The fish tank that would not work until and Judy Parsons (left with Adam Frederick) and her students solved some tricky problems with nitrogen cycling. Photograph by Michael W. Fincham.

Over the course of their rookie year with striped bass, Parsons and her students lost only three fish. Two died during the October crisis. Another died later from leaping out of the tank.

The rest returned home in style to the Eastern Shore. In May, Parsons and twenty students rode a rattling school bus for three hours from Rockville to Bishop's Head, Maryland where the Chesapeake Bay Foundation holds weekend field trips for teachers and their students. Their stripers got a smoother ride. Needing an oxygen supply for the long trip, they cruised down in the back seat of an air-conditioned car with an aerator plugged into the cigarette lighter.

Out in the wetlands along Fishing Bay, on a sliver of land that points south toward Tangier Sound, Parsons and her students sent 23 stripers sliding out to feed and fend for themselves in the food-rich waters of the middle Chesapeake.

Over the course of the year Foor-Hogue, the master teacher, lost more. Five of his stripers died at South Carroll High School. Several leapt unseen out of their tank, several died when a pump was accidentally turned off. The perpetual educator, Foor-Hogue taught his students how to dissect fish, take blood samples, remove organs and analyze tissue. He turned each death into a teachable moment.

Twenty of his fish survived, and on a cloudy day in May they leave Carroll County the way they came – in coolers and plastic trash cans. Their chauffeur is Foor-Hogue with one of his students, Mike Steel, riding shotgun. Frederick and other students follow in separate cars. This is no funeral procession, sliding somberly through red lights and stop signs with headlights lit in the middle of the day.

Think of it as a baptismal procession. Foor-Hogue calls it the best day of the school year. His students are going to release their tank-grown fish out into Chesapeake Bay. For the stripers, now nearly a foot long, it will be total submersion baptism and the beginning of a new life in a larger world. For the students, it will be a communal event. At Sandy Point Park, they are meeting up with Doug Stransky's students from Randallstown High School, a predominately black school in Baltimore County.

Driving south in his black, four-wheel drive Cherokee, Foor-Hogue starts worrying that his stripers, raised for part of the year in a chilly greenhouse, won't look as big as Stransky's. He's heard reports that Stransky has stripers that are 20-inchers. "He had them in warm water inside," he tells Steel, "so their metabolism would have been double what ours were."

Processions like these head out every May and early June from dozens of schools in Maryland. Since the first summer workshop with a dozen teachers, Adam Frederick and Jackie Takacs have spread their Aquaculture in Action program, with its tanks and pipes and problem-solving projects, to 41 schools, including an elementary school, a middle school, a high school in Pennsylvania and another in West Virginia. In buses and vans, pickup trucks and station wagons and the back seats of air-conditioned cars, striped bass and bluegills and rainbow trout go riding to their reward.

Just north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Frederick stands on a dock at Sandy Point Park, taking pictures of Foor-Hogue's fish-release ceremony. He wants to hook more teachers into his program and pictures might help. They'll go into his newsletter and up on his Aquaculture in Action web site, a resource for the network of teachers he's already got enrolled and an ongoing advertisement for signing up more schools.

Frederick clicks off some digital frames of Foor-Hogue lying flat on his stomach, hanging over the edge of a dock. He's holding a cooler half open beneath him and sloshing some warmer, saltier Bay water into the cooler. Inside five small stripers are trying to swim circles in a rectangular world.

"Wow, they're going to take off," says Frederick, trying to get some more frames before the fish are gone.

"No they're not," says Foor-Hogue. "I'm going to put some more water in." He can't believe how warm the water is. His stripers, used to the cool waters of a Carroll County greenhouse, seem to be acclimating well enough to this sea change in their lives.

"Their final swim," says Foor-Hogue, thinking of all the time and work he and his students have put in with these fish. "They've been swimming in circles for months – the endless swim to nowhere."

Now they have somewhere to go. A few years in the Bay, then perhaps the long swim down the Bay and up the coast to Maine. Stripers born in the Chesapeake have made it that far before turning around and heading home to spawn. At a foot long, these school-raised stripers have no major predators in the Bay, except fishermen with their nets and fishing lines and scientists with their electroshock prods. The ocean is another story.

One by one, the stripers head out. Kathleen McClellan, a senior, stands in the water guiding them over the lip of the cooler. Kevin Weeks and Mike Steel, two juniors, carry the rest of the coolers down from the car. Guys are too cool to wade in the water so they work on the dock, pouring buckets of warm Bay water into the coolers, getting the rest of the fish ready.

Foor-Hogue peeks in one of Stransky's tall fish cans and confirms his suspicions. Stransky has 20-inchers, no doubt about it, beautiful and big enough to eat. The student, for this year at least, has bested his teacher. Stransky, it turns out, took his first two chemistry courses from Foor-Hogue. And he learned his fish-rearing techniques from the Aquaculture in Action workshop and web site. He's a physicist, not a biologist, but with that kind of training he's been able to raise some monster fish with his students.

The fish have somewhere to go and so, perhaps, do the students. Foor-Hogue and Frederick have helped steer students into aquaculture, biology, oceanography, aeronautical engineering and environmental science and policy. Kathleen McClellan, the girl in the water guiding the stripers, is headed to the Air Force Academy. Doug Stransky, of course, went into science teaching.

Another girl in shorts, one of Stransky's students, wades out with a trash can, and the two girls together keep guiding the big fish into the Bay. Frederick takes more pictures and then Stransky starts clicking away also. Soon the students start playing to the cameras. A girl holds up a striper: "Say bye-bye to the camera." She kisses it and slips it underwater. "Bye-bye."

Foor-Hogue, the godfather, has no prayers for the occasion but he does have a hymn. "We should do a chorus of "'Born Free,'" he says. That dates him, of course, because none of his students know what he's talking about.

Another fish slides out of the can, looks around, then darts away looking for dinner, and Foor-Hogue tries humming the duhnt-duhnt-duhnt-duhnt theme from Jaws.

That dates him too, so he shuts up and starts taking pictures.

Students release striped bass back into Chesapeake Bay at Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor. Other fish-release sites for Aquaculture in Action have included Sandy Point State Park by the Bay Bridge, tidewater rivers on the Eastern Shore and freshwater streams and lakes in central Maryland. Photograph by Adam Frederick.

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