Considering the impending doom of the oceans—the bleaching and death of coral reefs, the wiping out of fish populations, the increasing acidity of seawater caused by the absorption of CO₂, leading to the destruction of shelled organisms, the threatened shutdown of the warm-water-to-cold-water transoceanic conveyor that brought Frank's marlin north and keeps the North Atlantic temperate—you shouldn't really be able to have a great time fishing just for the heck of it. Somehow, though, I still do. I'd rather fish with Captain Frank than do just about anything. At 4:30 in the morning, I'm up and driving, on the way from where I live, in suburban New Jersey, to meet Frank at his boat. The New Jersey Turnpike runs between the Newark airport and the docks and warehouses of the waterfront, in the busiest transport hub in the country. At 4:45, I drive through it like a dream. Billowing steam or smoke emerges from some industrial stack and takes a sharp left, pointing offshore, white against the black sky and catching the lurid Jersey lights on its underside. The ocean will be windy today. It's November 14.

At Frank's marina, there are parking places set aside for overnight anglers; almost everything done especially for anglers makes the world better, I believe. Here the wind is milder. Lanyards ring against flagpoles and masts with an intermittent, longing sound. Streetlights throw shadows of the flags; the shadows flutter on the sides of immense shrink-wrapped yachts in dry dock. The sky to the east—seaward—is lightening. With the offshore breeze, the entire land seems to sort of lean that way. In the flat water of the marina, among the boats and pilings, baitfish pock the surface in occasional agitations. These are small minnows of a good-size baitfish called bunker, hence their nickname, peanut bunker. Because of the rings made on the surface when schools of minnows are agitated, Frank also calls them "rain bait." I have an auspicious feeling. I believe I am going to catch something good today.

Frank shows up. He is wearing a hooded rubber rain slicker made by Grundéns, a Swedish company, and rubber overalls on top of a fleece pullover and jeans. He brings rods and gear along the dock down to Fin Chaser in a little cart like a wheelbarrow. He loads the boat, makes sure the video camera is working, and casts off. Nothing has been happening recently, he says. He went out Friday, fished all day, and did not catch a single fish on a fly. That almost never happens. Today he has a hunch about the airport, he says. We idle out of the harbor and then he opens it up to top speed.

Imagine the following autobiographical fragments shouted by Frank in flying spray over the sound of the engines and the boat bumping on the waves: "Right there's the part of Staten Island I grew up in! Neighborhood called Ocean Breeze! Ocean Breeze! My mom moved us there when I was 12! Best thing ever happened to me! Walk out the front door and onto the beach! Perfect! That jetty there—not that one, the one farther to the north!—it's called the Naughton Avenue jetty! A storm sewer comes out there! I was on that jetty practically every day of my life! I must've spent 250, 300 days on that jetty every year! Twelve years old, I caught a summer flounder from that jetty—you couldn't believe how happy I was! I put that fish in a Tupperware container, showed it to everybody! It was a big event in the neighborhood! There were almost no fish back then! Catch a striped bass, you'd talk about it for a month! Guy had a bumper sticker—THE PRICE OF A STRIPED BASS IS ETERNAL VIGILANCE! We didn't know any better! Fished constantly anyway! Used to catch bluefish off the jetty! Really little bluefish, called snapper blues! About this long! Catch 'em on those little red-and-white Dardevle spoons, remember them? See who could be first to catch a hundred! Then take 'em around the neighborhood, give 'em away! One lady came out, held her apron out like this, we filled her apron with snappers!

"I wanted my own boat desperately! My mom was a waitress at the time! My dad's a strange guy! Left my mom when I was five! Owned a garage in St. George! Told me if I worked a summer for him in that garage, he'd buy me a boat! He worked me like a slave! But, at the end of summer, bought the boat! I sanded it, caulked it! Took it down to the marina to try it out and he sent an old pot smoker that worked for him to go with me! See, I was still too young to be by myself on the water! This pothead didn't know anything, I'm foolin' with the motor, guy lets the bow get away and I shoot straight across the mooring and punch a hole in a boat across the way! Guy says, 'I'm gettin' outta here!' We split. It was a mystery of the marina—who punched the hole in so-and-so's boat? Nobody suspected it was me!

