ACCORDING TO Ed O'Brien, skipper of the charter fishing boat Semper Fidelis III, the column that appeared in this space last Friday was "so inaccurate ... totally in the extremity ... way out of perspective ... read by a lot of people" and now "killing" men who make their money by taking others out on the Chesapeake to catch rockfish.

Captain Ed might sound a little extreme himself, but I guess he needs to go there to counter what he sees as an attack on his livelihood.

Media reports that Chesapeake rockfish are infected with a disease called mycobacteriosis were "flat wrong," O'Brien says, and did equal damage to the bay's charter fishing commerce.

O'Brien says he sees healthy rockfish in the bay all the time, caught every day by happy customers, with no evidence of disease. So there's no reason to discourage taking home a catch for supper, as I did last Friday.

"I saw worse-looking fish in the 1970s," O'Brien says. "I eat rockfish three or four times a week. This all started when this Wolfgang Something down in Virginia found something in fish. ... And he's got a [research] grant."

And to keep such a grant, O'Brien says, "you've got to have bad news."

Wolfgang Something is Wolfgang Vogelbein, director of the aquatic animal disease laboratory at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), and the man who identified the disease infecting rockfish as an aquatic member of a large family of organisms called mycobacteria. In a recent report about this in The Sun, Vogelbein described mycobacteriosis as a slow, wasting disease, like tuberculosis in humans.

I concede to Captain Ed and others who make their living off fishing that it was unfair to emphasize the scientific concern about "rockfish tuberculosis" without mentioning what has been reported numerous times in this newspaper and elsewhere - that the Chesapeake Bay has abundant rockfish, and most of the time the majority appear to be healthy. Eric Schwaab, the state's director of fisheries, says he has no reservations about eating rock.

Still, The Sun reported, some respected scientists suspect that many, if not most, of the bay's rockfish are infected and that the disease might spread when rockfish crowd into healthy bay waters this summer.

Unless equally respected scientists declare it bogus, then I think the public deserves to know about this. I never said we should stop fishing. I'll quote reporter Heather Dewar's May 9 Sun article on rockfish further: "The slowly progressing disease's only visible symptoms are skin sores, found on about 8 percent to 13 percent of bay rockfish in one study. Researchers in Maryland and Virginia also have found internal infections, sometimes accompanied by severe organ damage, in as few as 38 percent and as many as 69 percent of bay-caught fish."

Sounds pretty icky to me.

"But five years after mycobacteriosis was detected here," it continues, "no proof exists that it has killed any wild [rockfish]."

OK, icky but not lethal.

Captain Ed believes the incidence of this disease has been overstated by scientists and fishery managers, and that sores and blemishes on rockfish may be due to contact with nets and with humans who catch them and release them. (A little dig there at us catch-and-release anglers.)

Humans who clean rockfish - at the Semper Fi's home dock in Chesapeake Beach - do not die or even get sick, he says.

The whole issue has been "overamplified and overemphasized." The press, says O'Brien, "disgusts me," and I guess he was talking about present company.

But I don't take it personally. I respect Ed. He's vice president of the Maryland Charter Boat Association and very active in sports-fishing affairs. As a charter boat captain, he's part of Maryland's large tourism industry, which relies on the bay for its success. So Ed can never be happy about negative press reports about fishing in the bay. He was particularly peeved that I mentioned recent don't-eat advisories about "toxic fish" caught in 14 tidal tributaries, such as South, Chester and Back rivers, in the same column in which I mentioned the mysterious rockfish disease.

That wasn't fair, he says. It's a different - and healthier - world out on the bay where the charter boats run, even though all these bodies of water are connected.

I guess I don't make the distinctions so easily. I take a more holistic view of this.

I also have a tendency to trust scientists.

So, suffering from that condition, I see the rockfish as yet another life form stressed by the mess we've made of its environment. That thinking might be more instinctual than rational, but I'm kind of stuck with it. Sorry, Ed.

Sometimes the news about the bay hits critical mass. The decline of oysters and crabs, the incidence of toxic chemicals in certain fish in certain tributaries, the breakdown of municipal sewage systems, the loss of bay grasses, the amount of nutrient runoff from farms and algae blooms, the wild growth of suburbs and the wide use of lawn chemicals there, the loss of trees and wetlands in the vast Chesapeake watershed, now a mysterious disease showing up in a resurgent population of rockfish - some days it just makes you wanna holler. Last Friday was one of those days.