Fisherman illegally catches 14 oversized bass off New Hampshire coast, investigators say
A Massachusetts fisherman is under arrest after investigators announced that he illegally caught 14 oversized striped bass off the coast of New Castle and Rye last week.
New Hampshire Fish and Game reported that they had received reports that a boater had been fishing in the Atlantic Ocean, with no lights on at night.
"The tips started to come in that there's a guy out here catching oversized striped bass. Everybody was catching oversize striped bass, but catch and release," said New Hampshire Fish and Game Lt. Delayne Brown.
The other fishermen, who were boating at the time, confronted the man, Brown said, before he left his first location.
"A bunch of anglers were yelling at him, [saying], 'we're calling Fish and Game. You can't keep those! Put them back,'" Brown said.
Officers from Maine Marine Patrol, Massachusetts Environmental Police, alongside local police, began their lookout for the boater in question, before the Portsmouth Police Department eventually located him after he had loaded his boat onto a trailer and "was in the act of ditching the fish."
"He knew that he was caught red-handed, and there were a dozen witnesses," Brown said, adding that the suspect confessed to catching the fish, further admitting that he planned to sell them in Massachusetts under his Commercial Striped Bass Permit in the Commonwealth.
According to Fish and Game, New Hampshire only issues a recreational license for saltwater fishing, which allows for one striped bass per angler, per day, that must measure approximately 28 inches to less than 31 inches. The fisherman has been charged with fines for licensing violations, and each fish was taken and possessed illegally.
Brown added that the fisherman's haul of nearly 400 pounds of fish could potentially be worth up to $1,600.
Peter Whelan, the captain and owner of the charter company Shoals Fly Fishing and Light Tackle, goes out on the waters virtually every day during the summer. He told WMUR-TV that there has been an influx of Atlantic menhaden, also known as "pogies," which, in turn, has brought in large numbers of striped bass.
"Big striped bass, thousands of them, have been feeding on those pogies right in Portsmouth Harbor and right along our coast," Whelan said.
Massachusetts has different rules for fishing striped bass, Whelan said.
"It's not the right of those fishermen to come into New Hampshire state waters or Maine waters and catch them commercially," Whelan said.
He added that the laws that New Hampshire has in place is in an effort to protect the state's resources.
"Those [14] fish that he killed — those are all big breeding female fish. Some of those fish are 25 years old, they swim back and forth from New Hampshire to the Chesapeake Bay, where they spawn every year," Whelan said. "Those fish come back to the same spots every year. So we're really trying to protect the resource here, both in New Hampshire and Maine."
As for what will happen with the fish, investigators said that they will eventually go to use and be donated to a wildlife rehabilitator. However, for now, the fish will be held as evidence, pending a potential need to use them as evidence in court.
"It would be nice to fillet them up and send them to the food bank, but they're evidence," Brown said.