well, we have some people talking about this anyway.
IMO we don't need a federal salt water license here for recreational fishing. it would be nice if we could get more stocking etc. from this but reallity is, one commercial ship load has more fish in it than all the recreational fishers take here. allowing bycatch makes it easier to run the regs but doesn't help the species we angle for. if they are allowed to keep them, then they should be the ones paying for stocking them, and encouraging more stocking. so from my point of view, good idea, but no thanks.
opening the east coast stripers to some sort of season makes sense. maybe instead of tagging just use a slot size to control the effects of recreational fishing on them. having the wardens survey fishers on the spot, like they do for ice fishing would also be a good way to track them.
clearly there are YOY stripers where nobody was tracking them along the east coast. also, stripers are not salmon, they don't just spawn in their home rivers. many, perhaps a majority do, but stripers try to spawn where ever they are when it's spawning season. they are expanding in ns and will do the same where they can on the east coast. since what looks like most of the rivers with tidal sections on the east coast had them before, and where the area has not been destroyed, they should be producing stripers again. soon.
as for the sj river stripers, they are a very different story. i don't think you fish for them much stroover. i landed 94 last year, and it's nothing to see a striper or two caught almost anywhere there is a group of striper fishermen, per night. sometimes a lot more than just a couple. the problem on the sj is they are not local fish, where before the dam it was one of the top four striped bass producing rivers in the world. the Miramichi was one of the others. now the dam sits where the prime spawing spot was, and for some reason the secondary spots like the hammond and belisle are not producing YOY. it may be as simple as the fish don't quit find it close enough to their spawning rivers, it could be polution, water levels, predation or something else. whatever the cause, they are not successfully spawning there. it has nothing to do with the numbers of stripers here, there are lots of mature stripers in the sj river.
this makes it a little tricky. the number of striper fishers here, even in all of the maritimes, is nothing compared to the several million people fishing these exact same stripers as they come here along the coast. so even banning striper fishing on the sj would have no noticable effect. reducing the bait fish taken commercialy in chesapeak bay would increase the numbers, as perhaps would a closer watch on the commercial herring and gaspereaux fishing in the maritimes. closing some of the season makes sense, everything needs a break now and then, however almost all of the striper fishing takes place from mid summer to late fall. very few even try for them any time else. given a choice of trout of striper fishing, nb'ers pick trout 99% of the time, so we are busy after trout in the spring. also keep in mind we were wrongly told by the province for decades that the season was closed most of the year for stripers on the sj, and those were the low years. the effective "opening" of the season did not decrease the number of stripers on the sj, in fact the opposite happened.
a solution that might help both areas is to set up a commercial striper farming co-op. perhaps join up the oromocto and st. mary's bands with a few on the east coast. grow them on land, in the oromocto/freddy area with stock supplied from the east coast. tieth them about 10% to be used for stocking. if they do as well as they have done on the st. lawrence we would all be happy.