Stopping at Bob Evans Seafood in Shady Side, Lou Hyde reports he routinely finds blue catfish in his 240 crab pots in Herring Bay. Some of the horned invaders are so fat that he tears up his pots cutting them loose.       Mick Blackistone, fishmonger, worries that they’re eating juvenile crabs.

     “Nothing is better than being on the water in the morning,” I tell my skeptical family as we head out the door at 5:45am.       We are meeting Captain Trey Plumb and my colleague Audrey at Collins Marine Railway in Deale. Plumb, owner of FishMermaniac Charters, is a Maryland native and a lifelong waterman. He has been fishing the Bay, its tributaries and the Atlantic Ocean for more than 30 years. Five years ago, he expanded his business by offering crabbing charters.

The Chesapeake tide was ebbing to almost placid. Rockfish prefer their dinner be swept to them by moving water. But in this case the stalling currents allowed them more freedom to gather around the structures where we were fishing. Our bait was their favorite snack this time of year, Norfolk spot.

     If there’s slight consolation in Chesapeake Country’s invasion by snakeheads, it could be that more of them are hightailing it north up the Susquehanna.

      When 95-year-old Bernie Fowler leads people into the Patuxent River on Sunday, the river in his heart will be one neither you nor I can imagine.      For the chain of followers linked arm in arm with the river champion in the annual test of water clarity, statistics tell the story of the river’s woes or redemption. Can the put-upon river with its D-grade report card achieve its Chesapeake Bay Watershed Implementation Plan targets for 2025?

     Over Memorial Day weekend, I heard a new, amusing joke.       Question: Why are snakeheads and channel catfish the most numerous fish caught this year?       Answer: Because they’re the only two species Maryland Department of Natural Resources hasn’t tried to help. 

      Callinectes sapidus, our beautiful swimmers, seem to be thriving on moderate winters in a healthier Bay. The Chesapeake is full of more crabs than in any year since 2012, according to winter’s annual whole-Bay census, taken by the University of Maryland Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and the Virginia Institute of Marine Biology.

       Breathless news accounts make it sound like something out of Jaws.          “Only a big octopus could win a fight with a blue crab’s deadly pincers,” read an account in The Guardian last week.          The typically reserved British paper is writing not of some fearsome sea creatures but of the crustacean that provides Chesapeake Country tasty lumps of our identity.

      A sturgeon is not a pretty fish. It’s long and bony with a sharp, upturned snout and whiskers. A prehistoric fish, they have been around for more than 100 million years. Once, Atlantic sturgeon were common in Chesapeake Bay and its rivers, the biggest fish that swam here in modern times.

     In the days before iPhones and Netflix, swallowing goldfish was a time-honored, if ridiculous, activity for inebriated young fellows. A guy in Holland carried the game too far.          The current issue of Acta-Oto-Laryngologica Case Reports (we at Bay Weekly love obscure journals) tells about a group of young drunks in the town of Rotterdam who apparently had emptied the aquarium of small species.