Owner Fred Mattera, 55, of Richmond, aboard the 84-foot offshore dragger the Travis and Natalie, prepares the boat to leave Point Judith in Narragansett for nine days at sea. The 22-year-old boat is named for Mattera’s children.

The providence journal / John Freidah

I assumed that during a week this cold, most offshore fishermen would be staying in port.

“No,” said Fred Mattera, who is 55. “We go. You can make money this time of year. So all of us trawlers, we go.”

I was speaking to him the other day in the cramped galley of the Travis and Natalie, an 84-foot offshore dragger named after his two children. It is 22 years old, which makes it among the newer trawlers that tie up at the Point Judith docks in Narragansett. There are about 50 such boats there and a score of smaller vessels that fish closer to shore. They form the core of Rhode Island’s fishing fleet.

I asked Mattera if he at least makes shorter trips in weather like this, when ocean spray is known to freeze in midair.

He doesn’t. He planned to steam out 200 or more miles, about as far as most trawlers go, and be at sea for eight or nine days.

Dave Booth, 44, was sitting next to him. Booth used to have his own trawler, the Saint Jude, but sold it last spring because he is thinking of moving on. Meanwhile, he has captained Mattera’s boat three trips since Christmas, which has left him only 12 days at home since then with his wife and three boys.

On this trip, Mattera will be skippering, with a crew of four, while Booth takes a break.

Mattera showed me his boat’s sleeping quarters. There are four narrow bunks packed side to side in a room so small and low you cannot sit upright on your mattress. The captain’s “quarters” across the hall are little better. Mattera and Booth smile. That’s the fishing life, they say. It’s not plush.

Mattera tells me he’s planning to get up at 2:30 a.m. for a 4 a.m. departure.

I ask why he doesn’t leave later.

He’s got to steam nonstop for 25 hours to get to Munson Canyon, south of George’s Bank. The best fishing begins at sunrise, so he wants to be on site by then.

The main catch this time of year for offshore trawlers from Point Judith is squid used for calamari. During the day, they are 500 feet down, hard on the bottom, which is how trawlers fish, by dragging their nets. At night, the squid tend to come up higher. They school more reliably in cold weather, which is why, ironically, Point Judith trawlers take more time in port when it’s warm.

“The summer’s when you paint up, do your chores and repairs,” Booth says.

It’s during frozen months like these that offshore dragger men go out to sea the most.

I ask if there isn’t a closer spot for squid.

Block Canyon, sometimes called “The Fishtail,” is about 80 miles offshore, and has been fruitful in the past, but not lately.

“Nobody’s doing anything there,” Booth says.

So Mattera’s going to the area around Munson.

Booth adds: “It’s the roughest place you can fish on the East Coast.”

NEITHER PLANNED on this life.

Mattera was playing football at the University of Rhode Island in 1972, studying political science and thinking about law school when he went out as a crew member and liked it. The same thing happened to Booth when he went fishing as part of a work-experience program at Portsmouth High in 1979. Both say their first trips changed their plans. It made them want to be fishermen.

It wasn’t in Mattera’s background. He grew up in Cranston. His father was a superintendent at a sewage-treatment plant, and his mom, as he puts it, was a mom.

Mattera found fishing to have the same challenge he liked in football. It’s rough out there, and nothing’s guaranteed, but if you’re competitive, know the game and have some luck, you’ll come home with something.

He now lives in Richmond with his wife. His children are grown; his son Travis served as a Navy officer aboard a carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2003 when the Iraq war started.

Mattera has advocated for the Point Judith fleet with government regulators, and started a safety training business for fishermen, which will be a mainstay when he sells his boat, as he eventually plans to.

A fuel man comes into the cabin to talk about a delivery. For this one trip, Mattera needs 3,000 gallons of number-two diesel. It’s now $1.85 per gallon, down from over $2.

“That was a killer,” Booth says.

But fuel will still cost Mattera close to $200,000 this year.

Groceries are another big expense. The day before, he sent one of his crew to Narragansett’s Super Stop & Shop to buy for the trip. It was, as always, a major expedition, filling six carts and costing more than $1,000.

“You tell Margie or Kerri, one of the girls there, we’re going to be putting up a boat order,” says Mattera, “and they’ll open up a register specifically for you.”

Groceries run him about $35,000 or so a year. It’s another $66,000 to carry the boat’s mortgage. Insurance costs $52,000. Then, per trip, there are 15 tons of ice and 1,200 fish boxes, and that’s just some of the list.

Expenses, Mattera says, have gone up much faster than fish prices. No one is making what they used to.

As always happens after a local tragedy, the risks of the business are now a big topic at Point Judith. Two weeks ago, the 75-foot New Bedford dragger Lady of Grace sank with its crew in Nantucket Sound as it tried to get home through freezing spray. And on Friday, the Coast Guard had to rescue three fishermen by helicopter off the 74-foot Creole Belle, also of New Bedford, as it took on water in rough seas southeast of Nantucket.

Mattera knew Antonio Barroqueiro, skipper of Lady of Grace, whose body was found in the wheelhouse of the sunken trawler.

“Tony was just even keel,” he recalls. “A gentleman. And he was about to retire. People in the community said it was his last trip.”

The sinking had a big impact on Mattera’s wife.

“She was in tears,” he said. “Distraught, begging me not to go fishing.”

But he adds: “You can’t let it rule you or you’ll never throw the lines off again.”

