Digital Extra

Go to Champlin's Seafood, for example, and you'll find a hand-lettered sign on the door that says, "Yes, we are open. Unfortunately, due to the North Cape crisis, DEM has prohibited any sales of our lobster and crabs."

Inside, the tanks that are usually swarming with crustaceans are empty and dry.

Farther along, at ABC Lobster, there are lobsters, but only some are for sale. The others are listless in tanks where the water is topped with a skin of oil, and behind the counter Gary Tucker explains, "They're alive, but they're acting strange. They're not well."

Nearby at Fish's lobster shop, there are plenty of healthy, uncontaminated lobsters, but there's not a paying customer in the place -- despite the best efforts of owner John Fish, who Saturday added a sign out front that says, "Fresh Clean Seafood," and decorated it with a reassuring happy face.

From the retail stores to the processing plants to the fishing docks, the catastrophe of the oil spill is being felt in a variety of ways, all of which have one thing in common: They are becoming increasingly expensive for local fishermen and fish dealers, and those whose ancillary businesses depend on them.

How expensive? No one knows yet. State officials have suggested the immediate cost could be in the millions of dollars and the long-term cost, in the tens of millions.

In Galilee alone, the state embargoed the sale of some 43,000 pounds of lobster that became contaminated when seawater mixed with oil was inadvertently pumped into lobster tanks.

Thousands of other lobsters have washed up, dead and dying, on local beaches. And officials have closed 105 square miles of Block Island Sound to fishing of any kind.

Art Smith, a lobsterman for 25 years, called the situation "just unbelievable."

"I've got 800 traps in the area that is shut down," Smith said.

He said that if he had to, he would relocated his traps -- but he can't.

"I relocate all the time to move the traps where I know the lobsters are. But according to what I understand, I'm not even allowed to haul my pots [from the closed area]."

Even if he could move his traps and catch clean lobsters, Smith isn't sure he could sell them. "I was talking to John Fish; he said the way things are going, it doesn't sound like anyone would want to buy a lobster from the state of Rhode Island right now."

Asked what the financial impact on him will be, Smith said he doesn't know.

Besides shellfishermen, the closure affects the so-called "day-boat" fleet -- fishermen who drag nets close to shore and don't stay out overnight. One of those is David Dykstra, captain of the dragger Forager, based in Snug Harbor, across from Galilee.

"We spend our entire year in that [closed] area, and this essentially puts us out of business for fishing where we like to fish," Dykstra said.

In the winter, he fishes almost exclusively for bait fish, mainly herring and skate, which become bait for lobster traps. In summer, he catches a wider variety of fish, but still relies on catching bait for lobstermen for much of his income.

And if the lobster business is bad, he said, the repercussions can strike him.

He said that if the area remains closed to fishing, his only option is to fish farther from home, in deeper, less friendly waters.

"It's going to be more expensive to go where we would have to go," he said.

The spill has caused other, technological problems for fishermen, as the crew of the Long Island fishing boat Calli-Lin Elizabeth found out yesterday.

The boat had been at sea for only two days, but when it arrived to unload fish at the Town Dock fish company in Galilee yesterday, 20 years were missing -- 20 years of technology, that is.

State health officials won't allow companies such as Town Dock to use sophisticated flume and pump technology to transfer fish from boats to dockside processing plants because the pumps and flumes use seawater, taken directly from the water at the dock, to move the fish -- and thanks to the North Cape, the water is fouled with heating oil.

Yesterday, that meant that the work of unloading 30,000 pounds of whitefish from the Calli-Lin Elizabeth had to be done by hand: 100-pound tubs of fish, one at a time, were lifted from the hold and swung on a rope to the wharf, where they were dumped, again by hand, into larger tubs and then carried by forklift into the plant.

On a normal day, using a flume, unloading the boat's cargo would have taken two hours. With luck, yesterday's task would take five hours. It took the boat's crew, assisted by Town Dock plant manager Mike Manning, 90 minutes just to jury-rig a set of pulleys and shackles to do the laborious hauling.

"Way back when, this is the way we used to do things around here," said Bob Cherenzia, part of the unloading crew. "This is primitive."