Never mind that the Environmental Protection Agency has relaxed enforcement standards during the crisis, so that it is now more lawful in Maryland for a petroleum company to dump pollutants in a river than it is for me to stand in one and catch a fish without killing it.

What made me snap was when the Department of Natural Resources stipulated that charter boats could still go out, as long as they were fishing for food and kept it to fewer than 10 people.

I frequently see these crowded boats zip by me while striper-fishing the jetties of the Chesapeake. And while I don’t begrudge a skipper making a living, just picturing their pink-faced sports floating by on a party barge, listening to bad bro-country while downing Fireball shots, as the boat catches their fish while trolling … well, that was just too much.

So, I did what I always do when the world stops making sense — went fishing.

I grabbed my trusty six-weight and my sentimental-favorite vest, which now has more holes than pockets, though I can’t seem to throw it away. I went to a nearby farm pond, half-scummed over with algae, but which is so tucked away, I drove by it for 15 years without knowing it was there. I brought a makeshift creel (a knapsack lined with a Safeway bag), in case I had to fake a fish homicide if a natural resources officer rolled up on me.

As the sun slipped behind the tree line, while spring peepers tuned up the band, I caught a mess of largemouth and crappie and bluegill, each of them somehow managing to wriggle out of my hand before they made it to the creel. Yet they didn’t have me feeling like an outlaw; they made me feel what they always do: gratitude. Helping me live just a little lighter.

As Jim Harrison wrote: “Fishing does what poet Tom Crawford said about bird watching: It removes the weight of what we’re not.”

While too many of our fellow citizens have perished, while two of my cousins and one of my nephews are in quarantine, while the woman at Safeway courageously bagging my groceries told me she was staying healthy, “but some girl at Giant just died” (she offered this matter-of-factly, a-grocer-turned-grizzled-infantryman), it was good to see old friends. They might just be fish. But they’ll do. Especially with the rest of our friends locked away.

Matt Labash, formerly a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Fly Fishing with Darth Vader.”