.
If the ocean still wants to get the better of you? Zofran (anti-nausea frequently given by physicians and especially in surgery) can be a day saver. iI you have it left over from a prescription, bring it - if only for someone unprepared. We sometimes have a few aboard also.
Honestly - If you get to go on the ocean once a month, once a year or even less; why risk chumming all day?
Ahhhh, then there's the ebullience of youth! Of course you can party hard all night and go on a moderately calm ocean..
No you can't!
If you howl at the moon all night? Chances are good you'll howl into a bucket all day.
Get Rest & Take Preventative Medicine!
Please Bring A Cooler With Ice For Your Fish – We Do Not Mix Different Party's Catches In a "Boat Cooler" - A 48 Quart Cooler Is Fine For A Few People. Do Not Bring A Very Large Cooler. We have some loaners - you'll still need ice. I want your catch memorable even after the dishes are washed! Should you catch some monstrous fish, we’ll be able to ice it.
No Galley! Bring Food & Beverages To Suit. A few beers in cans is fine for the ride home.
Our daily fish pool is a $20 Split Pool - half goes to the heaviest sea bass or advertised species announced in AM. Perhaps summer flounder/fluke or mahi, for instance - and half goes to our daily 50/50 reef raffle. Reef building works wonderfully off our coast - we're building fish habitat & growing coral like crazy! I do all I can to fund/build & promote it.
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Reef Blocks - As of 8/25/25 we have 44,430 Reef Blocks (mostly in units) & 2,980 Reef Pyramids (170lb ea) deployed at numerous ACE permitted ocean reef sites. There are also 1,539 pyramids deployed by MD CCA at Chesapeake Bay oyster sites working to restore blue ocean water. (Think the CCA MD boys deployed another load too - have to check on that!)
Currently being targeted on ocean reef permitted sites with reef block units: Crystal Ann Brinker's Memorial Reef - 210 Reef Blocks (mostly loose here to create a foundation) - Ryan & Shari's Bay Breeze Reef 832 Pyramids - Uncle Murphy's Reef 274 Reef Blocks - Uncle Murphy's new barge 76 Reef Blocks - Rambler Reef 508 Reef Blocks & 14 Pyramids - Pete Maugan's Memorial Reef 156 Reef Blocks & 14 Pyramids - Calder's Reef Improvement - 224 Blocks & 12 Reef Pyramids - Virginia Lee Hawkins Memorial Reef 570 Reef Blocks (+98 Reef Pyramids) - Capt. Jack Kaeufer's/Lucas Alexander's Reefs 2202 Blocks (+57 Reef Pyramids) - Doug Ake's Reef 4,214 blocks (+16 Reef Pyramids) - St. Ann's 3,035 (+14 Reef Pyramids) - Gratitude Reef 360 Blocks (+12 Pyramids) - New Reef at Jackspot #1 - 60 Blocks - and Another new reef at Jackspot #2 - 140 Blocks - And Yet Another(!) #3 - 52 Blocks (1 pyr) - Sue's Block Drop 1,810 (+30 Reef Pyramids) - Kathy's Cable 386 blocks (12 pyramids) - Rudy's/Big Dad's Barges 164 Reef Blocks (+9 Pyramids) - Benelli Reef 1,552 (+18 Pyramids) - Capt. Bob's Bass Grounds Reef 5,232 (first reef to cross 5K) (+ 120 reef pyramids) - Al Berger's Reef 2,110 Reef Blocks (48 Reef Pyramids) - Great Eastern South Block Drop (Now Bill Beacher's Memorial Reef!) 280 Reef Blocks (+10 Pyramids) - Cristina’s Blast 140 Reef Blocks & 2 Pyramids - Capt Greg Hall's Memorial Reef 362 Blocks (+2 {very important..} Pyramids) - Forgotten Block Drop at Great Eastern Reef 95 Reef Blocks & 2 Pyramids - Kinsley Construction's Reef 964 Pyramids - Bear Concrete Reef 512 Pyramids, 44 Blocks - New Unnamed Reef at Bass Grounds 40 Blocks 209 Pyramids..
Greetings All,
Some among you have read my reports for decades - others just look for fishing dates.
