I met Thomas, the vegan fisherman, at the Brooklyn pub after the weekly Sunday derby meetup. I had just finished an abbreviated interview with Ben, and even though the bells went off on his fishing rod, there was nothing on the line. The bar was too loud to continue recording, so I just relaxed and settled down with a pint of Brooklyn Pennant with Thomas and other derby members, including Maria, who helped Ben and Jamie Potter organize the derby. When I told her I still hadn't caught any fish (she caught one the day I saw Ben filming himself Survivor Man style), she was incredulous. "Really?" she kept asking, between bites of a chicken taco. "REALLY?"

Thomas is a carpenter, born and raised in Williamsburg and often travels east to those same East End towns, Montauk and Southampton, for work or fish, or both. He is the aforementioned vegan fisherman who won't eat ice cream, but will eat fish, a concession he makes by only eating fish he catches. When he's not fishing out East, he's fishing from his kayak in Jamaica Bay near JFK Airport. Thomas is a hardcore fisherman for striped bass, and he regards bluefish as a cannibalistic devil-fish. He told me he has trouble remembering people's names, but "I can tell you when I caught this fish on the outgoing tide and I had a shore wind..."

"Well," I said, tipping back another beer. "You know where your priorities are."

"It's a totally different way of life out East," he told me. "Like I'll go check out spots at lunchtime and I'll just see van after van lined up on the sides of the roads. Every contractor in the area is there. They have a thing where they'll say 'Well, if I can get to it tomorrow, I will.' Meaning if the fish are biting they won't be there [to work]."

Like Greg, Thomas was very generous with his fishing knowledge. He pulled out 5-inch plastic lures from his tackle bag and told me they were his go-to lure, and said to fish them super slow, just enough to keep them from going slack in the water. He told me about using live eels, "like Twinkies for bass," and when you feel the eel panic and jerk the rod before a bass strikes you have to "bow to the cow"—fisherman's parlance for lowering the rod tip for a few seconds before setting the hook, and the hopes that there's a big (female fish are bigger) bass on the other end. He recommended I check out a fishing video filmed underwater from a striped bass perspective of things. When his girlfriend at the time confronted him about the video he had to explain, "No, it's called 'STRIPERS Gone Wild,' asshole!"

Thomas knew about the pier I was trying to reach. Earlier in the week he was looking for fishing spots for the derby and discovered a way to get closer. "You have to climb over this barbed-wire fence out over the water and run over some steel I-beams and junk but you can reach it," he said. "It's totally illegal and shit can get so shady back there sometimes. If there wasn't other people fishing around there I definitely wouldn't have felt safe. But I was getting hits on almost every cast out there."

We made plans to meet up that week. With two weeks left in the derby, John's fish was still far and away the leader. No one, it seemed, was going to catch him. I hadn't even gotten a bite at this point, but with what Thomas told me and a new plan of action, I was getting closer.

I had to wait until Thursday for my work schedule to work with the tides since I wanted to fish at least two hours of high tide. I emailed both Jamie Potter and Ben the day before and told them about the mission. Both agreed to meet up, but by the time I was getting off work, I hadn't heard from either. So it was going to be a solo night.

I arrived just after dark. It was pretty quiet and I could hardly hear the water moving up river. I climbed over the concrete barrier and untied the rod from my bike, surveying the route Thomas told me about. There was definitely a fence wreathed in both barbed and razor wire hanging out over the water, and the steel girders lead to a corner of demolished concrete. A light shone near the shoreline by the dock and there was an industrial yard of some kind beyond that. As I was plotting how I was going to ninja my way over toward the pier, a pair of bright lights blinded me and a gleaming white horse of a Range Rover roared up behind me and stopped at the barriers. Two guys got out, I couldn't see them very well because of the flash of the headlights. One went around to the back of the car and started pulling something out. The other approached me and said, "Hey man, you doing some fishing?"

"No, not really," I said, stupidly.

"Oh." He walked around to the other guy, who was fiddling with something big and deflated looking on the ground. I could hear them talking, trying to put something together. Then I recognized the voice: it was Greg, and he and his friend had brought an inflatable 10-foot raft to launch into the river. "The other night we came here and caught about four or five, 30-inches or more on the other side of that pier," he said, pointing to the empty, fenced-off shipping pier. I looked out toward the end of the pier, a few hundred feet out into the river where the current swelled and was ripping hard to the right, upstream. I looked at his half-inflated boat and his friend working the air compressor.

"Yeah, it's a four chamber boat," Greg laughed. "One of the chambers has a leak hahaha. But it's designed to stay afloat with only one chamber fully inflated anyway so..."

I thought of what Robert told me that day in the tackle shop. Greg looked out toward the pier and said, "Boy, you can hear them jumping over there." I looked, but didn't see anything. We talked a bit longer while his friend finished inflating the boat, then Greg put the seats in and then the rods. We launched the boat from a skinny ledge of concrete and I held the boat steady while they climbed in. The water here was pretty calm, the current was definitely pulling but the surface was glass. Out there, beyond that pier the water was as restless as a hot summer night in the Favela. "Good luck," I said as if they were taking off on a Three Hour Tour. As they rowed away with rubber paddles under the glow of the city on low hanging clouds I heard Greg say, "Boy, it's a warm night out here." A few minutes later as I was packing up my gear, I heard him yell, "Mike they're jumping over here! See if you can get over that fence!"