Access is a sensitive subject for fishermen, perhaps even more so than the license debate. Nowhere did anti-government sentiment simmer more restlessly than the little tackle shop in Greenpoint. I went to see Robert after the first few fruitless fishing outings, both to see if he knew about other viable night fishing spots and to pick up more lures and tackle since at this point I was losing an average of four lures a night.

"I don't know anymore," he said with a sigh. "I used to fish a nice spot but now they get you for trespassing sometimes. 17 years ago when I opened the shop there was access all over. People were free to go anywhere to fish. But now the police are like taxman but in police uniform. They have to make their money, that's all they care about. So now there is no place to fish.

"It's a huge problem," he continued, sitting back in his chair behind the messy counter. "[The city] wants us to fish the north end of Brooklyn and Queens, but there are so few places now. They listen to the property owners and kick the fishermen out."

A particular point of enmity with Robert is shore fishing, where the city or the state will make a media event about a new area for fishermen in one breath, then close prime and venerable shorelines to fishing in the next. "They open one pier, they're showing it on the TV and talking about providing access [to the water] for the people and meanwhile they're closing off 20 miles of shoreline to fishing," he said, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. "Then they put you in a spot with like 500 other people. Who the fuck wants to do that?"

A few days later I decided to check out one of the old spots Robert talked about. I got off work early with about an hour of daylight left and headed out on my bike to do some more reconnaissance. That first night of disastrous-but-humorous-results I saw several blocks down an abandoned pier stretching out into the river. It was clearly unusable, and it looked like much of the walkway was sitting in the water or rapidly falling apart. The pillars appeared to be sticking up out of the water, free from any necessary encumbrance like a plank of wood. Even if the pier was dilapidated, I still thought it would provide some good cover for fish. I told Kevin that one night—the only night he came out to fish: "I think we can climb this fence, run alongside this building, sneak through that far fence somehow and we could get pretty close to that pier." It was unnecessarily complicated and daring, because as I rode up to the spot Robert told me about, there was a driveway that lead all the way to the water and ended a few hundred feet away from the pier. The river seemed to slow down around here, and it cut into a tiny cove amongst no small amount of industrial trash, mostly piles of concrete. There were already two guys fishing on the concrete platform at the end of the street and they greeted me with some unease, but eventually relaxed. This part of the driveway was tucked well away from the main streets and there was no shortage of shady characters coming and going back here, like the guy I passed on my way in who was trying to hot wire a stolen pickup truck. The two guys fishing were older, one significantly older than the other, and at first they hesitated as if they didn't speak English. It turned out the younger one spoke English fine, but the older one did not.

"How's the fishing going?" I asked.

"Okay. Nothing yet. Maybe too early," the younger one said. They were fishing with clams, their lines casted out into the little inlet between the decaying pier and what appeared to be a half-sunken twisted wreck of a steel bridge. They had little bells clipped to the tips of their rods, so they just stood around waiting for a jingle to tell them a fish was on the line, and occasionally reeling in to make sure the bait was still on the hook.

I told him I just started fishing the East River and asked if this was a good spot to fish.

"Yeah, it can be good," he said. "The biggest I've caught here is a 33-incher. Another guy caught a 46-incher here."

"Thirty-three is a pretty good fish though," I said.

"Yeah, it was a pig," he said. "But can you imagine the 46-incher..."

We talked a little longer and it was starting to get dark. The guy trying to start the truck was still back there and I wanted to get out of there before he started asking me for spare change or something. I asked the guy fishing about bait versus lures, since lures were all I'd been using/losing so far.

"They work pretty good." Then he smiled, "But then you gotta... ehhhhh," he said, miming casting and reeling in over and over again. I laughed. The repetitive nature of casting over and over could get tiring, especially when you aren't catching anything. It was a feeling I was getting to know pretty well. I wished them luck and got back on my bike. On my way out, the guy trying to steal the truck asked me if he "could borrow five bucks until tomorrow."