Port Clinton, Ohio. November. It's a brisk 36 degrees, the chop on the lake could pulverize a small boat, and everything is masked in a foggy, dreary grayness that only old port towns can achieve.

Abutting a small marina at the end of Main Street is Port Clinton Fisheries (PCF) Inc. Although plenty of companies package and distribute Lake Erie fish and a handful of fishermen hold on to individual commercial licenses, this is the last commercial fishing business on the American side of Lake Erie. Rich Stinson, the owner and manager of PCF, inherited the company from his father. He's worked here for nearly 30 years, since junior high, in about every possible capacity: cleaning fish, scaling fish, selling fish, packing fish, running boats, pulling nets, mending nets, and now owning and managing. But his is a dying breed.

Most sport fishermen - or "sporties," as Stinson calls them - do not like commercial fishing. They don't like to see nets out in the water catching hundreds of fish at a time. So, when they have a bad day on the lake, they blame the nets. And Ohio listens. In fact, the state of Ohio's alliance with the sport fishing industry against the commercial industry is so infamous that it has inspired articles in many fishing and outdoor magazines and even a mention in Lake Erie's entry on Wikipedia.

The results have not been pretty for the commercial industry. It has lost over half of Ohio's total quota, the amount the Ohio Department of Natural Resources says anglers can remove from the lake each year, and all of Ohio's walleye quota, to the sporties. If that isn't enough, PCF must record and report its catches to the pound; sporties only have to report at a 70-percent level of accuracy. And that's just one rule. In the Ohio Administrative Code, a good 20 pages of Chapter 1501 are reserved for commercial fishing regulations.

For these and other reasons, there is a lot of tension between commercial fisherman and the state, between commercial and sports fishers, and between fishers and environmentalists.

Stinson says he talks to "some" sports fisherman. "I'm more on their side than they are on ours," he says. "But like the nasty, mean ones from the Lake Erie Charter Boats Association? Oh no, no way. Here's the thing: The fish have made a supreme comeback, but you would think the way tree huggers are talking, we're massively killing them. The fact is quotas need to be taken to keep the lake healthy. And - now you have to realize I'm not against sport fishing - sporties are not catching their quota. Since they've instituted the quotas, they've never caught it! So we hate Ohio because we're banking fish."

I ask what he means by banking fish.

"Let's say I'm supposed to take 100 pounds out of here, and I only take 10. That leaves 90, right? And then I keep doing that year after year. I'm banking fish. Well, fish die. And the older a fish gets, the more sterile it becomes, so it's not laying eggs, but it's still eating the baitfish ..."

"So too many fish are left behind, and these fish exploit the resource."

"Right! So we're saying let us catch them! They're ours - they're Ohio's, anyway. I mean, I don't eat them. I'm taking care of the 83 percent of Ohioans who don't go fishing. But instead I catch a two- to three-dollar-a-pound walleye in my net here, let it go, and keep a 15-cent sheephead. Then, two months later, I have to buy that same walleye from Canada at an escalated price. Do you know how hard that is?"

The Lake Erie commercial fishery, especially on the American side, used to be one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the world.

Commercial fishing first emerged on the lake in 1815, when a small company along the Maumee River in Toledo started shore seining, a shallow-water technique where live fish are pulled to the shore. Just 15 years later, it was a powerful regional industry that continued surging throughout the 19th century. The demand for salted foods during the Civil War gave the fisheries a bigger boost, and by the 1880s, they had become a major employer along Lake Erie's Western basin and were supplying fish to the entire Eastern United States.

The industrial revolution provided the industry with its first major hiccup. Industrial activity along the shores of a lake warms the water, and the two most profitable species at the time, whitefish and lake herring, could not survive in the warmer water. But the industry shifted gears, focused on catching walleye, blue pike and yellow perch, and rebounded. Technology also improved dramatically (the nylon gill and trap nets invented then are still the norm today). Over a dozen major fisheries dotted Western Ohio's coast, and Canadian companies finally started booming. On any given day in the 1940s, over 12,000 nets were out in the water.

But can yanking 12,000 massive nets of fish from the lake each day really be sustainable? The simple answer is no. The complicated answer is sort of no.

