These fishers are, on an industrial scale, the last hunters of wild things, men and women who go to sea to catch the finfish and shellfish the rest of us love. This is not weekend sailing on the bay. It is using axes to chop frozen spray from wheelhouse and mast before the boat becomes top-heavy and rolls under. Later in life I bored my long-suffering children by pointing out to them the high bows and heavy construction of commercial fishing boats compared with the pleasure boats tied up in the same harbors. It's the difference between the Western and Eastern ways of riding horses, as explained to me once by a wrangler at a dude ranch.
Fishing boats are serious.
My admiration for commercial fishermen has not diminished by the proverbial iota. But I'm finally having to face a terrible truth, one a child could have figured out but that somehow does not seem possible in the vastness of ocean from one horizon to the next. Dragging those nets across the bottom, year after year and decade after decade, wrecks the bottom. Reality has come to face me. A couple of years ago I chanced to see on television a film of an otter trawl moving across the bottom in the clear water of the Sea of Cortez.