A seventh generation fisherman, Joe Orlando has been fishing out of Gloucester since 1974. He’s captain of the Padre Pio, a 65 foot dragger.

He took ownership of the boat from his sister’s husband and his father, who brought the family here from Sicily in the Nineteen Sixties. Most of Gloucester’s fishermen are first or second generation Americans with ties to several towns in Sicily, which was the source of salt for Gloucester in the days before refrigeration when salted cod made Gloucester the fishing capital of the Western Hemisphere.

Most of the big boats are gone from Gloucester now. As the fishing industry has declined, Gloucester has gone from a big boat fishery to a small boat fishery. Orlando’s boat of 65 feet in length can’t fish the distant offshore grounds of Georges Bank, so it fishes Stellwagen Bank.

The other night I went out with Joe and his son Mario for what turned out to be a very short bit of fishing. Thirteen miles off Gloucester, they dropped the trawl, as the net is called, overboard. Before the net really had time to settle on the sandy bottom, 28 fathoms down, Joe announced his monitors were telling him he already had too much fish in his nets.

Too much fish? Yeah, according to complicated and seemingly crazy regulations, because he has a daily catch quota of 800 pounds of cod, when the net dropped 1500 to 2000 pounds of cod on the deck, we had to push all the extra fish overboard. In order to legally keep the rest of the fish, Joe would have had to stay on Stellwagen Bank another day—without catching anymore fish mind you—before going back to Gloucester with day old fish.

So instead, after fishing for just ten minutes, Joe and Mario headed back to Gloucester with 800 pounds of codfish and the next day they headed back to catch codfish that may have included the fish they’d thrown overboard the night before. If ever you needed an example of how crazy fisheries management has become this is surely it. Whereas they could catch 4000 cod at once, bring it all back fresh, and have it count as five days at sea in the management scheme, instead they have to make five trips with the considerable extra cost in fuel and ice and time, to catch the same amount.

With government scientists and environmentalists claiming that virtually all the stocks are overfished, Joe and his son, who’s an eighth generation fishermen, may be at the end of the family’s history as fishermen.