Bluefish v Stripers

Bluefish, pound for pound or inch for inch…hands down. And stripers give up a lot sooner than blues.
 
Bluefish. They have a nasty set of teeth, and they're meaner than any striper I've ever caught.
 
Blues are just plain BadAss period. Back when I was much younger and used to surf, we wouldn't necessarily get quit just because there was a shark swimming around under us, but a school of blues, it was paddle for shore as fast as possible.
 
Both are great inshore fly rod fish. And both are unfortunately overfished at the moment. Just sad.
 
The fishery for both have gone downhill for years. If you have fished for either species extensively since 2000 you know they are not what they used to be and the writing has been on the wall for a long time. As for the reasons I am sure there are plenty of reason why. I'm not a biologist.

And I am sure people will be like 'yea, but' we smacked them at XYZ location big time. That may be the case but that is the exception and not the rule.

Here

Here
 
Okay. I'm a little split on this. The blue is fast as lightning and nasty. While fishing off the coast of Long Island with a cedar plug of almost 10 inches, the blues would hit the thing 3-5 times on each cast, sometimes knocking it about a foot out of the water. But there's nothing like a head shaking striper headed for the bottom in deep water. Speed vs. dogged fight? I watched a guy plugging off the jetty in Avalon around dawn. He was throwing a big plug way out using a 12 foot heavy surf rod. The plug was a surface chugger. I watched as he retrieved. Behind the plug a huge open mouth appeared chasing the plug. The mouth was making a big wake as it crashed on the plug. 15-20 minutes later 42 inches of striper was hauled up on the rocks. BTW I've never caught a striper quite that big. Fun to just watch.
 
I have to go stripers. I don’t care much about pound for pound and I‘ll take the fight of a 4’ striper over a 3’ blue fish any day of the week.
 
I have to go stripers. I don’t care much about pound for pound and I‘ll take the fight of a 4’ striper over a 3’ blue fish any day of the week.
Apple and Oranges!!
 
how are they overfished?
As VCRegular wrote, anyone that fishes For blues and stripers for a while knows things are not what they used to be at all. There are plenty of articles about striper and bluefish population decline and new regs to control harvest >


 
As VCRegular wrote, anyone that fishes For blues and stripers for a while knows things are not what they used to be at all. There are plenty of articles about striper and bluefish population decline and new regs to control harvest >


The bluefish article quotes how many lbs of bluefish were caught by recreational anglers. I've fished for them for almost 50 years & have never have had or seen anyone taking surveys on how many bluefish you caught. I believe they run a cycle. The bluefish runs in the 60's, 70's & 80's were amazing. Then overnight they stopped. I would think that over fishing would create a gradual decline. About 6 or so years ago big bluefish ran up tidal creeks in Delaware where they had never run that far up, why?
A biologist years ago said that bluefish have the rare trait of migrating east-west as well as north-south. Most other fish just go north-south. The huge school of 15- 20lb bluefish might be the ones off the coast of Africa & might make there way back to the east coast, I hope :cool:
 
Back in the 1980's I went trolling for bluefish with a friend who just got his captain's license as a charter captain in Cape May, NJ. I caught a lot of blue fish trolling, but this was more like a workout at the gym.

I was so tired, and I don't even like to eat blue fish. I didn't want to just throw away all of the blue fish that I had caught, and I caught plenty of them.

Luckily for me, there were a lot of Puerto Ricans at the dock who wanted to buy catches. I said take them. I don't want them. Gracious Senior! Problem solved.

All of the striped bass that I have ever caught where in the Delaware River between New hope, PA and Trenton, NJ on spinning tackle at night with large black plugs.

I would rather fish that way than work out in the ocean with blue fish, and I have never kept a Delaware River striped bass.
 
I never kill my blue fish.
 
I catch a lot of blues and stripers in the back bays behind Wildwood/CapeMay on ultralite spinning rods, not on my fly rod (yet). The stripers are resident, usually 16-24 inches. The blues can be anywhere from 6-24 inches. Blues definitely fight harder, pound-for-pound, but the stripers hit topwater (often) and that is pretty exciting. There are plenty of both around this year.
 
Pound for pound, Striper tastes far better than Bluefish.
 
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