Easing my skiff up near a Bay Bridge support, I launched the lively Norfolk spot toward the sweet spot where the water eddied behind the down-current side of the concrete pier. I thumbed the spool, directing the baitfish to just the right place, inches from the support.     Stopping the spool just as the bait touched down, I released tension as the spot righted itself and jetted toward the bottom. My light thumb contact with the turning spool monitored the baitfish’s progress.

Moe and I imagined a fantastic day for rockfish. We had done well the previous afternoon with limits of bright, healthy stripers 26 to 28 inches. Hoping the pods would remain close to those same Bay Bridge structures overnight, we were back on the water early the next morning.

When Lester Trott, 95 years old this year, was born in Annapolis, the capital city had scarcely 9,000 residents.     Les and his family, which included two older brothers, lived for a time in Eastport on Duvall’s Cove (or Well’s Cove), swimming in the clear waters of Spa Creek and trapping muskrats to sell their hides for pocket money. They netted big eight-inch-plus blue crabs — called channel crabs because of their size — that had molted and were hiding in the thick grass growing in the shallows in front of their house.

This early morning I was prospecting for stripers beside a long bulkhead reinforced with large rock piled along the base. The water there was five or six feet deep, then dropped off gradually all the way to the 30-foot depths of the channel 100 yards away.

It was well after low slack when the incoming tidal current finally began to push me upriver. A light, soft wind from the south drifted my skiff diagonally cross channel and made everything just perfect for what I intended.     September is an ideal time to gather a bunch of fat white perch, some to fry now, some to stock the freezer for the coming winter months. Acting on that principle, I dropped my baits to the bottom and felt the tic-tic-tic of the half-ounce sinker bouncing over the shell bottom 15 feet below.

Diamond Jim has been caught.         True to the legend tagged to him by Maryland Department of Natural Resources, he brought riches to his captor.

We’d had a great day on the water. The bite was good, and we had boated a gorgeous pair of fat stripers, one 27 inches and the other just over 30. It seemed a shame to reduce them to fillets, so I didn’t. Scaling the hefty fish, then eviscerating them and removing the gills, I laid their graceful forms aside and reached for my phone to borrow a friend’s Caja China (pronounced: ka-ha cheena).

Twelve-year-old Colton Clayton caught a Maryland record largemouth bass while fishing at a farm pond in his hometown of Huntingtown, in Calvert County, on July 31. The fish was 11 pounds, 6 ounces, 26 inches long and 18 inches around. Clayton caught the fish using a spinning rod loaded with eight-pound test line and a plastic worm, rigged weedless and without a weight.

I coaxed the bow of my skiff in close to the Bay Bridge piling and shifted into neutral. The tide had slowed to a crawl, and the southerly breeze was still soft, so it was no problem holding our boat a half dozen feet off the down-current side of the piling.     My fishing partner in the bow, Richard Fraser, thumbed his reel into free spool and lofted a six-inch spot toward the back eddy. The baitfish hit the water about a foot from the pier and zoomed down toward the bottom some 30 feet below. It never made it.

What a year we’ve had for rockfish! In our fifth month of abundance, big fish are still just about everywhere in the mid-Bay, with anglers catching them using just about every method.     Eating fresh Chesapeake rockfish is one of the perks of living in the Tidewater. One of the many attributes of the fish is that its flavor can be influenced by the addition of easy-to-make sauces, which can give a fresh rockfish dinner a completely different taste each time you serve it.