Why the Big Ones Come and Go in the DelMarVa Surf

This was a hard post to write. It pulls together a lot of technical material: long-term ocean cycles, decades of harvest numbers, and a stack of fishing regulations. No single factor explains why trophy fish show up in the surf in some years and disappear in others, but taken together the data points to some likely causes.

I started chasing this question about seven years ago. Honestly, I wasn’t sure whether there really was a drought of trophy fish or whether I just wasn’t fishing often enough, or well enough, to hook and land one. Trophy fish, the ones that meet or beat citation size, are rare to begin with, so maybe it was just me. But one thing kept nagging at me: most of the record fish were caught in the 1970s and 1980s. Eight of the twelve state records for red drum, striped bass, bluefish and black drum in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia date from those two decades. Catch-and-release rules explain some of that, since fewer giants end up on a scale. Even so, I’d expect more truly exceptional fish to be turning up on the tackle shop boards and on social media.

I’ve organized what I found around three questions:

1. Harvest: Are we simply taking too many fish for enough of them to live long enough to reach trophy size?
2. Regulations: Where we’re seeing a rebound, are conservation rules behind it?
3. Ocean cycles: Does the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a 60-to-70-year cycle of warm and cool North Atlantic water, affect how many young fish survive to become the trophies of 20 or 30 years later?

Let’s dig in and see what the data tells us.

Overview

We will be looking at information related to four fish that are common to the Mid Atlantic surf and prized by surf anglers, Striped Bass, Red Drum, Black Drum and Bluefish. First let’s take a look at what the numbers tell us about the frequency and quantity of trophy fish being caught.

Comparing the six years before 2020 with the six years since, Virginia’s citation records tell a different story than my experience for one species and back it up for the other three. Trophy red drum citations rose sharply, from an average of 844 a year to 1,189, a 41% jump. Striped bass, black drum and bluefish all fell: stripers by 22%, black drum by 30% and bluefish by 47%.

Striped bass need a closer look. Citations for released fish (44 inches or longer) have soared since Virginia closed its trophy harvest in 2019, but only because anglers who once kept a big fish now release it and register it that way. Count every striper citation, kept and released, and the total is down 22%.

The real surprise for me was red drum. I was sure big reds had become harder to find, but the numbers say just the opposite: more trophy red drum are being caught now than at any time in the record.

So what’s behind the difference? Let’s take a deeper look at the numbers.

Looking at the year-by-year charts, each species tells its own story.

Red drum have been on a steady climb. In the 2000s, Virginia anglers registered somewhere between 500 and 800 citation reds a year. Five of the last six years have topped every year before 2020, and 2024 set the high mark at 1,659. All of these are released fish, since red drum citations have been release-only since 2000. Whatever is going on, there are more big reds out there than there used to be.

Striped bass look like a different fishery. The mid-2000s were the glory years, with more than 1,000 citations in 2006, 1,400 in 2007 and nearly 1,300 in 2008, most of them 40-pound-plus fish that went home on ice. By the late 2010s the numbers had fallen hard, and in 2019 Virginia closed its trophy season altogether. Since then every striper citation has been a release. Outside a bump in 2023, the counts have stayed well below where they were 15 years ago.

Black drum have taken the steepest fall. Anglers registered 945 citation black drum in 2003 and more than 600 in 2007. Since 2014 we haven’t seen even 75 in a single year, and 2025 produced just 20, with the same size requirements in place the whole time.

Bluefish were never a big part of the citation boards. Outside a spike of 251 in 2001, the counts have mostly stayed below 50, and last year Virginia registered exactly two.

So why are big reds booming while the other three are fading? To answer that, we need to look past the last few seasons, all the way back to when these fish were born.

Macro Environment Trends (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation)

Years ago, while searching for environmental factors that might explain the rise and fall of trophy fish, I came across a 2010 Bay Journal article, “Link between striped bass, weather suggests stormy times ahead for fish.” Among other things, it describes how a climate pattern called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) affects how many young striped bass survive each spring.

The AMO is a long, slow swing in sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic. Think of it as the Atlantic’s version of El Niño in the Pacific, only stretched out over decades. Each phase lasts 30 to 40 years: a long warm stretch followed by a long cool one, as the chart below shows.

Here’s the short version of the article. Some phases of the AMO bring wetter winters, cooler springs and more frequent nor’easters to the Chesapeake. Those conditions delay the spring plankton bloom until striper larvae are at their most abundant, and high river flows push the larvae and their food together. In the researchers’ words, the prey “almost has to bounce off the heads” of the larvae. More larvae survive, which means more young fish join the schools, and hopefully more of them live long enough to reach trophy size.

The article focused on striped bass, but I wondered whether the same cycle might show up in our other popular surf fish. Since a trophy fish is anywhere from a dozen to 50 years old, the place to look isn’t the AMO in the year it was caught. It’s the AMO in the years it was born.

