Watching a Modern-Day Tom Sawyer in Dana Point

His fishing gear was a cardboard tube that probably came out of a roll of paper towels, about 8 or 10 feet of monofilament line wrapped around it, and a tiny hook on the other end. No reels, no sinkers, no floats.

Within easy reach was a paper cup filled with small pieces of some sort of bait.

With this kind of rig, the boy couldn’t do much fancy casting, couldn’t get any real distance at all, so he had climbed over the railing along a walkway in Dana Point Harbor, dropped down the side of the concrete seawall and, since it was low tide, was able to stand on the rocks with water surging and gurgling in the spaces between them.

He baited the hook, unwound a few feet of the line from the cardboard tube, and swung the bait so that it sank between a couple of rocks.

Almost at once, the line and the cardboard tube began to twitch. The bait, clearly visible only inches below the surface, was being pecked at by several minnow-sized fish, 1 1/2 to 2 inches long. In a matter of moments the hook was clean.

By now, several harbor visitors were leaning against the railing, watching this modern-day Tom Sawyer.

The boy seemed unaware of them and showed no embarrassment or disappointment at the loss of his bait, but calmly reached into the paper cup, re-baited his hook, and swung it back into the water. All of his motions seemed deliberate, well-practiced and, for him at least, enjoyable.

The line twitched again and soon was stripped of bait.

The boy, probably 11 or 12 years old and neatly dressed in walking shorts, shirt and rubber-soled shoes, dipped his fingers in the cup, re-baited and once more swung out his line.

At that moment, on a recent sunny afternoon, there probably were scores of boys his age running in groups, skateboarding on crowded sidewalks, sitting in front of television sets in dark rooms, yelling and screeching in noisy arcades full of electronic game machines.

Maybe there were some others like him, happy doing something as old-fashioned as fishing for minnows with less than a dime’s worth of gear--fishing alone and not even having any luck.

Time after time, the boy re-baited his hook with a patience that obviously was too much for the series of strollers who stopped, watched for a minute or two, then walked on.

Finally, his bait cup was empty. He rolled the line around the cardboard tube, which he stuck in a back pocket of his shorts. He squashed the paper cup and put it in his shirt pocket so as not to leave any litter. He didn’t have any minnows to take home.

He started climbing the seawall to the railing.

“Do you fish here a lot?” I asked him.

“Pretty often, maybe two or three times a week.” His response was quick and friendly.

“What’s your name?”

“Keith,” he said, and paused. “Just Keith. I’m really not supposed to be here today. My parents. . . . “

“I understand. Well, do you ever catch anything?”

“Oh, sure. I got one last week.”

“What’d you do with it?”

“Fed it to my cat. She liked it.”