But this morning, attired as I was with my bag of hand-made Lefty, Wade and Harry Livingston plugs, my Van Stall reel taped onto my new graphite "meat stick," I arrived at the Hook's North Beach parking lot about five am. Eager to be at the fish, and with enough coffee in my system to make the half hour walk along the eastern shore of the Hook to the point facing New York, (the "Rip"), to make even my lazy carcass seem lightweight and springy.

The early morning blackness is one of those wildly beautiful times when the anticipation of catching fish looms larger than any other, the mind replaying past conquests with a fervid self-inflating approbation, while hope swells in the breast. Much as I walk the jetties near my home, I was at the Hook, where the big "lunkers" roamed before their migration south, and I was imagining I would be adding to my limited repertoire of "landed" beauties a few hours hence. My biggest Bass being a twenty-six I caught off the Pullman Ave. jetty three years earlier, I kept dreaming, as it were, of getting a fish that would make my socks go up and down like windowshades.

As I trudged along the sand, passing fishermen already at the watery mysteries, I heard a "Ya-HOO!!!" and came upon a kid, about seventeen years old, standing well back from the water's lapping edge. He was shivering from the cold, and no small wonder as unlike myself, all decked out in Healy-Hansens, Red Ball boots, and every imaginable bit of appropriate angler's attire, he was wearing a sweatshirt from some high school, street sneakers, and in his hands was a two-piece rod and reel set one might buy at any K-mart for twenty-nine ninety-five.

He had no plug bag, no light, and as he hunched over to take the line in his hands to drag what looked like a small cadillac up from the water's edge, I could see his one plug was tied directly to the line with no snap.

"Ya-HOO!" he bellowed again, finally sitting back onto the sand beside his quarry, slapping its heaving side with the flat of his hand.

"Hey, Mister, ain't this the cat's meow?" His adenoidal adolescent voice vaguely reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman's, only perhaps a bit more reedy, as though Dustin had both a cold and clothespin on his nose.

I looked down at the fish and my stomach gave a lurch. For there, resting on the sand like a beached striped Manatee, was a Striped Bass of about thirty pounds. That this weedy youth had managed such a feet wearing street shoes and with a plug tied to what looked to be twelve pound test both amazed and sickened me.

"Sheesh!" was my clever response.

"Yeah, man. My first time. Holy ****!"

"Son, that's the fish of a lifetime," I croaked, jealousy prompting me to speculate that if I savaged him quickly enough, buried his slim body in the dunes, and hightailed it back to the car, I might get to the weigh-in shop in West End in just enough time to concoct a palatably realistic story.

"You kiddin? ****, check this out!" and he hopped up with an agility that reminded me middle-age is a time when the esprit of youth can make a man jealous enough of easy mobility to both loathe his creaking slowness and want to kill those for whom activity is not preceded by swallowing a handful of Advil. I moved my light to where the mossy-faced youth had stopped and there, on the sand, was a fish a good ten pounds larger than the one I had just seen the glabrous twit beach.

As I fixed my eyes in sickeningly envious stupidity on his forty, he capered back to the water, took the thirty by the tail, and dragged its sandy form to lie beside the leviathan forty. There together, like twin testaments to the wicked arbitrariness of Fate, lay two fish a dozen Bass fishermen might angle a lifetime for and never so much as see, let alone catch. And here was this young mooncalf, barely old enough to drive, standing shivering in his high school sweatshirt, Yankees baseball cap, with his K-mart two-piece rod and reel lying in the sand, grinning like a possum eating bumblebees while I shrank inside myself from scalding hate, envy and self-loathing.

"****," he said again, "this one's bettern I thought!" He slapped his thigh, tapped the still breathing thirty with his half-laced, red Keds high-top, and asked "Hey, Pop, you gotta smoke?"

Wordlessly I handed him a Camel and lighted it for him, hoping he succumbed to instant cancer, heart disease and stroke, patted his shoulder and told him to take it easy. He rambled off a few more adolescent curses of glee, and danced around his two huge beasts while I wandered off up the shoreline in a daze. My only satisfaction being the knowledge that the likelihood of his ever coming so close to another fish of either size again being slim or none.

A few days later I read in the Asbury Park Press that a fellow weighed in a thirty-one and a forty-three. In the years since I began fishing, with all the time I've spent on barnacled rocks, alongside pockets, guts and roiling jetty fronts in the dark, all the thousands of dollars lost to custom wrapped rods and the latest in reels, hand-made plugs and thermal waders, boots and gloves, this young Starbuck, with no more knowledge than a titmouse on a dinner plate, had bested me, most of the men I knew to be superb anglers, and most of all the dedicated fishermen along the entire coast.

I wondered if perhaps one of my great-grandfathers had robbed an Egyptian tomb in the dim past, the Pharaoh's curse wending its way down through the centuries to land on my hapless form. That morning I caught three "rats," about five pounds each, and one "keeper." A slim sleek fish of no more than a millimeter longer than the minimum.

How's that for a lesson in humility and the vagaries of chance?