Zoned to Extinction.

• Author: Paige, Sean
• Position: How government regulations affect commercial fishing

Overzealous regulation may soon render commercial fishermen a dying breed

"We've got water coming in!" the captain announced abruptly as he poked a flashlight through a torso-wide hatch to where the Detroit diesels fretfully thrumbled below.

Stunned by the statement, I did a quick assessment of the situation. I was on a small fishing boat a 20-mile swim from the nearest land, Fort Jefferson and the Dry Tortugas. It was the dead of night in seas notorious for their sharks and hull-ripping coral. We were taking on water and, what's more, our depth-finding fathometer was on the fritz, making our proximity to that coral a troubling mystery. Black waves were grabbing hold of the idle craft and pounding on it broadside.

A leaking boat in dark and dangerous seas wasn't my only reason for anxiety, however. The captain was a Key West fisherman--a "conch" in the local vernacular--named Harvey Watkins, whom I'd met the previous day. All I'd really heard about Harvey was that he had once done prison time and might be a little crazy. His mates, Christian and Ramon, were strangers to me as well. And after having watched everyone aboard (including myself) dip into the beer cooler with great frequency all day, my confidence in our collective reflexes and judgment was at ebb tide.

This was a bit more than I'd bargained for when I showed up at Watkins' modest Key West bungalow the day before. I was looking for a story about government regulations that were creating a new endangered species in the southern tip of Florida: commercial fishermen. Watkins, I had heard, was one of the best of a dying breed of "crawfishermen," the area's jargon for lobstermen. He worked the distant and dangerous waters around the Dry Tortugas, which would soon become the site of the nation's largest "no fishing" zone, a disturbing new approach to fisheries management being pushed by federal bureaucrats, environmentalists, and others. This zone represents the boldest step yet toward the creation of a national network of marine wilderness areas, mandated by an executive order, that may eventually blanket large areas of U.S. coastal waters, depriving both sport and commercial fishers of their most fertile fishing grounds.

The waves continued to pound and I desperately tried to assure myself that this couldn't really be happening. I recalled with bitter amusement that this type of participant-observer reporting is sometimes called "immersion journalism." The captain and his crew (who had hurriedly emerged from the berthing space in nothing but briefs and rubber boots) began moving with amazing efficiency and confidence, quickly clearing away gear from the rectangular coffin lid shielding the boat's flooding bowels.

With practiced precision, Watkins and his crew found and fixed a ruptured engine intake hose that was the source of the problem--one of a hundred acts of grace under pressure I saw the crew exhibit during what was, to them, just another routine haul out to sea. Technically, they're fishermen. But life at sea, I quickly began to appreciate, also re quires them to be carpenters, diesel mechanics, electricians, butchers, chemists, medical corpsmen, and short-order cooks.

Spending even a couple of days in their world will make you understand that even the priciest lobster dinner is worth every penny. Quarters on Watkins' 48-foot Fryde Conch are spare and impossibly cramped. Life aboard is a constant battle against rust, mildew, and rot. The stench of bait clings even in a stiff breeze. The slop-covered deck pitches wildly, and working on it in high seas is a job for the Wallendas. There are a thousand ways to get slashed, crushed, snagged, speared, or dragged overboard, with no medical help--save for a bottle of Captain Morgan's stashed in the wheelhouse--within easy reach. The boat is a playground for tetanus. Scorpions nest in the rope coils. Competence and sound instincts are a must, because even minor mistakes invite major disaster. It's a difficult life, though men like Watkins love it and want no other.

Those are the unavoidable dangers of a fishing life. What really exercises fishermen like Watkins, he explained to me bitterly in our days together, are the threats from dry land: meddlesome government agencies and litigious environmental groups that have descended on this serene southern...