It’s only about ten in the morning, and we’re already headed back to port. At the rear of the boat, under the huge reel holding the trawl, Jeff Emerson, the young crewman, is gutting about half a ton of codfish and plopping the carcasses into large plastic tubs. Muscling other tubs of crushed ice up from the hold, he ices the dressed fish, and covers the tubs with heavy wet fabric. Flounders, dogfish, and two “keeper” lobsters go into separate tubs. Dave has put a country music CD into the player by his seat, and a speaker on the outside of the wheelhouse blares it over Jeff as he works. I ask him if he likes country music. Not much, he responds, but it’s better than nothing. I ask him if he’d prefer Mozart, and he makes a wry face clearly unrelated to his labors.

Jeff graduated recently from UNH with a major in chemical engineering, expecting to go straight into a job. He might have, too, if there’d been any jobs. There weren’t – and apparently still aren’t – so, like some of his friends who financed their education by working part-time at the Yankee Fishermen’s Coop, he went full-time on a fishing boat. He’s been on this boat about a year now. He helps Dave get it ready to go out in the morning, and then grabs an hour’s nap while they steam out to the fishing grounds.

At the start of the trawl, Jeff and Dave pay out the net and the heavy steel “doors” that hold it open. Jeff then keeps an eye on things for the hour or so that they drag the trawl along the bottom. Dave stops when he feels they have a catch – this morning he said he could tell by the resistance that there was at least one lobster trap in the trawl, which is a pain because it blocks the “cod end,” the purse at the end of the trawl – and he and Jeff reel in the heavy cables, picking out rubbish as it comes aboard. Besides two rusting, derelict lobster traps, today’s haul contained a set of orange slicker trousers, several sport-fishing cod lines with big hooks and lead weights, and a piece of half-inch rope. Dave had to cut the mesh to get one of the traps free, and before reeling in more of the net, repaired it in just a couple of minutes with a net needle, a gadget that’s always been a complete mystery to me. Then they resumed the retrieve.

When the cod end finally came aboard, with help from an additional winch, Jeff yanked on the rope holding it shut, and the catch dumped out into a low-sided 8-foot-square pen at the stern. Jeff tossed the fish into the plastic tubs and stacked them. He measured the lobsters, banded the claws of the keepers, and dropped them into a bucket of sea water. Then he went to work with a very sharp knife, attended by an enthusiastic crowd of herring and black-backed gulls that watched and commented loudly on his every move.

Meanwhile, Croy Carlin, a 2010 University of Maine graduate and the fisheries inspector aboard for this day’s trawl, was busy measuring and cataloging the fish that would be discarded. Ocean fisheries today are managed as never before, and the boats that are still in business are assigned specific annual quotas for each species they take. At the moment Dave is fishing for cod, but the cod will move farther offshore during July, and he’ll switch to silver hake, which require a different net size and conformation. The discards from each haul are deducted from his quotas, which provides him a strong incentive to fish specifically, and renders the inspectors – assigned randomly and often by the fisheries agency – about as popular as meter maids.

If you want to go a-fishing, it helps to be an early riser. I left a 2:45 wake-up call at the desk of the Holiday Inn and met Steve, the Public Television videographer, at 3:15. We arrived at the pier by 4:15. Security is surprisingly tight for a fishing pier. In spite of our clearly labeled vehicle, the guard had us park where he could keep an eye on us until Dave showed up and brought the Ellen Diane in to the wharf to pick up our gear. The fisheries inspector was a bit late; he’d called to say he’d had a flat tire, but was on his way again, with his GPS indicating 17 minutes to ETA. Dave edged out through the anchorage and under the Hampton-Seabrook bridge, and we were off to sea. I very rarely get seasick, but with a camera aboard, this would have been a worse-than-usual place to do it, so I was chomping salty party biscuits and downing carbonated Sunkists.

Dave started his fishing career at the age of 13, going out as a hand on party boats. Later he got his master’s license and had his own boat, but found that it palled after a while; too many of his clients defined “party” differently from the way it was intended. And there were the occasional medical emergencies: Codfish hooks are barbed and quite large, and removing them from human flesh is unavoidably painful. If a passenger got one under an eyelid, the party was over and the boat headed straight for shore.

Dave has at least hundreds of great stories. As the autopilot and GPS guided us out to the fishing spot, he was able to tell a few dozen with very little provocation. He expresses ambivalence toward strict government reporting requirements, but clearly appreciates that he’s often able to fill his boat with a single drag and make a good living from the sea. As a reminder of his other life ashore, a photograph of his wife, Ellen Diane, graces the dashboard right behind the wheel.