My efforts to guide fishery management toward better outcomes have focused on,
A) Habitat - With astounding losses of hardbottom/livebottom reef in the 1950s/60s/70s, our efforts to restore fish with what little natural bottom remains is as if we tried to restore wildlife that lived in a 1,000 acre patch of hardwoods that is now almost all farmland. At least with farmland there is great benefit. With lost hardbottom fisheries, spawning production is shrunk to near nothing.
B) Improving/Repairing recreational catch data. Wildly inaccurate recreational catch guesstimates from MRIP and MRFSS before it have robbed fisheries science and management of nearly all their potential to see what works and what doesn't.
If MRIP data shows 170,000lbs of 1.5lb average sea bass caught From Maryland's Shore in Sept/Oct 2017 - then that's bloody well what happened - now manage using that exact data!
Yes - that truly is a data set. We turned the internet inside out back then and found one guy who'd caught a keeper from shore.
One.
It's nearly four years of MD Party/Charter sea bass - that never have ever averaged 1.5 lbs.
Using pure fantasy to create real world regulation.. What could go wrong?
Lots of estimates are way worse. That one's just an easy for anyone faintly familiar with Mid-Atlantic coastal saltwater fishing to see.
Oyyy..
Both those seem so dead obvious - Restoring/Improving Habitat and creating accurate catch data. Both seem necessary to acheive good outcomes with management. They're both in the Magnuson Stevens Act that funds & guides federal fisheries too..
Not that I've cleared any of my big three, but my highest hurdle has be convincing management that forcing sea bass to spawn young creates a simple path to exponential spawning production.
Everyone who studied fisheries in college was taught "BOFF" is how to get fish to make more fish (Big Old Fecund Females.) With sea bass, and I suspect many other species, making them spawn young - when most numerous - and positively not protecting numerous large females - is key to expanding their population.
For long time readers readers here is vindication of my theory that's been most difficult to persuade the fisheries community of; here is a study that matches my thinking on 'age at maturity' - but in smallmouth bass & not sea bass.
(See link and article below)
Among themes I've returned to time and again since 2006 is "Management has shifted age at maturity by 2, even 3 years by increasing the size limit above 11 inches. Where size limits at 11 inches or less before 2002 promoted exponential spawning production (sea bass making LOTS more sea bass!) ..the shift from age one to age three or more decreases production to the point where com/rec sea bass extraction lessens the population in time."
In 2013/14/15 subbottom profiler survey equipment used by several boats over those three years drove; no, eradicated sea bass from within a 525 square mile area. Though the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) called my findings nonsense - "as quiet yas a ship's propeller," they said ..when I filmed numerous reefs within the noise footprint of sounding equiopment in late August 2015 - there were no sea bass on any of them.
Zero.
Reefs I had filmed in 2004 with sea bass in their thousands then had none.
Some believe the sound of a subbottom profiler mimics a super predator using echolocation - Whatever the truth of it? Sea bassv left. (Summer flounder did too.)
From 2016 on I was predicting a surge in spawning production as all those many small patch reefs were recolonized by sea bass; predicted that we'd witness exponential population growth.
Did.
Caught summer limits into 2022.
I also predicted that surge would falter and die as soon as every reef was populated by 13 inch males or better.
If fishery management would recognize this behavior - what this study unveils - in sea bass (what I've been quietly laughed at for since 2006) we could soon make sea bass fishing incredible again.
I believe this is management's greatest tool - if utilized and combined with habitat restoration/creation? The sea bass population could be made larger than it was after WWII..
Presently all our marine species are managed via catch estimates (really bad ones!) To manage for maximum spawning production would be a whole new world for fisheries science & management.
I'd sure like to see it - and soon!
Regards,
Monty
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Decades of efforts to eradicate invasive smallmouth bass from a midsized Adirondack lake have led to a surprising result: The bass rapidly evolved to grow faster and invest more in early reproduction, leading to an even larger population of smaller fish.
A study published June 9 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that, in response to pressures from annual removal of a quarter of the smallmouth bass population, the numbers of small bass – 5 inches and under – have increased even as larger fish (greater than 12 inches) were mostly eliminated.
Though smallmouth bass are native to North America, they were introduced widely across the Adirondacks in the 1900s, where they took over many lakes. Their arrival led to declines of native fish species and stunting of growth rates in prized brook and lake trout, which compete with bass for the same prey.
