I confessed to my girlfriend via text message that I was probably the worst fisherman I knew. I'd just completed a trifecta of fishing ignominy—lost one lure, then another, then three snags on five casts inside of ten minutes. It was a gray, heavy day. "I don't think I'm supposed to be a fisherman," I wrote her. I sneaked through a fence behind a Con Ed power plant and looked out across the river to the gray city, a screeching sound through the guides on my rod. The wind was howling across the East River from the west at 30 miles an hour, and the green water was rushing downstream and swirling in hurricane-like patterns on the surface, hammering the bulkhead below me and splashing and foaming aggressively. I was completely miserable but determined to catch a fish. To my left was a barbed wire fence covered in fishing line and rusted tackle, like the Kite Eating Tree in those Charlie Brown comics. All over the ground was broken glass and old hooks with snell knots still attached. An empty bag of chips whipped past me and the water beckoned hungrily. She texted back "Sounds like you're casting into a pit of despair." She was so right.

This is how I spent most of the month-or-so-long Brooklyn Fishing Derby: like an extended episode of Fishing With John, the critically acclaimed series starring John Lurie fishing with celebrity guests in which all scenes of actually catching fish are edited out. Here I was, religiously fishing for the first time in more than 15 years, searching for I-don't-know-what out of the Brooklyn side of the East River for a story I proposed to Casey in the beginning of October, romanticizing this idea of nothingness—the seeming opposite of the types of personal stories in Harpers and the New Yorker in which the author struggles to shoot that first buffalo or nail down that dodgy interview, and eventually succeeds. I was entertaining a somewhat different outcome to this story, however—what if the author set out on this quest to learn something new and discover something about themselves, set about to write about his experiences and devoted a month or more chasing this story, daily taking copious notes, and then found in the end he had nothing to write about, except, perhaps, that he was a terrible fisherman? Because three-and-a-half weeks into the derby, I hadn't had a single bite.

I first heard about the Brooklyn Fishing Derby from the posters that popped up around the neighborhood where I work. Williamsburg being the hipster epicenter of every awful trend of the last seven to ten years, endlessly and ruthlessly co-opting other people's ways of living and making an ironic hat out of it, I figured the posters had to be some kind of hipster prank. One Saturday while walking to the subway I passed by the fishing derby booth. It was three guys sitting at a card table with a pile of photocopied applications and posters in front of them. Some of the applications had ink written on them. Although my initial contact with the derby people was brief and fleeting, I studied the mental image closely on the train ride into the city, walked distractedly with my girlfriend through Chinatown until she finally said "Well, you may as well go back and talk to them." My girlfriend, whose father's side of the family are all fishermen and hunters, was very gracious.

It was late in the day when we got back to the derby booth on Bedford Avenue. The three guys were still there and I grabbed a couple applications, already plotting to team-up with a friend who was living for a long time on my couch. Two of the guys, one with a beard and another who reminded me slightly of a young Tom Waits circa The Cotton Club formed the Brooklyn Urban Anglers Association over the summer in order to organize events such as this one. I asked them a couple customary questions, like the rules about judging fish. It all turned out to be very informal: there were four eligible fish species—striped bass, bluefish, bonito, and false albacore. The derby was all catch and release. If you caught a fish you would submit a digital photo or video via email. You were supposed to hold a tape measure against the fish to indicate size. "Try to make it look real," one of them said to me. "Like, don't put a picture of a barracuda in it or anything." Although it was officially called the Brooklyn Fishing Derby, spots like Sheepshead Bay weren't eligible for the event. Instead the organizers opted for a stretch of the East River from the Valentino Pier in Red Hook, to the Gantry Pier in Long Island City, technically Queens, just across Newtown Creek, which is widely regarded as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the country. The East River, while probably not the first place a fisherman would choose to hunt big striped bass, was nonetheless a migratory route for these fish, with a strong tide, fast, deep water and plenty of man-made cover.

I took the applications still not wholly convinced the event would not be a self-celebratory hipster excuse to wear Bass Pro Shops hats and camouflage overalls, but the idea of getting back into fishing was starting to crank the dusty wheels in my head. The derby began October 1, which by chance was also the first day of a new state law requiring fishing licenses for all recreational saltwater anglers, and ran through the first week of November. Prizes were yet undetermined, and the derby rules appeared to be directly cut and paste from another, more organized, fishing derby, like the one held in Martha's Vineyard held every year. That derby is the subject of David Kinney's book The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and The Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish, which, I imagined, would be like the adult version of this story, where dedicated, veteran fishermen ruin their marriages searching for that Big Fish. This story, I hoped would not be the one where we learned how to tie advanced clinch knots and tried not to hook ourselves. Maybe we'd catch something.