Short answer: south, mostly, and not all of them.
The big migratory stripers that summer in New England spend the winter a long way down the coast: in the Atlantic off Virginia, on the shelf off Maryland, and toward North Carolina, a known wintering ground. Acoustic tags have tracked the trip.
But the species only partly migrates. In the Chesapeake and the Hudson, part of the population mostly stays home, and some northern rivers hold fish right through the winter. Anglers call those holdovers. Here is what the tracking shows, why some fish stay, and what it means if you fish in January.
The trip south, measured
The cleanest track comes from 66 adult bass tagged on their Hudson River spawning grounds, in a study led by David Secor. Those that left the river reached Massachusetts in May and June and stayed until late September. Then they worked south at about 6 km (4 miles) a day, reached the coastal water off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay in early-to-mid January, and stayed until mid-March or early April. The run home went nearly twice as fast, and the pattern repeated every year of the study.
Fish tagged here tell the same story. Of 159 adults tagged in Massachusetts, 125 were later detected elsewhere on the coast, traveling to mid-Atlantic wintering areas and to spawning rivers in the Chesapeake, Delaware and Hudson (Kneebone and colleagues, 2014).
A second Secor study, of 100 Potomac River fish, found every large one summering in Massachusetts and heading south between November and January. Their exact winter address was "less certain," the authors wrote: Virginia's shelf receivers lit up in January and February, but North Carolina's shelf, a known wintering area, lacked receivers.
A receiver grid 10 to 50 km off Maryland fills in part of that gap (Rothermel and colleagues, 2020). Striped bass showed up there mostly from December to February and in early April. In winter many lingered for days on the deeper, outer stations, favouring bottom water of 9–13°C (48–55°F) and avoiding bottom water colder than 7°C (45°F).
And the fish down there were still eating. In winter trawl catches off Virginia and North Carolina, 85% of stomachs held food on average, and across more than 1,000 fish, Atlantic menhaden made up about two-thirds of the diet by weight (Overton and colleagues, 2008).
When the fish leave Massachusetts is its own question, and we cover it separately.
Why not every fish goes
Biologists call this partial migration: one population, split into groups called contingents, each with its own travel habit.
In the Hudson, 51 tagged fish and more than half a million detections sorted into three: fish that mostly used the upper river, fish that mostly used New York Harbor and the lower river, and fish that went to sea (Gahagan and colleagues, 2015). All three mixed on the upper-river spawning grounds in late spring, then split up.
In the Chesapeake, size decides much of it. In the Potomac study, nearly every tagged fish of 80 cm (31.5 inches) or less stayed in the bay all year, and the size at which half the fish left came out at 79 to 82 cm, about 31 to 32 inches. A minority of big fish stayed too. Staying was not the safe choice: the small stay-at-home fish were lost at about 70% a year, against 37% for those that went to sea.
The fish that stay north
For New England, the published record on holdovers is thin. The best new evidence is from Maine, where three years of monthly water samples tested for striped bass DNA in the Saco River, plus acoustic tags on 41 fish, revealed an overwintering population nobody had documented (Tyrrell and colleagues, 2026). We could read only the paper's summary, which does not say how many fish stayed or where.
The best measurement of how a wintering striper behaves comes from Nova Scotia's Minas Passage, a Bay of Fundy channel where currents approach 12 knots and surface water can fall to −1.5°C (29°F). Six of 17 tagged local bass, 20 to 29 inches long, turned up there through the winter, detected on 99 of 121 days between them, to the researchers' surprise (Keyser and colleagues, 2016). Their day-and-night depth rhythm featured in our post on the tide. The winter part:
- From early January to late March, with surface water under 4°C (39°F), they were rarely shallower than 15 m (about 50 feet).
- The colder the water, the less they rose at night. Below about 1°C (34°F), the nightly rise stopped.
- They were detected least in the four coldest weeks, early February to early March.
Those temperatures were estimated from other years' satellite records, not measured on the fish, so read them as "the coldest part of winter" rather than as thresholds. The authors could not tell whether the fish were eating.
The only direct count we found of what stripers eat through a northern winter is for fingerlings: young-of-the-year in the lower Hudson, 3½ to 6 inches, sampled on 29 dates over five winters. Of their stomachs, 65% were empty. Of what they had eaten, 95% by weight was invertebrates, mostly amphipods and shrimp, and they ate more in early winter than late, with no link to the day's water temperature (Hurst and Conover, 2001). We found no published equivalent for adult holdovers in a New England river.
What it means in January
- The fall-run fish are gone. Tagged fish that summered here were hundreds of miles south by mid-winter. One Potomac fish lingered in Massachusetts until January. It was the exception.
- Winter fish are local. The documented ones belong to particular rivers, estuaries and, in Canada, a tidal channel. No published list exists, so your own log is your best evidence.
- The deep cold is the quietest stretch. The Fundy fish stopped rising at night and were detected least in the coldest weeks, and the young Hudson fish ate more early in the winter. That points at early winter rather than February. If the Fundy authors are right that very cold bass are lethargic, a slow presentation is the logical match. That is inference, not measurement.
- A blank tells you little. The Fundy fish stayed up to four months, and the Hudson winter diet data show mostly empty stomachs. A fish can be there and not eat.
How StripedLines uses this
StripedLines is built for striped bass. Partial migration is why the app does not treat winter as an empty coast: in winter the water's temperature decides, not the date. Very cold water reads Dead, and the app says that is its own cutoff, not proof the fish have gone.
What it will not do is tell you which river is holding fish this winter. Nothing it reads can see a holdover, and a number pretending to would be invented.