"Then my mom's brother, Lou, moved a few houses away from us! I began fishin' with him! He's the guy I fished with more than anyone else! I loved him! Called him Uncle Lou! He had just got out of prison! He was in the mafia! He and two friends had hijacked a train in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and drove it to a siding behind a bar where they used to hang out! They opened the freight cars, and turned out they were all full of some kind of fabrics, completely useless! So they decided, what the hell, let's rip off the bar! So they did! 'Everybody lie on the floor!' They drove away, one guy got in a crash, killed some people, Lou and both the other guys went to jail! But my uncle had MS! Wore braces on his legs all his life, his hands were like this, sort of claws! My mom threw herself on the mercy of the court, got him released because of his illness! He got out, went back to his old ways! He and I'd be fishin' in my boat and we'd have to come in so he could take calls for his bookmaking business! He'd be at the phone, bookin' bets, and meanwhile I'm pourin' lead for fishin' sinkers at the kitchen table! Then Lou shot a guy! Walked into a bar, right up to him, bam bam bam bam, right in the chest, four times! And the guy lived! In court the judge said, 'Mr. so-and-so, do you see the man who shot you in this courtroom?' Guy looked around, looked at everybody, looked at my uncle, said, 'No, I do not, your honor!' Uncle Lou was great to me! He had a really obsessive personality, got even more carried away with fishing than I do! He'd go anywhere, stay out all night if he felt like it, all the next day! And he'd talk to me while we were out, and philosophize! Lou was a very deep guy! Wrote a lot of poetry! I made myself into a fisherman, but if anybody helped me, it was Lou! Fishing saved my life! My friends and I, we mostly stayed out of trouble! Other guys in the neighborhood wound up drug addicts, drunks, criminals! Guys that didn't, guys that made it out, it was mostly because of organized sports or fishing!"

Meanwhile (to shift tenses), Frank and I were leaving New York City landmarks in our wake. The distant Empire State Building, which had been off the port bow, now had moved toward the stern. On the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, traffic seemed to be barely moving as we sped by. Past the T-shaped scaffold of the old Parachute Jump ride at Coney Island, past the high-rises of Brighton Beach, under the Marine Parkway Bridge, and into Jamaica Bay. This is the body of water that bulges into Brooklyn and Queens. Much of the bay's shoreline in Queens has been made straight by the landfill's edge at John F. Kennedy International Airport—the possible good fishing place Frank had in mind.

Well into the bay, Frank stopped the engines and glassed up ahead. Sometimes striped bass chase baitfish up the bay and then trap them against the riprap rocks that line the airport shore. One look and he shouted exultantly: birds, by the dozens, flying above and diving into the water just where he'd guessed the fish might be. What happens is, the fish drive the bait to the surface, the birds see the commotion and gather above, and the bait gets it from both sides. As we came closer, I could see the birds, too. Black-backed gulls, laughing gulls, terns, and common seagulls were hovering and diving like flies and bees on a dropped scoop of ice cream.

And behind the birds, so close you could see the pilots at the windows, 747's from many lands waited in the takeoff line, making a ubiquitous, all-encompassing jet whine to go with the wind and the waves. "Man, smell the jet fuel," said Frank. Our problem was, Homeland Security buoys along the airport shore don't allow boats within a few hundred yards of it, and the fish, as fish will do, were staying on the forbidden side. Frank held the boat as close to the line as possible, starting and stopping the engine as we drifted in and sidled back out again. I tripped and fumbled, bent out of shape with excitement, trying to make a good cast. Fish were busting the surface just out of my casting range. Somehow I got off one of those long, lucky casts that unrolls like Perfa-Tape on Sheetrock, and the line lay out straight on the waves, and Frank was yelling at me to strip it in. I did and—excellent! excellent!—came up joltingly tight to a fish.

I tried to reel up the loose line on the deck, it tangled, the fish ran, the boat drifted in, the gulls cried. Frank worked on the tangle, started the engine, backed us out of the zone, came back to the tangle. I was holding the fish hard, with the line clasped to the rod with my casting hand. The fish pulled line through my fingers anyway; if he'd run far enough, he would have drawn the snarl into a line guide and broken free. For a moment the fish came to the surface and sported back and forth there like a person. I saw the impressive distance between his dorsal and his tail, and had to tamp down my big-fish anxiety.

I started to get some line back. The fish dove, saw the boat, flared. Frank leaned over the side with the net until it seemed only his toes were holding the gunwale. More anxiety on my part, and mental preparation for disappointment and sorrow. Suddenly Frank was up again, with the dripping net, and in it a 31-inch, 11-pound striped bass. The biggest striper ever caught on a fly on Frank's boat was 24 and a half pounds, so 11 is no news to him. He cheered madly all the same. I was really happy—the fish was a record for me. Our period of standing there and looking at it lasted awhile. The striper was healthy, thick through the shoulders, and just arrived from the sea, as evidenced by its brightness and the small sea lice on its sides. I wouldn't eat a fish from the East or Hudson rivers, because of the health advisories, but ocean fish I'm not so worried about. This one went into the live well to be my family's dinner, or dinners. The pilots of the Saudi Arabian 747 cargo jet waiting in line nearby, if they happened to be watching, saw the whole thing.