Fishing for Perch, Casting for Consolation

Baynard regaled me with tales of big rock he'd caught in the old days five, 10 or 15 years ago. He showed me a spot where Diane had been reeling in a 19-inch rockfish when a 26-incher rushed up and knocked the bucktail lure out of the smaller fish's mouth and snatched it away, right before their startled eyes.

As fisheries chairman at CCA, Baynard thinks he has a good idea why legal-size rockfish are vanishing from their old haunts. He blames it on overfishing and lack of food. CCA is on record as favoring designating rock a game fish, off-limits to commercial exploitation, and is helping lead the fight to protect menhaden, the bay's principal baitfish, from massive industrial exploitation by the Virginia-based factory fleet at Omega Protein in Reedville.

While he, like everyone who spends time on the bay, is concerned about declining water quality and its effects on fish, Baynard reckons if the water is clean enough to support big populations of white perch, it's still clean enough to support similar stocks of rock.

He blames Maryland for not adequately protecting rockfish. "I was talking to Howard King [fisheries chief for the state's Department of Natural Resources] the other day," said Baynard. "I asked him why, if rockfish are a 'recovered species,' as they say, I can fish all day and not catch one?"

He blames the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a federal oversight board, for failing to protect menhaden, the principal forage for rockfish, blues, sea trout and other prime game fish. CCA and other conservation groups are tackling ASMFC this summer at a series of public hearings, calling for action to restrict the plunder of hundreds of millions of pounds of the oily baitfish to make cat food and fish oil.

Meantime, for all its problems, the Chesapeake remains an alluring place for a couple of anglers willing to lower their sights. As we sped from one perch hot spot to another last week, Baynard spied a school of rockfish breaking the surface, tearing through a mass of peanut-size menhaden. He stopped to cast into the mayhem, catching and releasing a dozen or so throwback rock in the 10- to 14-inch range.

Things could be worse. "Thirty years from now, when there's nothing to catch here but catfish and eels," I said to Baynard, "our kids will probably say, 'Remember when we used to catch big perch here, and schools of little breaking rock?"

Those were the days . . .