Watching my German shorthair pointer, Sophie, enter an autumn game field never fails to send a quiver of anticipation through my being. She operates with certainty in an arena where I can only guess at what is about to transpire. A hunting dog is grace, speed, focus and intensity. Humans are acolytes when we accompany a dog into the wild. Pausing as we enter a cover, she will lift her head and taste the air. Instantly she knows the history that has recently transpired unseen before us. The game...

As we entered the Atlantic and the big ocean swells effortlessly lifted our 85-foot head boat, Thelma Dale IV, I recalled the words of one of my favorite authors, Tom McGuane: “I fish all the time when I’m at home, so when I go on vacation, I make sure to get in plenty of fishing.” That has always been my guiding philosophy. Our annual family vacation at Bethany Beach had been for many years, at my insistence, a time for a lot of oceanside and Assawoman Bay angling and...

  It had been way too many days since I had caught a rockfish, and I was ready. But late that afternoon, the light was beginning to fail, and my surface plug had gone untouched cast after cast.  My hopes had been pinned on a rumor that there were good fish to be had around this remote pile of boulders. Now it looked like it was just not going to happen for me, again. Getting desperate, I changed my lure color. Perhaps in the dim, fading light of day, black would be a better choice....

  It’s beginning to look like business as usual with the Chesapeake’s most treasured natural resource, the blue crab. Maryland is on course to resume the destructive harvest of female crabs, sooks, with its first official act upon the arrival of news that the crab population has at last begun to rebound.  At the brink of species collapse two years ago, our crab population has shown a 60 percent increase in only two seasons after the first significant reduction of female...