Rockfish Late Reporting to Schools
The eastern horizon was a faint orange smudge as we rounded Greenbury Point at the mouth of the Severn River early Saturday and headed north toward the Bay Bridge under starlit skies. It was opening day of fall rockfish season, pale dawn was a half-hour away and we were bound for a crowd.</br></br>"Wow, look at that line of boats," said George Turner. From four miles out the base of the bridge appeared as a parade of twinkling red, green and white - the running lights of powerboats by the hundreds speeding out from the launch ramp at Sandy Point State Park to claim the choicest bridge pilings before sunup.</br></br>"Don't worry," said Kevin Kenno, dean of bridge fishermen, "most of those people don't know how to catch rockfish on the bridge. They'll just be running around from piling to piling. We'll find a spot and catch 'em."</br></br>He was not idly boasting. At 6:35, Turner nosed the skiff up to the base of a concrete column near the western shore - one of the few without another boat on it. Incoming tide swirled around the structure.</br></br>Kenno tossed a 1 1/2-ounce white bucktail dressed with a white, split-tail pork rind beyond the piling and reeled it back along the length of the barnacle- and grass-encrusted column, trying to match its speed to that of the rushing tide, as if his bucktail were a helpless bait fish being swept by the current.