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The catch: what happens when industry insiders write their own regulations? Welcome to the fishing business

OUT ON THE OPEN ATLANTIC, the approach of darkness brings no end to work on a lone fishing boat that hauls in multiple catches a day, 24 hours a day, from the Georges Bank shoals. Isabel S. is not one of those wooden Winslow Homer dories manned by yellow-slickered oarsmen. It's a 95-foot steel-hulled trawler, powered by a 1,000-horsepower Caterpillar diesel V-8 engine and manned by a crew of five men--captain, mate, engineer, cook, and deckhand--who work in shifts around the clock for as long as they are fishing, usually for a week at a time. The boat's

hold can carry 180,000 pounds offish layered in crushed ice, though owner Robert Lane says he rarely carries more than half that.

The weather on the North Atlantic in February ranges from uncomfortable to hostile, with air temperatures in the 20s and water temperatures in the 40s, and wave heights commonly exceeding 6 to 12 feet. The winds are relentless. At this time of year, a man overboard in heavy seas could survive only a short while. "When the seas start running up to 20 feet," Lane says, "we knock off and lay to. It's too risky to have the men out on deck under those conditions."Lucrative as it can be, commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in America.

Incongruously, it's also a business freighted with paperwork. Fishing is so heavily regulated by the federal government that Jeffrey Hatfield, who's run this boat for Lane for 17 years, boards Isabel S. lugging a briefcase full of regulatory documents. Trawler owners like Lane, along with long-liners like Mike Russo--who runs Susan Lee out of Chatham, Massachusetts--spend much of their time trying to stay on top of groundfish regulations like the infamous Amendment 13, a document that's four inches thick. The effectiveness of all that paper is another story. "The hardest thing about this fishery is the year-to-year uncertainty," Russo says. "The plans take so long to develop that they're defunct by the time we get them, and the rules change so often it's impossible for me to do a business plan." Both boat operators are savvy about their industry and belie the stereotype of the rapacious fisherman bent on catching every last fish. They understand conservation. And both are deeply frustrated. "The lack offish isn't going to do me in," Russo says. "The management of the fishery is going to do me in."

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