The son of an insurance man from nearby Beverly, Massachusetts, Dave Marciano started fishing at age 11 and never considered another trade. “I just took to the water,” he says. “I got my first jobs on charter boats in Gloucester as a teenager. After high school, I got into it full time.” Marciano worked for a decade as a crewman in Key West and Gloucester before an employer spotted his obvious talents and “threw him the keys” to captain a boat. “I ran that boat, the Captain Vince II, for three seasons, and we did real well,” he explains. “I saved enough money from my captain’s share that I could buy my own boat.”

In Gloucester, where the waterfront has a memorial to the thousands of local fishermen who have died at sea over the past three centuries, Marciano also holds the distinction of having survived a 2003 shipwreck. “We were pushing the limit, and the weather was a little crappy,” Marciano recalls. They were 18 miles offshore and struggling to get back with thousands of pounds of fish when a plank in the hull gave way. “We sank in 33 minutes,” Marciano recalls as matter-of-factly as a landlubber might recall a fender bender in a parking lot.

“It wasn’t as dangerous of a situation as it sounds, though. We’d had all that Coast Guard training, and we had the pumps and other equipment, and there was another fishing boat a mile away. We wanted to save the boat, but we knew that as long as we didn’t do anything stupid, we weren’t going to die.” His peers, who heard him on the radio during the ordeal, told him they were surprised by his utter aplomb in the midst of such a mishap. “I heard comments like, ‘I woulda been freaking out, but you were as calm as an [expletive] air traffic controller,’” he laughs. “But that’s why you do the training.