The story is told in East Texas about the notorious noodler who showed up one Saturday afternoon on the Crockett town square, very excited. "Noodling is sort of like arm-wrestling a big fish barehanded."

Port Aransas waters had never seemed so dead as in the summer of 1950. I couldn't buy a bite anywhere . . . surf, piers, jetties, passes or bays. So I went to see Bill Ellis, the owner-in-residence of the historic Tarpon Inn.

He was born in 1875 in Houston County, Texas, the son of a circuit-riding Methodist preacher. He was named Robert Joseph Spence, but everybody except family called him “Mister Bob.” Sometime during the first World War, he was elected sheriff of Houston County, an office he held into the socalled Roaring Twenties.

You have to understand at the outset that I am not a real bass fisherman. You can tell just by looking at me and my gear. I don't own a polyester jumpsuit with a patch on the breast pocket, I don't own a bass boat (except for an inflatable, named "Riff-Raft") with more electronics than a Russian trawler. I do not possess a graphite rod with anything written on the shaft, nor a freshwater reel with line heavier than 6-pound-test.

I couldn't have felt sorrier for myself as I sat on the long veranda of Tarpon Inn at Port Aransas, Texas, brooding over my bad luck. This was the big fishing trip of the season for me. The one I'd planned and saved for all summer, and it was a bust. For two days, the last two of my visit to this famous fishing spot, I'd been skunked. It wasn't the weather or the water or the scarcity of fish. Conditions were O.K., but I simply couldn't connect. Somehow I always missed being in the right place at the right time.