Fishing is connected to everything. The Homeland Security helicopter that hovers over Frank's boat far offshore one morning and checks us out bow and stern through its blind windows of one-way glass leads us to a conversation about September 11, which Frank witnessed live, from close by in the Hudson River, where he happened to be guiding that day. He saw the sunlight glint on the wings of the second airplane as it banked slightly just before impact, saw the figures jumping from the buildings and mistook them at first for falling shingles. His imitation of the sound of the buildings coming down rocks your spine. Nowadays people have forgotten why we are at war, Frank believes.

And as striped bass fishing segues to September 11, that event links back to the fish, which have become harder to catch around Manhattan because of all the restricted areas where boats can't go, such as U Thant Island, just off the United Nations Building (U Thant, the rock's namesake, served as UN secretary-general for years), a fishing spot Frank considers the best in the whole East River because of the many 20-pounders he has caught there on a fly. Getting boarded by the Coast Guard is such a nuisance, though, that he seldom fishes the Manhattan waterfront anymore.

So now he does less inshore fishing, so he goes farther out, so he burns more gas. His boat uses a gallon of gas every mile and a half. Eighty miles is not an uncommon distance for him to travel on the water on an average day. And apropos of that, as we cruise by, he points to the oil tankers full of Mideast crude that are waiting to dock at refineries in Bayonne. Sometimes our pursuit of birds pursuing bait pursued by stripers leads us among ships of a tanker fleet, or next to container ships with their dull profiles of boxes stacked to the sky. Then we get to talking about the huge number of people in greater New York, and about the so-called reduction boats, also quite close by, that suck up hundreds of millions of pounds of baitfish into onboard converters, and render out their oil to use in lubricants and omega-3 vitamins; and about the inevitable effect of this loss of forage on striper numbers, and the ditto effect of unstoppable urban sprawl and runoff on the places where stripers spawn...

One could give up, one could despair. Or one could fish ironically, like an inmate shooting flies in his cell with rubber bands. A main reason I like to fish with Frank is that he's neither a despairing nor an ironical guy. There's a larger method to what he's doing, a principle involved. I think it has to do with the essential environmental friendliness of following an occupation one loves. "Growing up, I never thought for one minute about conservation, and I didn't know anybody who did," Frank says. "And, honestly, back then there wasn't that much to conserve. But we've seen the resource recover, we've seen how strong it is, and how we can affect it. Look at all the technology we take advantage of, the fish finders and weather data and satellite information; if I want to know what's happening right now, I can pull out my cell phone and make five calls and in ten minutes I'll have a pretty good idea of where the fish are and what they're taking. When we have this power, obviously it increases our responsibility to the resource. I'm thinking about the resource all the time."

Which leads him, naturally, into civic life. In the cause of fisheries conservation, Frank organizes, sends out mailings, confabs with like-minded people, keeps up to date on developments in environmental politics. For years he and other local anglers were members of the Coastal Conservation Association, an organization out of Texas that promotes saltwater sportfishing. More recently, a number of New York–area anglers split from the CCA and founded the Fishermen's Conservation Association, to focus more on the fisheries of the Northeast. The FCA arranges beach cleanups, take-a-kid-fishing days, tournaments, and fundraisers. Selling donated items at fundraisers, Frank has developed impressive skills as an auctioneer. A related style of talking, motivational in its own right, animates him when he praises the virtues of his essential fish.

"The striped bass is the great success story," Frank says. "It's the fish of the masses. Stripers are predictable and highly migratory, so every year everybody gets a shot at 'em. You can be a kid on a dock or a pier, a surf fisherman on a beach, a guy in a boat out in the ocean. You can fish for them in freshwater or salt. They'll eat anything from a live eel to a gob of clams to a light little streamer fly. One hundred and seventy-four thousand anglers fished for stripers in 2003, according to the study we had done at the FCA. And that was just in New York State! Those anglers generated $365 million in economic activity. That's why we think—the FCA thinks—the striper should be a game fish only, and never fished commercially. In 2006, the legislature made it the state saltwater fish, like the brook trout is the state freshwater fish.

"If you've fished around New York for 30 years like I have, you've seen enormous change. Beachfront real estate that was nothing when I was a kid now goes for millions of dollars. Development is everywhere. It's harder and harder to just walk down to the water and fish the way I used to, and I see fewer and fewer kids doing it. They're playing video games, watching television. What we're really trying to do is involve people in the local fishery in a lifelong way. That's why the FCA is constantly talking about access. Because if people have no connection to the fishery, they're not going to care if it's destroyed. You can talk about the environment all you want, but if it's completely abstract, people are like 'So what?' A guy who's spent some time on a beach around here or out on the ocean, and who's caught one fish he'll never forget—well, now he's become a person with a connection to the resource. That guy hears about an oil spill, it has a real meaning to him. We've tied a string inside him that will tug on him when the ocean is in trouble."