Located between the down-at-the-heels mill towns of New Bedford and Fall River, the Westport’s blue-ribbon, blue-collar fishery remains comparatively crowd-free.

HARTFORD, April 18 (AP) Saturday is the start of trout-fishing season in Connecticut, but environmental officials are concerned that as many as 50,000 of the freshly stocked fish were swept away by the northeaster and might now be swimming in flooded fields and backyards.

Strangely mild weather that bathed the Northeast in springlike temperatures through December and January prevented ice on the lakes of the Adirondacks.

Florida?s season of ?sturgeon strikes? ? collisions between the leaping fish and hapless boaters ? is under way.

On paper, the author’s late-summer fishing trip to Alaska’s vast interior couldn’t have been timed any better.

As more water runs off pavement, there is less of it to recharge streams.

In one of fate’s serendipitous nods, storms that had led to talk of evacuation instead brought bursts of memorable striped bass fishing in the surf.

The last few weeks of spring usually surrender an abundance of important mayflies, and their hatchings and twilight egg-layings are just cause for celebration.

An ardent fisher’s favorite rivers are increasingly peopled with ghosts, and Opening Day is more pilgrimage than fishing.

Nature may be bountiful, as she has been with this year’s run of stripers, blues and false albacore. But she can also be capricious, as she was in Montauk.

This week’s column includes items on the effects of throwing the little fish back, molecule-size sensors for cells and NASA’s value plan.

One soon learns to be wary of Lake Umbagog’s moods. It is long and shallow, and rough water can build up in minutes.