The numbers don't lie.
Last Wednesday, Feb. 3, was my 6,429th sail since May 7, 1987. So I think perhaps I've seen a thing or two on the local water, and I've dodged a few boats in the harbor in my time afloat, eh?
Well get this: Wednesday was the first day in those 6,429 times that I didn't see a single boat underway in Gloucester Harbor. Not one, from 3 to 4 p.m., in the middle of what I'd call working hours on a Wednesday. Everyone just tied up — what boats there were left, that is — just sitting there.
Just as I pulled up on the dock, I could see a lobster boat coming around the bend. But he didn't look like he was even out fishing, just transiting from across the harbor.
Nothing — just the ghost waves of the boats that aren't moving anymore, lapping at Gloucester memories.
The Coasties and their bully buddies at NMFS and NOAA have done their work too well. And still, the sinister eye of the Federal Fortress of Solitude up on the hill in the industrial park woods monitors away on their destructive progress to the fleets. Time silently ticks by in its usual portentous way on the water. Silent monitoring requiring less and less manpower with each passing month and each passing boat.
It was 38 degrees, or some such temperature. There should be boats out here, I told myself.
How many times have I looked under my sail to see disaster headed my way if I didn't make a big, fast alteration of course. Sometimes it would be two or three boats, headed in different directions, crissing and crossing, working and prospering with the freezing sweat of honest toil, an honest day's catch burying their waterline.
But not anymore. The silent pall of regulation hangs in the air, handed down from the Fortress on The Hill — as silent and stately as in every era of bureaucratic enforcement back to the days of Napoleon, the Czars, the British colonialists, and the Russian masters.
To step outside the rules — the forces that be, the blindly obeying forces of enforcement — is too risky, too expensive and possibly, too life-threatening.
Literally and figuratively trigger-happy? Oh yes, oh yes. Their armed masters and enforcers keep their watch on, almost looking forward to confronting any boat that comes along. To be underway is to appear guilty of something, anything. Just, maybe, guilty of being out.
Is that an offense yet? It's like I imagine it was, perhaps still is, being black in a southern town; you're out, so you're up to something illegal.
We've seen the "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire." Now we have the "Rise and Fall of the Family Fishing Business."
Someday, someone will write the definitive book on the federal government's 30-year insane, stupid, runaway plan to hyperinflate the fleet under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, round up too many fish, then kill off the fleets as fast as they can — all the while blaming the fishermen in both directions.
It's a great way for our president's minions to create jobs in a down economy — to let Nurse Jane run the families out of the business, all the while preaching salvation and manifest destiny.
Mr. Obama can't claim to not know what's going on by now. The subject has finally been raised in Washington. Are the Bad Guys in the White Hats going to have to clean up their act, or will they be able to keep their cover as Nurse Jane's private police fleet?
The zest, the relish of the uninformed, uniformed harassment force bristles with impatience, waiting for its next victim.
Ahhh, they've done their job too well. No traffic today? They'll have to go out of the harbor to find boats to endlessly search, endlessly tie up in red tape, to scour the decks for even an extra tail or a fin here and there, out of line, out of place.
Be careful a seagull doesn't drop an extra tail or head on your deck, fishermen. You could, have, will end up with a five-figure fine for letting nature run its course.
The numbers don't lie. If Nurse Jane has her way, fishermen, yours, too, might soon be up.
Gloucester resident Gordon Baird is co-founder of Billboard's Musician Magazine and is producer of the "Gloucester Chicken Shack" TV show.
