The Species Collection

Marylanders call it rockfish and everyone else calls it striper, and both camps are certain they are right. It is the Chesapeake's signature gamefish and the state fish, and the Bay is the single most important spawning ground on the Atlantic coast — the majority of the coastal migratory stock begins life in these tributaries.

A striper is built for current. It holds behind structure with its nose into the tide, letting the water bring food to it, which is why the classic presentation is not a fast retrieve but something that drifts naturally past a channel edge or a bridge piling. In spring they push far up the tidal rivers to spawn; through summer the biggest fish sulk in cooler, deeper water; by October they are herding bait on the surface and giving away their position to any angler watching for birds.

The fishery is managed tightly, and the rules change from season to season. Check the current regulations before you keep anything, and handle the ones you release with wet hands and a short air exposure — the fish you let go this spring is the one somebody catches in three years at twice the size.

It is worth understanding why the rules move around so much. Striped bass recruitment — the number of young fish that survive their first year — swings wildly depending on spring weather, and Maryland's juvenile index has come in below average often enough in recent decades to force repeated reductions in what anglers may keep. A strong year class, like the famous 1993 and 1996 cohorts, supports the fishery for a decade. A run of weak ones shows up in the catch six or seven years later, which is why managers act on survey numbers rather than on how many fish people happen to be catching this month.

The practical upshot for an angler is to fish the tide rather than the clock, to size your tackle so a fish can be landed quickly rather than played to exhaustion, and to carry a de-hooking tool. Circle hooks are required when using bait for stripers in Maryland, and they genuinely work: they tend to find the corner of the jaw instead of the gut, and a gut-hooked fish rarely survives release no matter how careful you are afterwards.