By John Holyoke, Bangor Daily News
Hunter Pate is not one of a dying breed. Instead, he’s one of a breed that has slowly, one by one, simply given up.
He is a striped-bass fisherman on the Penobscot River.
And over the past seven years or so, many who share a passion for the hard-fighting, sea-going fish have sold their boats, moved inland to target other species, or simply thrown in the towel altogether.
Not the 16-year-old Pate, though.
“I’m pretty sure they’re not gone,” Pate said last week as he fished from his family’s dock on the Penobscot. “There’s always another fish to catch [out] there.”
Pate should know: He’s one of the guys who’s still fishing, even though he rarely has much company, and sees few striper fisherman troll past his house these days.
“We used to catch ’em all the time. Every day, we probably caught 10 or 15,” said Pate, recalling the “good old days,” back when he was a mere 8-year-old.
Then, something changed.
“A couple years ago, we actually got shut out,” Pate said. “We didn’t catch a single striper. The past couple years we caught one or two each year.”
Still, Pate keeps on fishing for stripers … when he’s not taking his boat out to compete in local weekend bass tournaments on inland lakes.
A couple of weeks back, he caught three stripers in a one-hour span.
His thought?
“Maybe they’re coming back,” he said. “[I’ve spent] probably a week’s worth of fishing [since then]. Not a thing.”
But down the Maine coast, the tide is changing. Fisheries experts say striped bass have indeed returned to some of the state’s more southern estuaries.
Is the Penobscot next? Nobody knows. But at least one fisherman will be ready if the fish return to his home river….