So let’s look at the citations for all four species alongside the AMO during the years those fish were most likely spawned, and see what turns up.

These charts take a little explaining, so bear with me. The bars are the same Virginia citation counts we looked at earlier. The black line is the twist. For each year, it shows the average AMO during the years when that year’s trophy fish were most likely born. A rising line means more of the big fish reaching citation size that year started life in a warm Atlantic. The gray shaded area on the right is the future: those fish are already swimming around out there, they just haven’t grown into trophies yet.

Red drum are where this gets interesting. Around 2010, most of the trophy reds being caught were born during the cool 1970s and 1980s, and the line bottoms out there. Since then the line has climbed steadily as more warm-born fish grow past 46 inches, and citations have climbed right along with it. The line hasn’t even crossed zero yet, and it keeps rising into the 2030s. If this pattern holds, the best red drum fishing may still be ahead of us.

Black drum follow the same pattern, just slower. These fish can live 50 years or more, so today’s trophies were born in the cool decades, and citations have collapsed while the line sank. The line turns up from here, but the warm-born black drum won’t reach trophy size in big numbers until the 2030s.

Striped bass go the opposite way. Citations peaked around 2006 to 2008, when the big fish being caught were born in cool years. As the warm-born fish took their place, citations fell. That matches what the Bay Journal article described: the cool, wet springs that help young stripers survive come with the cool phases.

Bluefish don’t line up with the AMO at all. The line rises while citations keep falling, which tells me something other than the ocean cycle is driving bluefish. We’ll come back to that when we look at harvest.

A word of caution: two lines that both trend over 20 years can look connected even when they aren’t, and the fish ages here are estimates. These charts show a pattern, not proof. But the pattern is consistent enough that I wanted a clearer way to see it, so I plotted the same data a different way.

Let’s see how some trending fits these warming and cooling cycles with citation size fish reports.

In these charts, each dot is one year of citations. How far right a dot sits shows how warm the Atlantic was, on average, when that year’s trophy fish were born. Dots left of the dotted center line are years when most of the big fish were born in a cool Atlantic, and dots to the right are years when most were warm-born. How high a dot sits is how many citations Virginia anglers registered that year. The solid dots are 2020 and later.

The dashed line shows the overall trend. If it slopes up, trophy numbers have risen as more fish were warm-born. If it slopes down, they’ve fallen. Each chart also lists a number called “r,” which measures how tightly the dots follow that trend. It runs from −1 to +1: close to +1 means a strong upward pattern, close to −1 a strong downward one, and near zero means no real pattern at all.

Laid out this way, the picture is hard to miss.

Red drum slope clearly upward, with r = +0.71. The best years, including the record 1,659 citations in 2024, sit at the top right, where more of the trophy fish were born in warm years. Nearly every red drum dot is still left of center, which means the warm-born fish are only now taking over the trophy class.

Black drum slope upward too (r = +0.62), but for a sadder reason. Their good years, 2003 and 2007, came when some of the trophy fish were warm-born, while the recent lean years are all bunched at the far left. Today’s big black drum were born in the coldest stretch of the last century.

Striped bass are the mirror image of red drum, sloping downward with r = −0.72. Their big years, like 1,400 citations in 2007, came from cool-born fish, and the recent years sit at the bottom right. Warm-born stripers simply aren’t turning into trophies at the same rate, which lines up with the Bay Journal’s point about cool springs and striper survival.

Bluefish also slope downward (r = −0.51), but don’t read much into it. That number rests mostly on one big year, 2001. Take it out and there’s barely a pattern at all.

So the AMO appears to push our surf fish in different directions: warm decades favor red drum and cool decades favor stripers, with black drum following red drum’s lead on a much longer delay. These numbers mostly reflect long-term trends, and a correlation can’t prove the ocean is the cause. But three of our four species following the cycle this consistently is hard to dismiss as coincidence.

The ocean is only part of the story, though. Even a great spawn won’t produce trophies if too many fish are harvested before they get the chance to grow old. Next, let’s look at how hard we’ve been fishing these species, and what the regulations have done about it.

Harvest and Regulation

A trophy fish is a survivor. A 44-inch striper has spent 15 years or more dodging nets, hooks and predators. A citation red drum has outlasted all of that for two decades or longer. A strong spawn only matters if enough of those fish live long enough to grow big, and that depends on how many we take out of the water along the way.

So I pulled the harvest numbers for each species going back to 1981, commercial and recreational. I also lined them up against the major conservation rules and against how many of us are out there fishing.

Each bar is the total number of fish killed in a year, split into three parts:

• Gray: the commercial catch.
• Blue: fish kept by recreational anglers.
• Gold: released fish that died afterward. Fisheries managers estimate that about 9% of released stripers don’t survive, 8% of red and black drum, and up to 15% of bluefish. When millions of fish are released, those deaths add up.

