Mid-morning sunlight breaks through the lingering salt haze of sunrise. Pete Kromer laughs—a Bonacker born to tide and toil. It is simply Pete’s way.

The familiar taste of sea salt hangs in the cool, humid air, giving way to the gentle warmth of rolled sleeves. His hands curl around coarse yellow rope that has been hauled and winched through heavy, shifting surf more times than anyone can count. His rubber waders shine like wet slate, like seal skin just broken from the sea. His unguarded, ever-present smile is as easy as the wind drifting through the dunes.

The Land Rover I had purchased four years earlier gave me new access to the beaches and back trails of the East End, and to the fishermen who worked these shores. On mornings like this in 1978, its four-wheel drive carried me along the ocean sands from Hither Woods to Gurney’s, where a handful of Montauk’s remaining haulseiners still worked the surf with a single dory and shared gear.

Theirs was a meager existence: a full roster of equipment was beyond the reach of any one fisherman. Instead, they pooled what they owned. One man might bring the winch truck, another the nets, another the trailered dory; together, they assembled enough gear to make a day’s fishing possible. In that small, hard economy, the catch belonged to all of them, just as the risk did.

Pete’s was the rhythm of the haulseiners—the shared breath of men, gulls, and sea. They moved in harmony through the thunder of deep-troughed, crashing waves, through the cries of gulls, the heave of oars, the pounding beach breakers. Theirs was a synchronized ballet where a misstep could cost a man dearly in this hard, salt-soaked world.

By the time of this photograph, the hardest part of the morning’s work was over. The dory had come in through the surf, been winched onto its trailer, and hauled up onto the beach; the net had done its heavy work. Above the shoreline at Gurney’s Beach, Pete stood with the gear that defined his life—rope in hand, waders creased, shoulders easy, laughter carried on the wind. Behind him lay the open beach and low dunes; in front of him, just beyond the edge of the frame, the Atlantic rolled in on the same bars he had fished for years.

Here, labor and joy meet in a single, unguarded instant. Pete’s expression holds both: the weight of a working life and the uncomplicated pleasure of being exactly where he belongs, surrounded by the tools and tides he understands best.

Before the crowds and condos, before this world fell silent to the winched seine and the clatter of oars against lapstrake dories, there were mornings like this—when the surf fishery still belonged to men like Pete and their small wooden boat, and Montauk’s shoreline was measured in tides and haul lines rather than property lines.

In the summer of 2025, while preparing this work for exhibition, an East Hampton Library historian finally put a full name to the face I had long known only as a Bonacker haulseiner. As coincidence would have it, some thirteen years earlier I had come to know a “Mike Kromer,” who repaired outboard marine engines. A single phone call revealed that Pete is his grandfather—ninety-five years old as of this writing. After forty-seven years, son, grandson, and great-grandchildren were able to see Pete as he was in the summer of 1978. When Mike presented the print to Pete, he told me that easy smile returned the moment Pete saw it—and, in that instant, it quietly spread across the family as well.

This photograph is both portrait and remembrance: a brief, sunlit moment with a Bonacker fisherman at the closing edge of an era, when the haulseiners of Montauk still drew their living directly from sea and surf.

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