Commercial fisheries had certainly been abusing the resource, and if they had continued at the same rate, they probably would have single-handedly destroyed the ecosystem. But that didn't happen. Other forces, like pollution, did the job first. An influx of nitrogen and phosphorus-based pollutants into the lake lowered the oxygen levels, and Lake Erie became a eutrophic, or "dead," lake. Catches dwindled through the 1950s and '60s, and in 1970, the state banned commercial fishing altogether because scientists found high mercury levels in a few fish. Though reinstated the next year - apparently they'd made a mistake about the mercury - they took away the commercial industry's entire walleye quota. Sport fishing for walleye was flourishing as a tourist industry.

Things have only gotten worse for Ohio's commercial fishermen since. Because they lost their walleye quota, and therefore their ability to catch Lake Erie's most profitable species, fisheries have had to resort to filling their nets with cheap, barely edible fish, fish that are sometimes ground into cat and dog food. They received another blow in 1984 when the state banned gill netting. Gill nets are equal-opportunity killers; they don't discriminate if a fish is the wrong species, too young, too small, too pregnant. Some fishermen denounced Ohio's decision; others accepted, or even applauded, the new regulation; more and more over time, fishermen are divided in their environmental philosophies.

One thing all commercial fishermen can agree on, though: Ohio's government has been lying, cheating and driving their way of life to extinction for almost 40 years just to please a few loudmouthed sporties.

Fifteen yards directly across the street from Port Clinton Fisheries is Fisherman's Wharf, sporty paradise. It's a bait and tackle shop and a charter fishing business with four full-time captains and several part-timers. The store is lined with aisles of spinners, floaters and bobbers of all shapes and colors - sort of a candy store for a certain type of man and even certainer type of woman.

Manager and charter captain Kermit Hibner laughs when asked if he or his colleagues are involved in sport fishing special-interest groups. "Not really, no," he says. "We sit around and watch football."

"Personally, I think [commercial fishing is] a good thing. Most people do not. They think, "Oh, they're taking all these fish out.' But that's what I like about it - they take out all the wrong fish. They take the carp, the sheephead, the white perch. If they didn't do that we'd have a lot of trouble catching walleye. I think the normal person in the sport industry believes [commercial fishers are] taking out too many fish. But that's someone that doesn't understand the ecosystem or how many fish are here. People all say, "Well, in one day they take five tons of fish.' Five tons is a lot of fish, but if you think about how big Lake Erie is, there is just no way, no way in hell to think that'd be a lot. Commercial fishing's been here a looong time, and they've never depleted the lake."

Kermit says all of this very graciously. Sure, most of his praise for commercial fishermen stems from the fact that they make his job easier, but what normal person doesn't worry about doing his job well? The two other sports industry people I talk to, Steve Brugger and Ray Travis, fishing guides from Erie, Pennsylvania, are the same way. They talk about how much they love fishing, love their jobs, love being near the lake, love all the publicity and business the area is getting for sport fishing, and most importantly, love helping clients land the big catch. Steve says fishing here is like Disneyland for adults. He says you can go anywhere in the world, spend any amount of money to fish, and still aren't going to have a better day than you have right now on Lake Erie.

Wheatley, Ontario is home to seven or eight commercial fisheries that combined employ about half of the small town's population. All of them are very different in size, makeup and history, but they are all located here, in the heart of Lake Erie's commercial industry, and they are all trying their damndest to keep that heart beating.

"The US is running us over here," declares Ken Loops of Loops Fishery. "We just keep getting cut and cut and cut. Back when the biomass was down, like 10 years ago, our quotas were through the roof. Now biomass is way up and our quotas are down like this, eh?"

He's right. The Lake Erie Committee's (LEC) Detroit River-Western Lake Erie Basin Indicator Project has been scientifically estimating walleye populations since 1978. In the late 1990s, their estimates were in the 20 million range, which they consider low quality. Today, walleye numbers are up in the 40 millions, above the LEC bar graph's dashed "High Quality" line. But although populations of walleye, as well as other species such as yellow perch and white bass, are strengthening, quota numbers are conspicuously declining. From 2006 to 2007, Ontario's total allowable catch for walleye fell from 4.28 million fish to 2.32 million. Yellow perch fell from nearly eight million pounds to five-and-a-half million pounds. And while it seems plausible that populations are up because of strict quotas, this is not the case. The LEC says spawn size, which is related to ecosystem health, is actually the biggest determinate of fish populations. Its Indicator Project, therefore, strongly supports the commercial fishermen's stance that political agendas, not science, really set quotas.

