Representatives of Local 359 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union visited Montauk on Thursday to urge commercial fishermen facing $5-per-gallon fuel prices and ever-more-restrictive regulations, to join. The meeting has generated considerable interest.

About 50 boat owners and captains from Shinnecock and Montauk Harbors gathered at the Montauk Firehouse to hear what the union had to say.

“We have a selfish motive,” Dennis Faicco, president of Local 359, began. “We want to save an industry.”

Mr. Faicco, president of the United Seafood Workers Union, a member group of the U.F.C.W., and Ed Lynch, who represents region one of the greater union’s international branch, said Montauk was chosen as a starting point in their effort to organize fishermen nationwide, in large part because the port supplied a sizable portion of the fresh fish that enters the Fulton Fish Market on a weekly basis. Montauk is the most productive harbor in New York State.

The U.F.C.W. represents approximately 1.4 million people engaged in the retail grocery trade, food processing, and the seafood industry. The union announced its support for Senator Barack Obama for president on Valentine’s Day.

Many of those who work at the Fulton Fish Market, where Montauk and Shinnecock fishermen ship most of their fish, are represented by the United Seafood Workers union. Mr. Faicco explained that the best-laid plans of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, to modernize the market and move it from South Street in Manhattan to Hunts Point in the Bronx, have not materialized.

“Prices went through the roof when Giuliani decided to pull the plug. There’s been a slow leak and now people are going out of business,” Mr. Faicco said. He explained that the “walk-up” retail trade, which was a big part of the old Fulton Market, was no longer possible at Hunts Point. That situation was made worse, the union organizer said, because of high prices and restrictive regulations that have resulted in a lower volume of fish passing through the market.

“Without fishermen there’s no market, and if you eliminate the market, what are fishermen going to do? . . . We’re in the same boat,” Mr. Faicco said.

The union representatives said they had come to Montauk to learn firsthand how the unions might be of help. He suggested the union could work toward winning a government fuel subsidy. “You need to be subsidized like farmers, get some kind of relief,” Mr. Faicco said.

“We can’t be subsidized. We’re under the Department of Commerce. If we were under the Agriculture Department we might be able to be subsidized,” said Hank Lackner, captain of the Montauk dragger Jason and Danielle. “You’re looking at fishermen who are about to go out because of $5 fuel.”

“How would you approach it? We’re dying. Can you do it?” asked Laurie Nolan, who manages Seacapture Corporation, a Montauk-based tilefish producer and a state delegate to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

“We’ll go to the Legislature. Timing is everything, and the time is now,” replied Mr. Lynch.

“We’re also fighting imports from Canada,” Captain Lackner said. “Their fishermen are subsidized. With NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] and everything else, we can’t fight it.”

“We’re in desperate times. We’re at a point where things look like they’re going to explode,” Mr. Lynch told the fishermen. He promised that the union had enough sway to tell politicians: “You’re not going to be in office next time.”

Capt. Phil Ruhle owns and operates a dragger out of Rhode Island and is a delegate to the New England Fishery Management Council. He said it had become clear that the current system of managing the fisheries “doesn’t work anymore. It’s failing and failing fast. The bureaucracy can’t function. The science is terrible.” He said, however, that moving fisheries management to the Agriculture Department would be “a hard sell,” in part because the subject of fisheries management, as well as fair representation in the political struggle between the industry and powerful conservation lobbies, was unknown to the general public. “It’s never in the national news.”

The union reps said it would be front and center at the U.F.C.W.’s annual convention in Montreal in August. Mr. Faicco suggested the union could have a video made about the state of the fishing industry to be shown at the convention.

Paul Farnham, of the Montauk Fish Dock, asked if the union would have a conflict of interest in that it represented businesses that import fish. Mr. Lynch answered that the situation was comparable to the import of inferior and dangerous toys from China. The union would favor the sale of fish caught by fishermen they represented, he said, adding later that the union could act as a forum for negotiation in such a case.

Billy Grimm, of Montauk’s Inlet Seafood, the state’s largest shipper of fish, told the reps that three tractor-trailer loads of whiting flood the market each week. “At 50 cents a pound, we’re going backward. At 30 cents a pound, they’re making money.”

“We’re here to help you lobby,” Mr. Faicco said.

Fishermen responded that they could make money with $5-per-gallon fuel if it weren’t for regulations that forced them to throw back fish because of unnecessarily low trip limits. “I can make it on $5 fuel if I can keep what I catch,” said Captain Grimm, referring to alternatives such as cumulative trip limits instead of individual trip limits. That is, allowing fishermen to keep what they catch until a quota is filled, then either tie up their boats or target another species, thus saving fuel and avoiding wasteful “discards.”

On the subject of a fuel subsidy, Mr. Lynch said, “The Teamsters are in Washington now. We could partner with the Teamsters. There’s going to be a new president. We’ll ask for that kind of attention.”

Captain Lackner and others expressed doubt that the union could help them with what they considered unfair and wasteful regulations. And, they admitted that commercial fishing organizations had been of little help, in part because management schemes tended to pit different groups against one another.

“You say your organizations are not working,” said Christina Clausen, a collective bargaining representative for the union, so maybe “you need a larger membership base.”

“We do have the appropriate influence,” Mr. Lynch assured them. “There’s strength in numbers.”

Mr. Faicco said the union was asking for a trial agreement not with individual fishermen but with an association created by the fishermen. Members of the association would pay $40 per month. Individual contracts that include health and retirement benefits would come later, “if you think we’re the right people.”

On Tuesday, Captain Lackner said he was somewhat optimistic. “They don’t know what they’re up against. It’s a machine, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the environmental lobby, and that’s not even counting the fuel. I don’t know if they have ideas now, but they might be able to help us.”

Mr. Lackner, who represents the industry on the New York Seafood Advisory Council, the New England Council, and the Mid-Atlantic Council, said his boat was now fishing for groundfish species out of New Bedford, Mass., because of limits on whiting, and after that he will be fishing for squid out of New Jersey because of prohibitive New York regulations. Both moves require expensive out-of-state permits, and, he stressed, take money out of the local economy.

“Without giving those guys a three-year course in fisheries management they can help us in two ways, get us out from under the secretary of commerce, and start a campaign to get American people to eat American seafood,” Mr. Lackner said, adding that it would be imperative for the union to reach out to the larger fishing ports like New Bedford and Gloucester in Massachusetts, Cape May, N.J., and Point Judith, R.I.

“That’s what we’re thinking. I’ve talked to a lot of fishermen. Forty dollars a month. Can that be money well spent? I tend to think so. That’s a pretty powerful group. If we get just one ad, or one piece of legislation, it would be a success, and then we’d all buy in, but it can’t take more than a year because we won’t have any money,” Captain Lackner said.

“They’re ready to run,” he said of the union. “It’s our ball. It’s up to us to fumble it, or not.”