It’s Mattera’s guess that the Lady of Grace got weighed down by ice buildup. That seldom happens far offshore, where water temperatures are in the 40s this time of year. But as you approach the coast, as the Lady of Grace did, colder masses can sweep out and make conditions lethal. Spray will instantly freeze on your rigging, your pilot house, your foredeck — everything.

“I came across Nantucket Sound once,” Mattera says , “and we were measuring the buildup a half an inch every 15 minutes. Two inches an hour.” His boat got so heavy that instead of bouncing over each wave, it was plowing through them. Mattera had to lay-to so he and the crew could knock the ice off with crow bars, mallets, even a baseball bat.

“Nantucket Sound in winter…,” Mattera says. “In 35 years of fishing, that’s the worst place.”

Each tragedy, Mattera says, is a warning to dragger men against staying out too long. If the forecast is at all worrisome, it’s prudent to leave your trip days early to get home before you’re in it. Even if you’re careful, he adds, the weather can catch you. And because fronts mostly move east, they come right at your face.

“We got a beating on the way home,” Booth says of his last return on the Travis and Natalie. “Fifteen-foot seas heading into it. Every sea was coming over the bow. Nobody got sleep because we’re getting thrashed around.”

In some ways, Mattera says, a 24-hour ride through that is harder than fishing.

“You’re just hanging on,” Mattera says. “The whole boat is shaking — boom and boom. You lay in that bunk in a pounding head sea, I guarantee in a half-hour’s time your shorts are up around your throat.”

I ASK what a day of fishing is like out there.

They start promptly at sunrise, shooting the net off the drum and setting it 500 feet deep. Mattera will spend the next three hours towing it to catch squid, watching the Chromascope and feeling the depths.

When he thinks he’s got a full tow, it will be time to haul back and have all hands go to work. They’ll bring the net up and over the stern ramp with hydraulic winches. Once it swings above the deck, the purse strings trip at the cod end and the catch dumps out.

They’ll immediately shoot the net into the water again, and if it was a good tow, the skipper will stay at the wheel duplicating the route. If not, he’ll search somewhere else.

Either way, the crew will start tackling the fish in an enclosed packing room on deck level. Many boats just organize each catch and put it below in the iced fish hold. It’s called wet fishing.

But Mattera’s is a freezer boat. That’s a lot more work. The crew has to sort by sizes and pack the squid in 25-pound boxes, which then go inside the steel shelves of a $300,000 plate freezer. That freezes them through and stops the clock from ticking on the catch’s shelf life so you don’t have to rush back to get it processed. Once frozen, the boxes go down into the ice hold.

If the net comes up with a good haul, say 2,000 pounds, it’ll take the crew two or three hours to do 150 boxes. Afterward, they’ll have an hour to rest or eat before the next batch. But sometimes, it’s only 10 minutes.

“And we’ve had times,” adds Booth, “you dump a tow on top of another tow that’s not finished, so you hand them hot dogs and say, ‘Keep working.’ ”

Often, it goes like that from dawn until 8 p.m., though if the net keeps coming up full, crews will work past midnight.

It’s especially hard when the conditions are bad.

“You’re just trying to stay standing,” Mattera says. “You fill a box, turn, the box is on the floor sloshing around, water rushing back and forth.”

On Dave Booth’s last trip, they started fishing one day at 6 a.m. and didn’t get off deck until 5 a.m. the next morning. That’s unusual, but it happens, and the crew is game up to a point because they know they’re putting more money in their pockets.

“There’s no one on land that works like that,” Booth says. “Most people there go home around 5, call it good.” It’s different on a boat.

THE GALLEY’S eating table sits by a TV that has satellite service and movies, but the pace is such that most hands only watch it briefly during meals.

“You’re just working, eating and sleeping,” Mattera says.

On a solid winter trip, they’ll bring home 40,000 pounds of squid, which yields around $40,000. Each crew member makes $2,200 or so. The payout is strictly off the catch, not hours worked. Mattera explains there are no W-2s among trawler crews, just 1099s. They are self-employed, and take the risk both ways. Mattera has had gold-mine trips where each hand made $7,500 or more. But when it’s a washout, whether because of bad luck or mechanical problems, a crew share can be almost nothing.

Most hands who work hard can make $65,000 a year, but as Booth points out, fishermen made even more 20 years ago when houses cost $100,000 — now houses are triple that. Fish prices haven’t kept up with living expenses.

The result is that few crew members are long term. Many work seasonally, and there are often different faces on each trip. It’s one reason, Mattera says, that you don’t see many young fishermen at Point Judith. Most are in their 40s or older.

“There’s no desire to want to get in,” Mattera says.

It’s no longer easy for owners either. In good years, Mattera says, he could make more than $130,000 on an average of 32 trips. It’s harder now, especially with an older boat.

“I’m starting to lose money year to year with maintenance,” he says.

So he plans in time to move on.

But he still finds a romance to it.

He’s proud that the squid brought in by the Point Judith fleet provide 70 percent of the preferred calamari in restaurants from here to California. He’s proud that Rhode Island fishermen are key suppliers of other stocks, like flounder, yellowtail, butterfish, whiting, scup and fluke. They chase a lot out there.

Mattera walks up the companionway to the wheelhouse. He looks out at the water.

He says there are always nice moments at sea, and he talks of serene nights with a full moon, clear northwest skies, and an occasional whale coming to the surface.

“It doesn’t get better than that,” he says.

He and his crew left Thursday at 4 a.m. for Munson Canyon.

They are out there now.

mpatinkin@projo.com