Frank graduated from New Dorp High School in 1981 and opened his own auto-repair shop. He also began selling used cars. He got married in 1985; he and his wife have two daughters, 11 and 13. No matter his life circumstances, Frank kept fishing, expanding his methods from bait and spin casting to fishing with flies. (Saltwater fly-fishing has nothing to do with insects, by the way; most of the flies involved are actually a kind of lure, made of deer hair and other fibers, intended to look like baitfish swimming.) And during the late eighties, coincidentally, the fishing in and around New York City began to improve.

In November 1997, Frank's wife gave him a birthday present of a four-day session at a motivational seminar in a hotel in Somerset, New Jersey. The session's leader was Tony Robbins, whose motivational tapes Frank watched all the time. Seminar events started with the several thousand participants in the grand ballroom giving backrubs to one another, turning to the person on the right and then on the left. This seemed ridiculous to Frank, and he made a mental note to take off after dinner that evening. But as it turned out, he didn't, and he ended up loving the seminar, and he came home from it as fired up as any motivator's dream. The next day he called his best fishing buddy, Dino Torino, and said, "Let's do it!" By "it" he meant become professional fishing guides. Dino was up for trying. They got their captain's licenses, took out loans, bought a guide boat, and put out ads in fishing publications.

A conjunction of the stars was working in their favor. First, the striped bass had returned. A five-year moratorium on all striper fishing in New York waters, including the species's key spawning grounds, had brought the stripers back abundantly. Guys who in the past had gone months without seeing one began to catch five and ten fish a day, and not all of them small. And second, with the boom years of the nineties ongoing, Wall Street was flush with profits, and spewing expense-account dollars. From a short startup list of clients, Frank and Dino soon found many others. "It became a hip thing for Wall Street guys to say at cocktail parties—that they'd caught such-and-such number of stripers fly-fishing in the harbor under the Manhattan Bridge or off Roosevelt Island or wherever," Frank explains. With the rise in striper numbers, fishing pressure on the bluefish went down, and that species also began to increase in numbers and size.

The appeal of what Frank had to offer seems obvious now, but took vision to realize. Basically, someone could leave an office in Midtown and be casting a fly in the great outdoors (city style) within the half-hour. (For that, of course, Frank would have to pick the client up at a pier in Manhattan, a service that costs more.) Even today I don't think the average person grasps how many fish there are in and around New York Harbor. Recently, an accused striped bass poacher was arrested with 900 pounds of illegally caught stripers he was about to sell, probably in Chinatown; Frank says that's just a small single day's haul for this particular guy. I have watched miles of fish-filled pictures on the screen of Frank's fish finder, whose digital images make it easy to distinguish between schools of baitfish and the larger stripers and blues. Sometimes you can even tell which way a big fish is facing. On a good day, you'll pass above schools of predator fish stacked eight and ten deep in likely intersections of current and tide.

Plus, here you're fishing in one of the all-around liveliest spots on the planet. New York Harbor and its environs feature almost as many relics and historic sites as you'd find nearby on land. A favorite tactic of Frank's is to drift along the edge of Hoffman Island, near the entrance to the upper harbor, and cast toward the racks and concrete that reinforce the island's shore. On certain tides, the stripers wait to ambush baitfish here. Toward the end of the drift he'll say, "Cast right at the big chain." From a bulwark of concrete, a half-dozen rusted links as big around as clasped arms extend down toward the waves. They are what remains of the great chain that once stretched clear across the harbor entrance to the Brooklyn side; its purpose was to hold the anti-submarine net that blocked the harbor during the Second World War. On the bottom farther out, off New Jersey, lies one of the submarines it deterred—a German U-boat sunk by the Coast Guard in 1945. (Frank is not exactly sure about the location of that submarine.)

Near the harbor entrance, an old wreck registers on the sonar—the curving ribs of a wooden sailing vessel lying on her side. Frank checked this wreck out with a submersible camera not long ago, when he was making a video about how stripers take a lure. He put the camera down, scouted around in the remains of the hull, and found that the wreck's cargo had comprised those hexagonal paving stones, familiar to every New Yorker, that line the sidewalks in and around Central Park and other public places in the city. In deeper water offshore, Frank sometimes fishes over a reef made of old subway cars. The city dumped them there some years ago both to get rid of them and to provide fish habitat. And along the Brooklyn beachfront, he may come in close to Coney Island if he sees bird activity; those many acres of Coney Island sand, usually empty during the late fall, when the stripers are around, used to be so jammed with bathers during the summers in the 1940s and '50s that you could hardly find a few unoccupied square feet to lay your towel on. So many visitors to Coney Island lost jewelry on that beach over the years that it's now considered one of the prime treasure-hunting spots in America; bent-over people with metal detectors work their way along it daily, leaving trails of little holes.

Moving on, following the birds, sometimes we parallel the ocean shoreline in Queens. Frank points out the shallows where the Golden Venture went aground in 1993. She was a cargo ship attempting to smuggle Chinese people into America. The Golden Venture's captain became confused heading for the harbor and just ran her in as close to the beach as he could get. The illegal cargo jumped down and swam for it. Ten of them drowned. Others made land, kept going, and disappeared into the American dream. At the Queens border, we generally try some casts by the Breezy Point jetty, a long and dangerous rock structure extending a few hundred yards into the surf. Frank knows tales of people who've been washed off that jetty, or who've had to climb up on the light tower at the far end during an unexpected high tide and wait for helicopters to pluck them away.

"A buddy of mine, sometimes takes videos for me," Frank says, "his name is W____, he was fishing off the Breezy Point jetty last week and a huge wave came and knocked him off. He loses all his stuff, his waders fill up, he's in the water, barely swims back, climbs back up, another wave washes him off. Swims back, climbs up—another wave. Same thing happens a fourth time. By now he's about out of strength, he's getting hypothermia, he swims to the rocks but can't climb out, he's going under. That's it, he's gone. And he said he reached up—it must be some kind of reflex all drowning people do—and he feels a hand grab his arm! These people in a boat had seen what was happening, they brought their boat in close, grabbed him, and saved his life.

"So all his stuff's gone, but he'd been having a really good day, and he decides he's not gonna quit now. So he drives into Manhattan, goes to the Urban Angler, buys himself a whole new outfit, and heads back to the jetty. On the way he stops at a pay phone to call his wife. Tells her everything that happened, the whole story; says he's got a new outfit, is going back, and so on. Wife listens to him. Then she says, 'I want a separation.' He's tellin' me this the other day, and at the end he goes, 'So, Frank, now I'm separated.' He's still fishin', though."