The first skipper I spoke with, Charles Borden, calls me a few days later, early evening.  "We're going out tomorrow, if you want...six am."  I tell him I'll be there.  This is essentially the first mission of my quest.  I try to keep my excitement to a dull roar.

It’s hazy-light, just me and some ghosts down at Lees Wharf at 5:30 AM. A steady wind eases out of the east, like it has been for the last few days. Capt. Borden said they usually didn’t catch much during an easterly blow, and he wanted something picture-worthy. I told him I’m not that great a photographer anyway. So the captain and his crew show up and I’m all in, wind or no. We shove off at 6:15.

The Drake is a beautiful new vessel, delivered from a shipyard out of Maine just four months earlier. She’s nice and wide with plenty of deck space for easy working and stacking traps. The boat is rigged to easily adjust to different species though, so today we’re gill netting - dogfish, monkfish, flounder, skate. It’s been slowing down a little lately, so the crew isn’t quite sure what to expect today, not to mention that the Drake is powering through some huge, soft, rolling swells like the crew hasn’t seen before, adding to the mysterious potential of the day.

                                                                     "Monkfish"

We hit the gear and Josh, a quiet, hardworking kid, gaffs the buoy and passes the lead line to Charles. The skipper loads the hauler and engages the hydraulics. Dogfish and skate start pouring over the rail. The work is quite straightforward. The net passes through the winch and gets passed along a wide sorting table. The crew stands staggered along the table, wrestling the snared fish from the webbing. Matt, the other deckhand, carefully flakes the net in a bin at the end of the table, ready to set back out without getting snarled or tangled. Though Matt says he’s always thought about fishing he and Josh are both relatively new to the job. They perform diligently and efficiently. We haul four sets in about three hours. Charles looks over the booty, nods ’not bad’, and turns it for the beach.

                                                                  "Teamwork"

Charles Borden conducts himself with a certain calmness, a reserve indicating great confidence and focus. He doesn’t waste any words, not even when discussing the fishing life. When I suggest that the new boat means that he’s in it for the long haul, he simply states, “There’s nothing else I’m interested in doing.” His father, a long-time industry manager, introduced Charles to the game early on. In his early teens, Charles fished a couple hundred traps out of a little skiff down Houseboat Row, over in Westport Harbor. While all his friends waited tables and pushed lawnmowers, Charles made his own hours, not to mention twice the money in half the time. (I have to laugh because Roche, the Key West native from my Florida trip, told me the exact same story. He said, “Fishing is more fun, the smaller the boat gets.“) Then Charles went to college, or enrolled anyway, for one semester, hacked around at a couple of other things, but came back to the ocean with the positive focus of knowing that this is the lifestyle he wants. So he does what he has to do to make it work.

                                                               "Houseboat Row"

“You gotta fish multiple species these days, with all the regulations. I tried having another job, then a little boat and a big boat, whatever, but you just end up spreading yourself too thin. You have one boat that can fish different seasons, dedicate yourself to the effort, and you’ll get back what you put in.”

I’m glad that maxim has proven itself for Charles, and I wonder how many commercial boys would agree with him. He chuckles about the “interesting conversations” with his Dad, and about how the fisherman swarm the man, peppering him with questions and demands, whenever he happens to come down around the docks. Fishermen fight a constant battle with the government’s regulatory bodies - not to mention the weather and the fish stocks - to know where they stand today, to try to predict tomorrow. Many live with the fear of having their ambitions simply snatched away.

Charles knows the future though. As the subject of the weekend comes up, I ask him half-joking if he’s going to church the next morning. He smiles slightly. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ll be right here.”