I chalked up my early successes to luck. But by keeping a meticulous journal and taking careful note of tide, weather, water temperature and the phases of the moon, patterns emerged. One spot, for example, regularly held 8-to-10-pound striped bass, bruisers with gaudy silver stripes and broad, emerald flanks. They happily attacked a top-water lure or fly twitched along a current seam, but only in the first hour of the ebb, and then only when it corresponded with dawn.

It didn’t take long to realize that few such encounters in the wild were random or accidental.

Locating stripers hinged on staying atop their prey. The Kennebec roiled with an unseen bounty of baitfish, thanks, in part, to the removal of upriver dams and the successful restoration of fish runs. Alewives, shad, blueback herring, menhaden, silversides and sand eels plumbed the river’s depths in constantly shifting schools. But because there is no reliable, real-time window into the sea — not even sonar can tell you what is happening where you’re not — I learned to rely on other clues.

I became adept at watching the body language, movements and direction of the gulls, kingfishers, seals, cormorants, bald eagles, osprey and herons that accompanied me on the river. Wildlife rarely loitered long without reason. More than once, a flock of terns or a bobbing seal tipped me off to a fishy spot I might otherwise have overlooked. Other times, I felt as though they were trailing me, hoping for an easy meal or discard.

These kinds of mutually beneficial relationships were common on the water.

Early in the summer, I befriended Slawek Pilat, a local eel trapper. Pilat had emigrated from Poland to New York years ago, then eventually found his way to the town of Poland, Maine, in the hope that someone there might speak his native tongue (no one did). But he preferred country living and in time landed a job at the Poland Spring bottling plant.

Trapping eels was his escape, a nod to his youth in rural Eastern Europe, when his family subsisted on smoked eels in the winter.

Not long after we met, I arrived home from work to find that Pilat had left a dozen eels in a five-gallon bucket dangling from our dock, sized perfectly for striper bait. A fresh batch followed each week. In August, when he accidentally lost his motor over the transom while hauling traps, I twice ferried him and a local diver out on the bay to find it — and we did.

In time, even the fish became more ally than adversary. Pursuing them had opened up a world of discovery and learning. To me, these fish were worth far more alive than dead. Throwing them back was my way of returning the favor to those who had done the same before me.