For a brief moment this weekend, I think I understood how a Gloucester fisherman feels.

My brother-in-law and I went to what has become our favorite fishing spot again, on the pier between Lynn and Revere Beach, this time armed with a fresh change of bait (clams and mackerel, instead of herring) and blessing from the wife to stay and fish for as long as we damned well pleased. About an hour after dead low tide, we started getting big bites on our bait as the incoming ocean brought in some hungry sea creatures, and next thing you know George is pulling his first striped bass out of the water. What a beautiful fish! But it was rather small, so he threw it back without even thinking about it, although a family of Cambodians crabbing off the pier thought he was crazy. Then he catches another striper! Again, it's a little on the tiny side, so back in the water it goes. And yet another! At this point I'm starting to feel a little left out, but before I have time to feel sorry for myself I get a huge hit on my line, and as I try to reel it in and I can feel whatever I've hooked is zigging and zagging and bending my pole so far that I'm afraid it's going to snap. I reel my cheap little Wal-Mart reel as hard as I can, hoping the whole contraption won't disintegrate before I get this fish up onto the pier, and then I see it. A striper! And he's twice as large as the ones my brother-in-law has been catching. Immediately I'm thinking about how I'm going to cook this thing (I love to cook, and especially seafood!), when I hear one of the old salts fishing alongside of us say, "that's probably a 19-incher," and then my heart starts to sink. 19 inches! No way! It's gotta be bigger than that. But no, I haul this big elegant fish up onto the wooden deck and someone whips out a tape measure, and what I thought had to be easily more than two feet long turns out to be between 18 and 19 inches, well short of the 28-inch legal minimum size for a "keeper".

My first thought, standing right there, realizing that I had to throw my catch back was this: To hell with the law, I'll keep it anyway. What right do some pencil pushers in the Department of Fish and Wildlife have to tell me what I take from the sea and what I don't? Then I thought: Well, if I don't keep it, who's to say that someone else won't catch it five minutes later and take it home themselves? The Cambodian crabbers already though my brother-in-law was demented for throwing back small fry - what are they going to make of me tossing back something almost twice as big? So I stewed and I stewed, railed against the injustice of the situation, and briefly contemplated keeping the fish again before I finally made the realization that this is what it must feel like to be a professional fisherman ALL THE TIME. Elation at the catch, indignation at the law, but a gnawing sense of guilt at the thought of taking too much, too soon. In the end I tossed the big silvery fish back into the deep, where I knew it belonged, hoping we'd meet again someday.