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.

      Dozens of islands in Chesapeake Bay were home to human populations, farms, forests, even a few stores and hotels, in the 18th and 19th centuries. Starting in the early 1900s, islanders migrated to the mainland. Now all but two of these offshore islands have disappeared or no longer sustain the communities that once thrived in isolation.

      This year’s accumulating stories of deaths and serious boating accidents on the Bay and our rivers have gotten to me. I no longer leave the dock without donning my inflatable PFD. It was expensive, but it’s comfortable, and I feel safer.

       Anne Arundel County doubled its number of public boat ramps this month, opening a new one on Parrish Creek at Discovery Village in Shady Side. The county has 533 miles of coastline but only one other public trailered-boat launch. That’s at Fort Smallwood Park in Pasadena.       “The second boat ramp opening in just two years demonstrates undeniable progress in bringing our citizens closer to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries,” said County Executive Steve Schuh.

         The minimum keepable size for Atlantic blue crabs is five to five and one-quarter inches, depending on the season. Crabs that size are ranked as smalls. Mediums range up to six inches, large six and a half and jumbo up to seven. Crabs seven inches and up are ranked as behemoths, also called heavyweights or whales.           So what do you call a blue crab measuring nine and one half inches tip to tip?

Folks in a fishing village on the Arabian Peninsula definitely had more reason than we did to complain about last week’s heat.

      Now is the time.       One of the better tasting fish (tied with white perch for first place), yellow perch are making their spring spawning run as you read. This is the best time to go after them, indeed probably the only time of the year when they are concentrated enough to make them your target. 

I had violated my sacred rule never to promise blue crabs before they were caught. To further increase the danger of a dinner failure when an ever-growing number of people was expecting to be fed, I had not run a trotline in more than a year. Now, at well past dawn, we were only laying out the baited line at the mouth of a neighborhood creek.