We were already launched speeding toward our rendezvous as dawn broke on the Chesapeake.     Then the radio crackled with bad news.     “Don’t bother,” said a friend who had arrived on station first. “There’s a red tide pouring out of the river and the fish have left.”

The rod tip twitched, just a little and just once, but I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye.     “Hey Mo, you’ve got a bite,” I hissed, needlessly.     My friend’s hand had already moved to his reel and slipped off the clicker to reduce its resistance on the line. His thumb was on the spool, but he left the rod in its holder.

We were drifting quietly well off the mouth of the Severn in 30 feet of water. It was not yet sunrise but the first blush of daylight lit the water’s surface well enough to show some very nervous schools of baitfish swimming around us.     Here and there small menhaden — peanut bunker — would shower into the air, fleeing something sinister below. There must have been a heck of a spawn this spring because I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so many menhaden schools this early in the year.

I could feel the five-inch white perch on my line swimming toward the bottom 30 feet down. The pulses of its efforts transmitted plainly up the line on my bait-casting rod. As the baitfish reached its goal and settled down, I lightly thumbed the narrow spool of my casting reel and lifted my rod tip just enough to make the fish’s movements a bit more frantic.     I was drifting over some nice marks on my depth sounder off the mouth of the Severn, and I suspected the arches represented sizeable rockfish.

Casting up tight to the riprapped shoreline, I flipped the bail closed on the small spin reel and started my retrieve. I wanted to keep the Rooster Tail lure up and off the submerged rock below. My retrieve slowed as the lure came away from the stony structure and I let it settle, slow rolling it down, close to the bottom where I hoped some big blackbacks were holding.

It’s good news for the Chesapeake Bay, which provides 75 percent of striped bass stocks that reside in the Atlantic. New recommendations by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission tackle the very real threat that commercial poaching poses to the fish’s sustainability.

The first target out of the trap house for me was just the slightest angle off of dead-straight-away, always a dangerous target and easy to misjudge. I swung up my 12-gauge single-barrel trap gun, just touched the bottom of the departing clay with my front bead, and slapped the trigger. The bird sailed on untouched as the scorer behind me called out, lost.

My reel began clicking out an alert, slowly at first but quickly turning into a metallic shriek as the fish that had grabbed my bait shifted into high gear. I plucked the outfit from the rod holder and switched off the line-out alarm, thumbing the reel spool lightly and letting the striper run with my bait.

The rockfish spawn is just about finished. The big migratory female rockfish have already vacated our waters to return to their wanderings along the Atlantic Coast. Migratory males (usually smaller than the females), remained in the spawning headwaters for the duration and are now forming up and leaving.

The trophy rockfish season — which ran April 21 to May 15 — was a good one. The first two weeks saw many big fish taken, lots of them measuring over 40 inches. The last week or so, however, proved a disappointment. Most of the really big fish had by then left our area of the Bay to return to the ocean.