Tim Arienti

Our fish have been migrating south for the winter.  Lately we have had some exciting news, some of our fish have been picked up far from where we tagged and released them.  As I had mentioned in an earlier log entry, I was assuming that our fish had left our system and headed south.  I wish they had stayed in our area longer but it is nice to hear of our fish showing up in different areas.

One of the fish we tagged in the Kennebec, George (Fish #11) made a brief visit to the Saco Bay area on October 24th.  George stopped by Wood Island, on his way south, for about 45 minutes around midnight on the 24th.  George had been tagged just over a month before on September 11th in the Kennebec River in Waterville.

Goldy (Fish #14) left our system on September 5th.  He was picked up during the weekend of October 30 and 31 by a hydrophone monitored by the Rutgers Marine Field Station.  Just like Bob last year, it took Goldy about 2 months to travel from the Saco River in Maine, to the Mullica River area in southern New Jersey.  As of this writing, Goldy is still in New Jersey and we will update you more on that in the future.

Unfortunately we arent able to acoustic tag every Striped Bass we catch because we dont have enough tags.  Fish that we dont acoustic tag are still valuable to our project.  We take a length, weight, fin clip and scale sample and then put a simple red dart tag in their back to identify that we had caught this fish at one time.  If someone catches one of these fish we would hope that they will inform us as to when and where they caught it.  This can help us to determine where our fish are going and how long it is taking them to get there.  On October 13, one of these fish was caught in the Cape Cod Canal.  The "Canal" is a very popular fishing spot because many fish use this passageway as a short-cut between Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  This fish, #406, was approximately 20 inches long and had been tagged in our area on August 30. 

Hopefully more of our fish will make appearances down south in the near future, and then again in Maine next summer.