The day starts before dawn and isn’t over until dark. In the salt-flecked light of a sunrise off the coast of Cundy’s Harbor, Maine, the Amanda-Elizabeth bobs in calm waters. Seagulls glide overhead as Gary Hawkes and a crewman pull up a cage by its attached buoy. Teeming lobsters emerge from the draining waters, their shells clinking together as the men sort them. They pick out a handful and sheath their claws in yellow bands before tossing them in a tub of water. The rest of the catch makes soft plunks in the water when thrown back to the sea.

The age-old art of lobster fishing in Maine seems as quaint and idyllic as ever, until you peel away the shell. The traps Hawkes uses are wire, not the old wooden kind that got bored by worms and buffeted by water currents. The boat is fiberglass, easier to maintain than Hawkes’s beloved old wooden craft, the Marjorie-Jean. On-board computers track Hawkes’s every move in the water and keep a log of everything he takes in and throws back— a record he’s legally bound to keep. Maine law also dictates that fishermen return all lobsters larger than five inches from rear to eye socket and smaller than 3 1/4 inches. What’s more, they must throw back any female clutching eggs to her carapace and clip a v-shaped notch (“v-tail”) into her flipper, helping to assure that other fishermen will know to return her to the sea if they catch her, too.

Lobster fishing has changed since 57-year-old Hawkes got in the business, but not enough to shake his love for Maine’s legendary industry. Fishing runs in Hawkes’s family— on a part-time basis, at least. His father, who operated a nursery and fished on the side, passed on to his son a love of the sea. Gary started fishing at the age of 11 and never stopped. On settling down in Cundy’s Harbor, a small harbor on mid-coast Maine at the mouth of the New Meadows River, Hawkes and his wife, Sue, set up shop, catching lobster for sale to distributors.

“We’re just a small, family-owned wharf,” says Sue, as if a quayside business was as common as a garage. They built the wharf down the road from their home over the course of a couple of years with lumber provided by a relative’s sawmill. Gary arrives at the wharf every morning, getting up at 4:30 to fill his distributor’s truck with the previous day’s haul and then load 80-pound bushels of dead fish and catfood (otherwise known as bait) on the boat to catch more lobster.

Gary usually takes two men with him to harvest the traps that he places around the waters. He uses all 800 of the traps his lobster license allows, hauling 300 to 400 a day on a rotating basis. Each trap may capture two dozen lobsters, but only yield a few legal ones. He cites one instance when a trap yielded ten legal lobsters as a stand-out day.

Once he’s emptied a trap, Gary slathers in new bait and throws it back into the water. Lobstermen leave their cages in rocky underwater spots with plenty of crevices, ledges, and other hiding places that lobsters prefer when they’ve shed their shells to grow new ones. Maine law dictates that the traps come with escape hatches to let out small lobsters and a biodegradable “ghost hatch” to let the other lobsters free in case the cages gets lost or can’t be retrieved for some reason.

Much of his catch Gary sells to his distributor, but he puts some aside for Sue’s lobster-shipping business. When she opened a gift store on the wharf in 1990, Sue also started mailing lobsters directly to customers through overnight delivery. Her orders span anywhere from two to 100 a customer. Sue says many customers tell her they prefer the lobsters from Maine and the Cundy’s Harbor area in particular — somehow, they taste better. While she has no way of proving this theory, she says she’s never grown tired of her own product. “It’s kind of like the healthiest fast food in Maine,” she says. “You can take a lobster, cook it up in 15 minutes, and it’s the best meal on Earth.”

It’s that tastiness that has led to the over-fishing that threatens lobster and other species. Hence, Maine’s strict lobster laws, some of which it started putting in place as early as 1872. But for all the extra hassle his home state imposes on his livelihood (he calls his shipboard tracking computer “Big Brother”), Gary doesn’t pine for the less restricted past.

“Lobsters are probably one of the best-regulated natural resources in the world because we protect the female egg-bearers,” he says. “The regulations are absolutely necessary.” He even takes biologists on harvests twice a year to help them with their research and to get a picture of how the species he relies upon for his livelihood is holding up.

In Gary’s view, the trouble is other New England states that don’t have a v-notch law. Given the nomadic lifestyles of lobsters, a female Gary releases could well end up in a boiling pot in New Hampshire a week later. Maine has pushed to make the v-notch law universal throughout the United States, but it hasn’t caught on yet. Gary says politics are getting in the way of conservation. “You get environmentalists, politicians, and fishermen together; it’s not good,” he says.

Gary tackles the other challenges of his profession without complaint. Though lobstering season lasts all year in Maine, Gary must take the boat out as far as 30 miles to capture the lobsters as they move to warmer water in December through May. When the lobsters get really scarce, Gary uses his various licenses to catch other creatures of the deep, from halibut to shrimp and scallops. He’s always careful to stick to his assigned lobstering zone (Maine has seven) so as not to infringe on another fisherman’s turf. “Each zone has its own little set of rules,” says Gary. “You try not to step on toes but every once in a while stuff happens. No one’s been shot yet, at least,” he adds with a laugh.

Daily, he’s exposed to the whims of the ocean and the weather. But he shrugs that off, too. “Mother Nature is the boss, and you have to respect that,” he says. “But you’re dealing with her every day in some of its best aspects. It’s very rewarding that way.”

And then there’s the work. Gary has endured 12-hour days on the water in all sorts of conditions since high school and doesn’t plan on stopping any time soon. Now that he’s older, it helps when he’s greeted by some of his grandchildren (nine total) when he pulls into the wharf. The children, who learned to swim at this spot, often wait for Gary and his two sons — also fishermen with their own boats. Their presence makes for a nice end to a hard day.

“It’s a good life,” he says. “You have your uncertainties, but I guess you have that in anything. I wouldn’t be anywhere else. As long as it’s a viable industry—and I think that it will be— and as long as I can walk down a ramp and into the boat, I’ll keep doing it.”