Ontario commercial fishers also lament the weakening American dollar, discuss changing preferences in consumer tastes, and praise Canada's Individual Transportable Quota (ITQ) system, which regulates catches, penalizes environmentally irresponsible fishermen, and protects stocks during spawning. The big topic of conversation, however, is Ohio.

"We believe Ohio has an agenda for the commercial fishing industry in Ontario," explains Ulysses Pratas of Presteve Foods, trying to summarize the Canadian sentiment. "And we believe our ministry of officials, our bureaucrats, has fallen prey to the tactics that Ohio has used. As a result, personally, I don't have a lot of faith in a long-term industry here. You know, I'm 41 years old, and I'd like to see my children phase into this industry at some point. But I'm not so sure that's going to happen."

The Lake Erie stakeholders have divided themselves into distinctly defined groups: the commercial industry, the "nasty" sports industry, and the sports industry that sits around and watches football. The only thing they seem to agree on at this point is to make unrelenting, cacophonous noise.

Ohio is charging its commercial fishermen with felonies and threatening to use state dollars to buy out all commercial licenses. Ohio commercial fishermen are suing the state in response. Canadian commercial fishermen are suing Ontario. Everyone is publishing accusatory articles in newspapers, magazines and blogs. But how could anyone even begin to facilitate compromise amidst so much yelling?

Perhaps the best voice to listen to is the voice of the lake itself.

Commercial fishermen make a good case for their concern for the environment. As Rick Misner of Ontario's Saco Fisheries says, "Everyone can point fingers at us, but who's got the most to lose? Nobody has more to lose than we do. It's our livelihood. So we want to take care of the resource and be responsible because we're more worried about what happens here than anyone else can be."

They are especially convincing, though, because they're backing their words with action on both sides of the lake. Although they contest current quotas and the way they're being set, they have embraced a quota system that is widely praised as one of the most sustainable freshwater systems in the world. What's more, most commercial fishermen believe in weeding out less responsible, less educated "pirates" from their industry, and many have even volunteered to test experimental environmental technologies such as satellite tracking for boats.

But the sport fishing industry also cares about the resource. Even though some lament how unregulated the industry is, no one really believes sporties are depleting the lake.

Although both groups are acting sustainably, this does not make all Lake Erie fishermen avid environmentalists. The commercial industry has most certainly been a less-than-responsible steward in the past. The environment was not a priority even just a couple of decades ago, and unfortunately, it still isn't today for many fishermen until it interferes with their work.

For example, every fisherman I talked to about the potential impacts of climate change on Lake Erie (a federal report, "Preparing for Climate Change," predicted lake levels will drop three to five feet throughout this century) brushed it off. "As far as climate change," one responds, "that's not really much of a concern to me. I mean, if we're having global warming, it should be warmer than average outside, but that's not really the case." Others switch the topic to erosion, currents, new green slimes on the lake and invasives, which are another story.

The current environmental thought is that invasive species, which are plants and animals not indigenous to a particular region, are bad. Evil, even. And in Lake Erie, they're a big deal. You literally cannot read a book, a scientific paper or a piece of legislation about Lake Erie without reading about lampreys, gobies and zebra mussels. Every time a new invasive makes it into the Great Lakes, a feat it manages by hitching a ride in the ballast water of a globe-trotting cargo ship, scientists and environmentalists insist it will destroy the ecosystem.

Fishermen think otherwise. "Exotic species? No, no," says Stinson from Port Clinton Fisheries. "It's like in the late '70s and early '80s - everyone was scared about white perch. Now it's a great fish to sell."

