He is a Gloucester guy, raised up from a Gloucester kid in a Sicilian family, so Paul Vitale came honestly to the water and to fishing as generations of Gloucester kids had done before him.

Now 42, Vitale spent his childhood running down to the docks, game for any task that needed doing on his father's boat that tied up down The Fort. He unloaded fish. He ran bait. As he got older, he even helped with minor repairs on the nets and engine, a little welding, a little twine work.

If the fates smiled kindly upon him, there would be early days, with time for breakfast with his dad and the other fishermen at Dooley's Dory, where he would sit, contentedly tucked into the din of conversation that, even now, seemed like some radio station broadcasting all fishing, all day from its place on the dial.

"There was always something to learn, something different every time," Vitale said. 

Vitale the kid had a plan, elegant in its simplicity and logical in its . . . logic: He would follow the strands of his DNA and, just like his father and all of the Brancaleone relatives on his mother's side, become a fisherman.

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