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We are now also distributing super fresh Chesapeake Bay striped bass, known locally as "rockfish," taken in pound nets and gillnets fished in creeks entering the lower Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers just an hour south of Washington D.C. These fish are immediately surrounded in shaved ice and delivered to us within two hours of being taken from the water. Some are still alive. The ones we will get average about 10 to 25 lbs in weight. We expect to have them from this source regularly from mid-November thru March.

Striped bass are coastal migrants that spawn during the early spring (March) in the upper reaches of the larger rivers flowing into East Coast estuaries and migrate as adults to their summer feeding grounds off New England. Young striped bass spend the first three years of their life in the estuaries, migrating out into the ocean and progressively farther north each summer along the Atlantic coast as they grow older. The oldest and largest adults summer off eastern Long Island, Cape Cod and the inshore parts of the Gulf of Maine where they feed heavily on an abundance of small fish and squid.

As winter approaches the colder waters push the striped bass back down the coast and they re-enter the Bay's major rivers such as the James, York, Rappahannock, Potomac and Susquehanna. The Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries produces about 90% of the East Coast's striped bass.

Striped bass spawn in the parts of these rivers just below the "fall line" (for example, Chain Bridge is at the Potomac River's fall line). They are not good leapers like salmon so they can't get up above the rapids at the fall line in each river. They spawn just below the fall line where the rivers' currents are strong. Their eggs need this constant tumbling to keep them from falling to the bottom where they would be covered with sediment and where they would suffocate from lack of oxygen and die. And they need to be able to flow with the current for 3 days until they hatch and become larval fish able to swim weakly at first but still moving and not falling to the bottom. At first they are ribbon-like, transparent with two big black eyes and a big stomach that contains their yolk sack. This shrinks as the fish uses its energy store. After about 2 weeks they are on their own to find planktonic food such as rotifers and other minute animals (which are abundant in the tidal parts of these rivers). The young striped bass feed on progressively larger fish (like anchovies) and invertebrates (like blue crabs) as they get older.

Striped bass are ambush predators. The adults eat squid, herring, butterfish, menhaden, eels, sand eels, blue crabs and any other small fish or invertebrates they can fit in their mouths. However, they will taste better if they have fed primarily on squid and herring, which are abundant off Long Island and Cape Cod, as compared to menhaden, which predominate off the mid-Atlantic coast. Maximum weight is probably about 100 lbs.

Striped bass are the number one gamefish on the Atlantic coast. Many are caught by surf fishers off New England. In the Bay, most are probably caught by charter and other sport fishers using live eels fished next to the pilings of the large bridges across the bay (such as the Bay Bridge - near Annapolis - and the Causeway across the mouth of the Bay) or deep trolling menhaden-like spoons and soft plastic "umbrella rigs."

The commercial and recreational fisheries are closely monitored by state and federal fisheries biologists to promote a healthy population. The recovery of the once severely depleted East Coast striped bass population is one of the few real success stories in U.S. fishery management.

Want to know how to tell a wild striped bass from a farm-raised hybrid (striped bass - white bass cross)? The wild fish will have unbroken black stripes down its side like the one pictured above.