"Well, invasives change the way you fish some, but really, most government agencies and most scientists have a tendency to preach doom and gloom," agrees Misner from Saco Fisheries. Presteve Foods's Pratas adds, "There was big fear that [invasive species] were going to displace the perch or other species in the fishery at one time. I don't think they've displaced anything though. I've not seen anything that has really impacted the fishery. In fact, I think they've improved the fishery to a certain extent."

Scientific studies show invasives have caused many problems for native plant and animal species. At the same time, the voice of someone who works on the lake every day is probably just as important as the voice of a scientist. Either way, when it comes down to it, Lake Erie fishermen are not raping the resource. The lake is rebounding after decades of rampant polluting. Biomass levels are up. At least ecologically, things are better than they've been for a long, long time.

Sport fishing on Lake Erie isn't going anywhere. The American Sportfishing Association estimates that it brings in over $1 billion dollars annually to the region's economy. The only challenge it's really facing is escalating gas prices.

The issue, then, is whether the commercial industry deserves to fish the lake too. Yes, its nets are probably an unpleasant sight out on the water; yes, it plays a smaller role in the regional economy (about $200 million in Ohio); and yes, it takes out quite a bit of fish from the lake. Still, if "sporties" are not catching their own quotas, what are they going to do with the commercial quota? And what about history and culture? Isn't the history of a place just about as important as its present? Not very many places in North America, or even the world, can claim to have had a vibrant freshwater commercial fishery. So do we really want to confine the entire fishery to some sleek, flat, black-and-white museum display in an old building near the lake?

Asked what they would do if legislated out of existence, the commercial fishermen give really depressing answers about having no idea what they would do for work, about not being able to pass on the family tradition. Ulysses Pratas's answer wins, though: "Right away in life, I took a huge interest in boats and in fishing. So over time, in my travels through all the Great Lakes, I've collected pictures from families who had people in the industry back three, four, five generations ago, as well as old artifacts like ice picks, things like that. It's truly unbelievable what these guys went through in the mid-1880s to create a viable fishery, to make a living, to feed their families. Then they fought to build markets and got to those markets from railcars, and they just kept building from there. And now we are making modern-day achievements. I can sell to someone on mainland Europe today and get them their fish by tomorrow morning. It's amazing how far we've come, how much history has been made to bring us to this point. So in my opinion, it wouldn't just be sad to see this industry go, it would be outright wrong. Especially since science doesn't dictate that it should go anywhere. It's all political."

He goes on about how immigrants from all over built the industry from scratch; he praises the industry's tight-knit, familial communities; he laments in epic, "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" fashion the fishermen who died on the lake; he describes the pride men had and still have today for being part of this industry. This is real work, real labor or a real trade you can pass on to your son.

Besides words, the fishermen, their businesses and the industry itself all have a certain look and feel about them. They're like their boats: aged, wise, and at once grimy and austere. In a way, they represent North America as it once was. They represent the hardworking, honest North Americans of our own cultural mythology who worked close to the earth, who did dangerous work. Everything about this kind of work, this kind of life - especially the grimier parts - is foreign to most of us now.

At Port Clinton Fisheries, Joel gives me a tour of the site. We climb a flight of stairs so rickety that I'm surprised it doesn't crumble. PCF is in an old building, and its top floor is wooden, moldy and dank. Mounds of nets fill every open space on the floor. A separate little room contains what looks like a crock pot you might use if you wanted to cook, say, a medium-sized cow. Joel says it's the ice maker.

Downstairs is for scaling, filleting, packing and storing fish. Shiny aluminum tables covered in a scaly slime claim one area, boxes of packed fish another, more nets yet another. In the far corner sits the most awful-looking torture device ever invented. It is a metal armoire made up of row upon row of razor-sharp blades. The fish scaler. It can scale a thigh-sized sheephead in about a second.

As we walk through the warehouse-like downstairs, every few feet I have to step cautiously around dead fish staring up at me. Joel opens the door to a room filled with a 12-foot-high mountain of ice chips. This is where the ice maker's ice goes.

"You know the two requirements to work in this industry, right?" Joel asks as we step out to the marina to look at the lake. I shake my head.

"One: you have to be completely fucking obsessed with fishing. Okay? And two..."

He raises two fingers and looks up at a seagull screeching overhead.

"And two: you have to be nuts."