Largemouth

If the unseasonably warm weather has your auto-cast finger twitching, there still is plenty of decent fishing around in fresh and salt water.In the lower bay, bluefish, sea bass and sea trout are still active. zTC Try the wrecks and stony bottoms for sea bass while using squid. Blues will take trolled spoons or hoses. Spoons cast into breaking schools work well also. The Middle Grounds, Tangier Sound and the mouth of the Potomac all have been good spots for blues.In the middle bay, the same methods will work well for blues in the 3- to 6-pound range, but the fish are reported moving south quickly as the weather cools, and catching them may take some work.

The complete largemouth bass fisherman should have many skills, from a strong knowledge of lure presentation and habitat recognition to a solid basis in boat handling, navigation and the use of marine electronics.Tonight through Sunday afternoon, Bass Expo '96 at the state fairgrounds in Timonium provides a series of seminars that can help fishermen hone those skills.For several years, Bob Dobart, show organizer and a successful local and regional tournament fisherman, has put together impressive seminar schedules for the Expo.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The BASS Classic might want to consider an ice-fishing tournament, given the number of cubes being used each day by competitors trying to keep their catches cool. With an intense sun, temperatures hovering in the low 90s and humidity above 70 percent, it's an uphill battle, but one the anglers have to join. Each bass that dies before the afternoon weigh-in is a 4-ounce deduction for the angler. Down at Paradise Point Marina, the tournament's launch point on Lay Lake, a muscled worker slings 7-pound bags of ice into a cooler every morning and replenishes it in the afternoon.

MARBURY -- Come on, get away from the hustle and bustle. Get on the rejuvenated Potomac where fish and wildlife abound, and where some humans are making an effort to restore waters while other environmentalists are cleaning up shoreside.The average largemouth bass of Matawoman Creek are considered by the Department of Natural Resources to be the biggest in the state. So it's not easy to forget about them while casting the shoreline in spring when the biggest of the biggies are on the rampage.

The chilly, wet weather of the last couple of days notwithstanding, spring really is here, and with it the urge to get out and wet a fishing line.For a few years now, Maryland has had a closed season on bass from March 1 to June 15, but this just means that you cannot keep any during that time.There is absolutely nothing illegal about catching and releasing all the bass you can hook, and as experienced bass anglers know only too well, right now through May are top bassing times.Here are some tips that I have picked up over the years that may help you put some of April's bass on a roll of film.

Tomorrow 40 of the world's best bass fishermen start casting for bass in the upper Chesapeake Bay complex, and not a single one of them would be caught dead with a dead bass, never mind eating one.The occasion is the three-day, 21st annual BASS Masters Classic, the biggest event anywhere in competitive fishing. First place alone is worth $50,000.In all bass fishing, the emphasis is on catching, but with the pros it's important that their catch be released alive. Matter of fact, on the BASS pro tour, anglers are fined points for fish that are weighed in dead, thus about 98 percent of all bass taken in BTC competition are returned to the water alive immediately upon being weighed.

Crabs are in the news. They were darned scarce this summer. The state just proposed permanent new limits on their harvest. And many crabbers are furious. What is a good citizen of the Chesapeake to make of it? Here's a primer on the issue: Why are crabs so important? People love to eat them, of course. Nearly a decade ago, crabs surpassed oysters as the most valuable catch from the bay. Lots of other Chesapeake critters depend on crabs for food, including: eels, striped bass, croakers, cobia, red drum, black drum, toadfish, sand bar and bull sharks, cow nose rays, speckled trout, weakfish, catfish, gars and largemouth bass.

THE FIRST TIME I met the bedazzlingest crab I ever saw was an afternoon in the mid-1980s, just off a flight into Baltimore-Washington International Airport. There in the main concourse, large as a small car, it balanced delicately on claw tips and the points of its swimmerets. The afternoon sun streamed warmly through the creature's jewel-like body, kindling olive and ivory, cerulean blue and jade and ruby-red. The stained-glass creation was an accurate crab, faithfully rendered down to the differing serrations of either pincer - the one adapted for slicing you up (for indeed, one felt like prey in its massive presence)

Maryland's stocking of largemouth bass in tidal waters this year was directed toward upper bay tributaries and rivers on the Eastern Shore, with some 260,000 fingerlings raised and released this spring.The Department of Natural Resources uses its Unicorn Lake Fish Hatchery in Queen Anne's County to spawn adult bass taken from tidal waters, then allows the newborns to develop in a sympathetic environment."Fish hatcheries are needed to provide more bass for tidal waters," said DNR Secretary Torrey C. Brown, "because many more young bass are able to survive in the hatchery ponds than in the wild."

The wind was freshening from the southeast as we ducked in behind Carroll Island at midday recently. The morning had been entertaining, if not frantic, with a half-dozen 1- to 3-pound largemouth bass boated and released over a three-hour period.But with the wind rising, the tin boat was becoming uncomfortable and in the lee of the low island shorelines there was a respite from the swell and the possibility of more good fishing.Early last month, the Department of Natural Resources released the results of creel surveys and population estimates for the tidal freshwater areas of the upper Chesapeake Bay -- and its findings showed a 32 percent increase in the largemouth bass population since 1988.