Most unfortunate ...

... That Sinking Feeling. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Mr. Nugent decries the regimentation of "ill-mannered watermen" who once did business by handshake and lived by codes that an outsider might appreciate but could never really understand. He and his dockmates prefer the yesterdays when "every fisherman was an independent cuss working alongside an independent cuss who happened to own a boat. It worked damn good for a hundred years." Another of Mr. Nugent's characters, the superannuated mob fixer Pink, worries that small-scale commercial fishing is going the way of whaling and that soon, in Mr. Nugent's typically pungent paraphrase, "the docks will turn into some sort of Sturbridge Village by the Sea, sanitized and saltless, with college boys pretending to be deckhands and former pencil pushers posing as captains."