**Our $900 Visitor Survey**

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- When we're not striped bass fishing-

We're trying to help out fellow striped bass fishermen :-) We are calling on the generosity of the fishing community to partake in a raffle to benefit the family of fellow fisherman Tom Melton. The family recently lost all of their worldly possessions in a tragic house fire - including both their cat and their dog. As editor for The Fisherman Magazine, Tom and his family have reached out many times over the years to help others in need. Now it's time to help them. We are appealing to the members the fishing community to participate in this raffle to raise some money for Tom, Kathy and their three daughters. The raffle is $20 per entry. You can enter as many times as you would like with one check and one letter - just make out the check to reflect $20 per entry. For example, if we receive a check for $100 that person will receive 5 raffle entries. For more details and to see a list of the 25 great prizes that will be awarded through this raffle - Tom Melton Family Raffle. There's also a thread on SurfTalk with more information and also with a few words from Mr. Melton.

 

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Old News: We apologize for the downtime on SurfTalk yesterday and today - we are upgrading hardware and software and as expected, it's not going as smoothly as we expected Such is life, I've begun to accept these sort of things much better than in my younger years...I guess it's either that or you pull all your hair out and stomp your feet and that doesn't help anyone but hat salespeople anyway. This may take a while, I've got a number of utilities running on our SurfTalk Forums right now...and they take a fair amount of time to run on such a monstrous conglomeration of saltwater fishing and striped bass fishing information. Did you know we have 31 forums in SurfTalk? I think only 26 are presently "open", but the others are still there should they be needed in the future. We're just shy of 7,000 members now as well...we have been getting an average of 91 new members every single week! It's membership growth beyond what we ever expected...and the website has had set a new record high in every possible measure of success for each of the past 6 months. It's unbelievable how far this thing has come from just a simple place where a couple hundred friends could share fishing pictures to what it is on the way to becoming. 100% of the thanks goes to each and every one of the folks that reads these pages, contributes to the forums, submits articles and photos, and tells their friends about this site and it's forums - so a heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you

On to some fishing talk. It's October, our waters our cooling, the baitfish are moving and things are starting to happen! To the far north, things have already likely peaked for our friends in Maine...and that peak is getting ready to move down the coast. Striped bass fishing should be excellent from Maine through most of Massachusetts right now with very good fishing starting to build in the Rhode Island area. It would be an excellent week to be on Martha's Vineyard, Block Island, Cuttyhunk or any of those striped bass, saltwater fishing meccas - I wish I could be there myself right now. Montauk has seen it's normal September blitzes...they always do. I have it on good authority (Oznavad) that there are no striped bass on Long Island's east end at this time - and they won't be back there again - ever. So Oznavad encourages everyone who was thinking about heading to the east end to instead enjoy the nice fall weather on your favorite golf course

New Jersey narrowly escaped a federal moratorium on striped bass fishing this fall - I'm still not sure how NJ got away with fishing out of compliance with ASMFC regulations for almost 10 months without having to miss a single day of our 4 year old regulations - but somehow, that's what happened. It'll be back to the brawling board for 2005 striped bass regulations as it seems the 2003 recreational striped bass harvest was astronomical and far surpassed the threshold for striped bass mortality. Not too many people that have been watching the trends and listening to the cries to kill more and smaller striped bass every year were very surprised by this. Yes, as expected, paid fishing advocates were very likely "shocked" And even more likely will make it very clear how wrong and untrue these sort of numbers are - but that's their job. It's very likely that the entire coast is going to have to seriously reduce their striped bass harvest in 2005...and since regulations are always 2 seasons behind, we've probably killed far too many in 2004 as well. As such, we're probably going to see some very, very different striped bass regulations for at least the next few years.

I want to leave you with one word of warning - and presently this is only been mentioned in NJ - do not let anyone trade your striped bass season so that their financial interests can keep two striped bass per day instead of the one striped bass per day that we are likely going to be allowed by the ASMFC. Don't even let that thinking get a foothold in this state! You will never get those days back, no matter how many promises you hear - any days that your season is shortened by will be traded down the road for more or smaller fish. Not everyone in NJ fishes for striped bass in November, December, January, April and May - but don't let anyone trade your historic NJ fishing season so they can take your fish and give it to paying customers. Just a word of warning...I mentioned a month ago we might see that if a one fish/day regulation looked realistic and a couple weeks later it was mentioned in the Asbury Park Press as a possible option. It isn't an option folks, do not give up your historic striped bass season so that paying customers can take the striper out of your cooler and put it in theirs.

I've got to get back to the server and software issues now, but I hope to have some much more interesting and more fishing oriented stuff to report soon :-)

Tim Surgent