In the 1960s, in the long summers of our youth, we would catch mackerel by the boatload off Ogunquit, Maine.

My boat was probably 10 feet long and had a flat, plywood bottom. When I was 10 my mother bought me a used 3-hp Johnson outboard (last year's model, $85), and when I wanted to stop or back down I spun it 180 degrees and slid the throttle to open.

Relatively speaking I was underpowered. The other kids had 5½-hp outboards on lapstrake Amesbury skiffs. But we all loaded up on mackerel.

We trolled daredevil lures with treble hooks and three or four worms, and in the calm of late afternoons and early evenings, particularly if thunderstorms had passed through, the bottom would rise up. Mackerel would roil the ocean from the beach to Bald Head Cliff, and probably beyond. We trolled through great bunches reeling in three or four fish at a time, for the most part throwing them over. (Who said you can't catch 'em twice?)

Back and forth we would go, each of us landing and liberating hundreds of fish until the sun set. There was nothing like steaming into the cove after night fell for aspiring 10-year-old fishermen.

There was no market for the mackerel, which is to say they weren't worth catching at our artisanal scale. From time to time seiners from exotic ports like Rockland would lay over in Perkins Cove, real fishing boats with masts and fish holds and nets, thrilling us to no end. But they were pogy boats and they, too, had no interest in our mackerel.

The mackerel were still there several years later when I graduated from high school. I had a bigger flat-bottomed boat (same outboard) and I figured, optimistically, no doubt, that I could carry 1,000 pounds of mackerel. But there was no market for mackerel, so that fall I pumped gas and torched herring with a friend, and the following spring I got a job on a redfish boat.

In the late 1960s and in the 1970s until the enactment of the 200-mile limit, mackerel, like everything else in the northwest Atlantic, were hammered by distant water fleets from Europe and the Soviet bloc.
American are not big mackerel eaters. So although stocks have recovered, they still aren't worth much money. Mackerel is now a midwater fishery, and getting on them and staying on them is a dicey proposition.

One reason is suggested by the research, which has found that in the years since my cohort and I fished them, warming water has spread out stocks to the north and east of their traditional winter grounds.

In any case, they no longer make themselves available in vast plentitude to little boys between Ogunquit Beach and the home shore, pining for the day when they can make a living on the ocean.