The findings have important implications from a management standpoint, both in terms of highlighting the importance of preventing non-native species invasions before they happen and in understanding that efforts to suppress a species may in fact backfire, leading to the opposite effect.
While plant and insect populations have long been recognized to evolve in response to herbicide or pesticide applications, manual removals of plants and animals were not thought to induce such adaptations. However, the bass population shifted towards a fast-living and early-maturing life history strategy as a result of drastically heightened mortality rates. One solution may be to conduct removals less often or take only a subset of fish, which could reduce the evolutionary pressure for bass to adapt, but the authors said that more study is needed. The broad takeaway for other invasive species removal efforts is that, even in the absence of a clear evolutionary pathway, eradication efforts should be seen as an evolutionary arms race.
“Twenty-five years ago, Cornell’s Adirondack Fishery Research Program set out to test whether we could functionally eradicate smallmouth bass from a lake,” said Peter McIntyre, Ph.D. ’06, professor in the departments of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and among the senior authors of the study. “It took us 25 years to prove why the answer is no: the fish evolved to outmaneuver us.”
“What we’ve documented is that life history traits like growth rate and age at maturity are things that can evolve to reduce the susceptibility to our removal efforts,” said first author Liam Zarri, Ph.D. ’24, who led the study and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Natural resources professor and study co-author Cliff Kraft began efforts in 2000 to suppress bass in Little Moose Lake in the Adirondacks with boat electrofishing, which uses a generator to electrify water and temporarily stun fish. Scientists then scooped them up, released the native species back into the lake, and removed all captured bass.
“The expectation was that if you removed thousands of bass from the lake every year, it would cause a rapid population crash leading to eradication” Zarri said. “For the first year or two, that seemed to be the case.”
At the same time, he said, population sizes of native fishes started recovering. Also, lake trout growth rates began to increase.
But after a few years, the researchers noticed their catch rates were increasing, rather than decreasing, driven by an expanding population of young bass.
Zarri’s genetic analysis, made possible by smallmouth bass tissue samples that Kraft collected starting in 1995, revealed that selection pressures from removing fish resulted in dramatic genetic changes between 2000 and 2019 in genes across three chromosomes. These genomic regions were associated with increased growth and early maturation rates.
Two companion papers, led by Tommy Detmer, a former aquatic ecologist at Cornell who is now an assistant professor at Iowa State University, examined the effects of smallmouth bass removal efforts on native fishes and on smallmouth bass behavior.
In one paper, co-led by Montana Airey, a doctoral candidate in McIntyre’s lab, the team found that nearly all native freshwater fish populations initially rebounded. But ongoing monitoring revealed that after 10 years, some fish populations continued to respond positively while others reverted back to the same low abundance as when smallmouth bass dominated the lake. The results highlight the importance of continual monitoring to understand the full ecosystem dynamics over time, Zarri said.
The findings have important implications for brook and lake trout in the Adirondacks. Not only are they threatened by warming surface waters and depleted oxygen levels in cooler deeper water where the fish retreat to over summers, they now also face the added burden of competing with bass for prey, McIntyre said.
Detmer’s other paper found that smallmouth bass, but not other native fish, in Little Moose Lake became more skittish in the years after removal efforts began. One possible explanation is that growing up in a lake where bass are removed four times per year has made the survivors cautious.
“We are also interested in testing whether there is a genetic underpinning for behavior,” whereby fish that are more skittish by nature (rather than by nurture) have avoided being caught, resulting in the skittish genotype sweeping through the population, Zarri said.
“Long-term studies of management efforts are critical, not only for deepening our understanding of natural ecosystems, but also for evaluating the effectiveness of specific management tools,” Detmer said.
Zarri, McIntyre and Kraft are coauthors on the companion studies.
Project funding was in part provided by the Adirondack League Club, the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, the National Science Foundation Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, the Cornell University Elizabeth Miller Francis ‘47 Summer Research Grant, and the Cornell University Kieckhefer Adirondack Fellowship.
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Capt. Monty Hawkins
mhawkins@morningstarfishing.com
Reef Restoration Makes Fisheries Restorations Simple!