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ON THE BALMIEST day of January, Arnold Leo gives in to the ancient pull of the bay. And so, with deft hands and strong arms, he loads his gray sharpie onto its rusting trailer, dumps his rubberized overalls onto the bed of his truck and guns the engine for Bubbie's Cove, the decaying East Hampton Town launch at Accabonac Creek.
The air is ripe with the scent of spring, but it is just a tease. As Leo glides along in his 16-foot sharpie - he built it himself, 10 years ago, under the guidance of an old-time bayman named Milt Miller - there are few signs that winter is ready to unleash its grip. And fewer still that there will be any respite from the problems that, over the past seven years, have all but shut down Long Island's commercial striped bass and scallop fisheries.
Leo is hopeful as he tosses iron after iron into the waters, knowing that a cache of scallops - fetching caviar prices these days - will send the conspicuously absent baymen scurrying for their nets. But the yield is disappointing: a mound of mud here, a heap of "Sputnik grass" there, a single scallop too old to keep.
But if the afternoon is short on scallops, it is, for Leo, rich in emotion. "God, that made me nostalgic," he says, invigorated, as he labors to haul in his gear. "I loved scalloping better than anything I've ever done in my life."
Arnold Leo doesn't fish much any more, at least not for money. After nearly a decade on the water, trap fishing and scalloping, Leo abandoned that livelihood years ago - like scores of other South Fork baymen, whose numbers have dropped from about 150 full-timers in 1980 to 35 today. He is now a caretaker, tending to an estate, 1,000 feet from Gardiner's Bay, that for centuries has been known as the Parsons' family farm.
But Leo is not just another fisherman displaced by pollution, regulation and sparse harvests.
More important to the other East Hampton baymen, Leo has become a nearly full-time champion of their cause, stubbornly determined to stave off the destruction of a lifestyle that has existed on the East End for more than 300 years.