The numbered dashed lines mark major regulations, such as moratoriums, size limits and slot limits. Each number matches the table under the chart, so you can see what changed and when.

The purple line, read on the right axis, is the number of saltwater fishing trips anglers made in the same states as each chart. It’s a measure of how hard we’re fishing. Each chart covers the coastline where that species is managed, not just Delmarva, because these fish migrate and every state along the way takes its share.

Each species has its own story here too.

Striped bass show regulation at work. The kill nearly vanished under the 1985 moratoriums, climbed steadily after the stock was declared recovered in 1995, and peaked at nearly 10 million fish in 2006. Since then, each new round of rules has pushed it back down: the 2015 cuts, Virginia’s 2019 trophy closure, the 2020 slot limit and the 2023 cap at 31 inches. Over 2020–2024 the kill averaged 17% less than in 2015–2019, even though fishing trips more than doubled over the full record. One thing stands out to me: in recent years nearly as many stripers die after release as are kept. The rules are clearly reducing the harvest. Trophy numbers are falling anyway, which points back to the weak spawns we saw earlier, not to overfishing.

Red drum are the one species where kill and effort rise together. Fishing trips in the red drum states have more than doubled since 1981, and the 2020–2024 kill ran 42% above 2015–2019. Fisheries managers have flagged that rising pressure as something to watch. But look at the rules. Federal waters have been closed to harvest since 1990, and since 2003 no state lets you keep a red drum over 27 inches. Nearly all of that harvest is small “puppy drum,” while the big breeders go back. That’s how the trophy class keeps growing even as fishing pressure rises: the warm-born fish get their chance to grow old.

Black drum didn’t have a coastwide management plan until 2013, and most of the harvest is smaller fish in the Carolinas and Florida. The kill dropped 32% over the same period. Harvest doesn’t explain the slide in trophy black drum. These fish live 50 years or more, so today’s trophies reflect conditions from long ago.

Bluefish are the overfishing story. In 1981 alone, more than 73 million bluefish were killed along the Atlantic coast. Today it’s well under 10 million, even with more than twice as many fishing trips. The stock was declared rebuilt in 2009, found overfished again by 2019, and put on a new rebuilding plan in 2022. When that many fish come out of the water, there aren’t enough left to reach old age, warm years or cool. That’s why the AMO tells us so little about bluefish.

Put it all together, and here’s what I take away: the ocean decides how many fish are born, and the rules decide how many live long enough to become trophies. Red drum have both working in their favor right now. Stripers have the rules but not the spawns. Bluefish show what happens when harvest overwhelms everything else.

So, where have all the big fish gone?

When I started down this road seven years ago, I honestly didn’t know whether trophy fish had become scarce or whether I just needed to fish harder. The answer turns out to depend on the species.

For striped bass, black drum and bluefish, it wasn’t just me. Trophy citations for all three are down sharply from where they were before 2020. Red drum caught me completely off guard. I was sure big reds were harder to find, but the data says we’re living through one of the best runs of trophy red drum on record.

What ties it together is time. The fish we catch today were born 10, 20, even 50 years ago, and the conditions in those years still shape what we see in the surf. Three things stand out:

• The ocean decides how many fish are born. When I lined up citations against the Atlantic’s long warm and cool cycles during the years those fish were born, three of our four species followed the pattern. Warm decades favor red drum, cool decades favor stripers, and black drum follow red drum on a much longer delay. The record books point the same way: every Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and world record red drum was most likely born in a warm Atlantic, and every record striper in a cool one.
• The rules decide how many live long enough to become trophies. Red drum have had both on their side, warm-water spawns plus a 27-inch cap that sends every big breeder back. Stripers show the rules working: the kill has fallen sharply since its 2006 peak. But without good spawns, there’s only so much the rules can do.
• Too much harvest can override everything else. Bluefish are the proof. When tens of millions of fish a year come out of the water, the ocean cycle barely registers.

What does that mean for those of us standing in the surf? If the pattern holds, the warm-born red drum still on their way should keep the trophy fishing strong into the 2030s. Black drum may finally start to rebound around then, as warm-born fish reach trophy size. Stripers are a tougher story. Maryland has now had eight straight below-average spawns, so the big fish of the next decade will be scarce unless that changes. Bluefish depend on whether the latest rebuilding plan works.

None of this is proof. Fish ages are estimates, citations count only the fish anglers chose to register, and two trends can line up by chance. But the pieces fit together well enough that I’ve changed how I think about it. A great day in the surf isn’t just about this season’s bait, weather and tides. It’s also the payoff from an ocean and a set of rules that gave those fish a chance to grow up 20 years ago.

So release the big ones when you can, and pay attention when the rules come up for review. The trophies we hope to catch in 2045 are being born right now.

“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

Timothy 2:15