During the coming summer months, chumming will be one of the easiest and most effective techniques for getting a limit of nice rockfish in your cooler.     Chumming is essentially putting a stream of small bits of ground-up baitfish into the tidal current flowing out behind an anchored boat. The smell and taste of the fish bits trails out and sinks down, attracting game fish, hopefully stripers, to your boat. As they seek out the source of the attractant, they will also find your hook baited with a larger chunk of the same baitfish.

Early May is a great time of year. The dogwoods are in full bloom, the scent of flowering lilacs perfume the air, redbuds glow crimson. And one of the greatest sweetwater fish species is, right now, moving into the shallows and picking out a spawning territory to defend.

It was opening day of trophy rockfish on the Chesapeake, but Moe and I were going shad fishing. Crossing the Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore, we could see that our decision was sound: The surface of the Bay was churned milky white from the breaking waves driven by near 40-knot winds.

Our blue crabs are in trouble again. Since last year, the juvenile crab count had plummeted to 111 million, down from 587 million in 2012, according to the 2013 Winter Dredge Survey results. The overall number of crabs in the Bay dropped by over 60 percent.     Blue crabs may, once again, be approaching the crisis levels of five or six years ago.

Not everyone trolls during trophy rockfish season. A growing contingent of shore-bound anglers fish bloodworms or cut bait on the bottom. They have been catching an ever-more impressive number of big migratory stripers.     An equally expanding cadre of small- and medium-sized boat anglers have also been chumming and chunking fresh menhaden (aka alewife or bunker) to hungry post-spawn giants. A big, juicy bloodworm on a bottom rig is just as effective fished from a skiff as it is from shore.

Pulling into my driveway this week, I caught the briefest  flash of bright yellow out of the corner of my eye. A neighbor’s forsythia bush was beginning to bloom. My mind returned to this exact time a year ago.     Late that morning, a friend and I were pussyfooting up to a riverbank on the upper Choptank. We had already spent a number of fruitless weeks chasing elusive yellow perch and again feared failure. What we saw in the water restored our hope.

It had turned into a beautiful day despite a forecast of high winds and rain. Trees were whipping overhead, but down the well-worn path we followed on the forest floor, it was sheltered and calm. When we broke out of the tree-cast shadow line, the bright sun warmed us so that we had to open our jackets and slow our pace.

The fish hit my Clouser streamer fly as it sank at the end of a long cast. I was waist deep, wading off Thomas Point and had not seen any action that evening. Surprised, I cinched the fish up and had it quickly on the reel. The rascal realized its predicament and began to take drag as it made its first run.     I judged it was a rockfish. But this fish acted differently. There was not a lot of head-shaking, just a firm surging run, first in one direction, then another.

John Whitman had had enough.         The quality of his favorite fishing lures for rockfish and blues, variations of the classic spoon, had gone downhill now that they were all made outside the U.S.     “They used thinner, cheaper metal, poor quality feathers, badly made hooks. You couldn’t depend on them any longer,” he said. “They didn’t swim properly, they didn’t last long and big fish could sometimes break the hooks.”

Perhaps it’s global warming. Maybe it was a super-successful spawn. Or it could be another one of those things that can’t be explained. Whatever the cause, young redfish are pushing up the Bay in search of new sources of food.     This high up in the Bay is the northern edge of these fish’s customary salinity range. But anecdotal indications are that a pretty fair number of redfish overwintered here. That means you’re likely to encounter these game fish.