Bait

Mark Bozymski stops while shopping to marvel at a glass case that holds fishing gear from decades past -- including a 1940s Pflueger-model bay reel and a 1950s Ted Williams-model reel. Then, kneeling before a display of hooks and sinkers, he finds the chosen one, a one-hook spinner perfect for creeks near his Annapolis home.His pilgrimage, a journey through fishing's past and present, is complete.Mr. Bozymski, 32, can return home satisfied by another trip to T. G. Tochterman and Sons, the revered Eastern Avenue bait and tackle shop that has lured anglers for miles and for generations.

It wasn't enough for Jeffery Keith Richards to stalk his prey with a shotgun. The Hampstead man tried to bait the turkey first with a bag of grain, police said.And in Maryland, that's a no-no.Maryland Natural Resources Police arrested Richards, 29, early yesterday and charged him with hunting turkey with the aid of bait at a farm near Westminster. He was fined $200."It's kind of an odd arrest," said Michael O'Brien, a police spokesman. "It doesn't happen very often. You can bait for deer, but all other animals you cannot bait."

There may come a time - perhaps as early as next year - when anglers will be required to use non-offset circle hooks when bait fishing for stripers on Susquehanna Flats during catch-and-release season. During a recent Flats trip, I noticed with surprise what appeared to be a lot of folks casting bait rather than artificials, a tactic that conflicts with what the March 15-May 3 season was supposed to be about. Others concerned about the survival of pre-spawn fish have noted it, too. The issue is likely to come up at the Ad Hoc Striped Bass Advisory Council meeting at 6 p.m. tomorrow at Department of Natural Resources headquarters in Annapolis.

As soon as Washington Nationals general manager Jim Bowden made the announcement late at night during the final full evening of baseball's December meetings in Dallas, the snickers started. There's Trader Jim making a splash for the purpose of making a splash. The snickers grew into full-blown laughter a few days later when Alfonso Soriano, the superstar Bowden had just traded three players for, said he didn't want to move from second base to the outfield. It was a legitimate problem because the Nationals already had an established second baseman in Jose Vidro, whose hefty contract made him an unlikely trade chip and whose beaten knees made it impossible for him to play anywhere else.

Like any good horror story, the northern snakehead saga already has a Maryland sequel in the pipeline: the Vietnamese nuclear worm. Hot-pink and up to 5 feet long, the worms have quietly made their way from the brackish waters of Southeast Asian mangrove forests to bait and tackle shops around the Chesapeake Bay. For anglers out to catch striped bass and white perch, the worms are everything they could want in a bait - fat, cheap and juicy, hardy in...

This spring it is likely that fishing with live aquatic bait again will be permitted in Liberty, Prettyboy and Loch Raven reservoirs, which had been closed to the use of live bait for fear that contaminated bait might lead to zebra mussel infestation in Baltimore's water supply.A proposed regulation has been approved and forwarded by the Department of Natural Resources for implementation on Feb. 14, following a public hearing and an open period for public comment on the regulation.In order for live bait to be used in the reservoirs, it must be purchased from a dealer whose source of supply and holding equipment has been certified free of zebra mussels by the DNR.The regulation was formulated with the cooperation of the Department of Public Works and the Maryland Aquatic Resources Coalition.

One of the best things about fishing is it's a recreational activity you can enjoy all year.Granted, winter weather in Harford County is downright miserable, but if you dress for the occasion, an excursion to Peach Bottom Nuclear Power Plant often can produce red-hot winter fishing action.Peach Bottom Nuclear Power Plant is situated on Conowingo Lake's western shore, approximately two miles above the Mason-Dixon Line. The facility is one of the nation's oldest nuclear plants, producing electrical power for much of the surrounding area.

Reginald Dowdy separated the strand of his customer's hair and slid a hollow bead-sized copper object to her scalp, leaving a black-and-white striped feather hanging. Dowdy's client, April McGill-Willhide, tilted her hair to the side and examined the bunch of multi-colored feathers that now outlined the side of her face. “It looks fantastic,” she exclaimed. “They're wonderful!” McGill-Willhide, a hair salon assistant, has a number of feather-accented earrings but wanted something more permanent that would allow her to look more current and chic.

SCIENTISTS at the University of Delaware have made important progress in their search for a synthetic bait to replace the horseshoe crab -- threatened with extinction by commercial fishers who use it to catch eel and conch. And a Maine firm is marketing a substitute made as byproduct of fish processing.Either alternative would be preferable to wiping out the armored arthropod, whose exceptional vision, remarkable internal clock and sensitivity to blood contamination from bacteria make it valuable for human medical research.

A quarter-century ago, experts theorize, a rabid Florida raccoon either wandered onto a West Virginia-bound flatbed or, more likely, was relocated there by a hunting club. Whatever the vehicle, that introduction caused one of the most intensive rabies outbreaks in history. Once confined to Florida and Georgia, raccoon rabies is now entrenched across the entire Eastern Seaboard, north to Canada and west to Ohio and Alabama. In the nation's most ambitious attempt to eradicate rabies from the wild, federal and state officials are trying to halt the proliferation by dropping millions of vaccine-laced pieces of bait in a virtual moat from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico.