"We're going to have to fight it," Eble said of new flounder fishing limits that will start taking form this week. "If they do shut it down and give us a six-week season, we just won't have enough time."

"If they make it (minimum size) 18 inches, we'll have two or three keepers a trip," said Steve Kelly, a mate on Eble's boat, Doris Mae IV, as he and brother Tom Kelly welcomed customers aboard for a four-hour fishing trip.

Any New Jersey angler is allowed to take up to eight summer flounder — also known as fluke — per day. But that generous daily limit is tempered by a minimum size of 16.5 inches, and captains say their customers throw back plenty of 15- to 16-inch fish.

But an emerging round of new fishing rules, mandated by timetables set in federal law, might boost the minimum size to 18 inches and possibly slash the daily catch limit as low as two fish and the fluke season to six weeks.

"They can't do that, man," Tom Kelly said. "They'd shut down everybody."

Fishing advocates and longtime observers of the management process say it's driven by mandates in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, a 1996 law that's in the process of being rewritten in Congress.

Under goals set through the law, managers must build the East Coast fluke biomass to 204 million pounds of fish, as calculated by annual sea sampling and statistical analysis. There's an estimated 105 million pounds of fluke swimming now from the Carolinas to the Gulf of Maine, but biologists project that its growth has slowed and won't be fast enough to meet the 2010 target date.

So the Magnuson-Stevens law requires managers to reduce the number of fluke that fishermen take. Whether those cutbacks become reality could be decided in Philadelphia on Wednesday morning at a joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The two panels respectively set fishing regulations for the ocean from 3 miles to 200 miles offshore, and for state-controlled waters within 3 miles of the coast.

When the council and commission met in Atlantic City in December, fishermen were looking forward to nearly 10 percent increase in the coastwide summer flounder harvest, up to 33 million pounds as the fish population continued to grow.

Instead, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that a previous stock assessment was flawed, and the rebuilding schedule toward 2010 was falling behind. Rule-makers balked at NMFS' demand for a cut in the previously increasing flounder quota. But in a confrontation with NMFS regional director Patricia Kurkul, the council and state representatives accepted a lower 23.59 million-pound limit for 2006.

Now the regulators are looking to go even lower next year, to a 19 million-pound figure considered by the council, or to a 13.9 million-pound limit recommended by a scientific monitoring committee. That latter number would be the smallest fluke harvest since the population recovery began in 1995.

There's a palpable sense of panic on the docks because NMFS officials could press for even deeper cuts.

"If NMFS wins this battle, it's over," said Raymond D. Bogan, legal counsel to the United Boatmen of NY/NJ, a party and charter boat industry group. "We've already seen people dropping out of the industry because of this. It's not speculation. It's happening now."

United Boatmen and other advocacy groups had been fighting the 2005 flounder decision in court, "but everything has been consumed by this new event," Bogan said.

They will be in Philadelphia arguing for a minimal quota reduction — not just for flounder, Bogan said, but also for black sea bass and scup, two other species that have been fallbacks when party boats can't catch fluke.

"For many of us, sea bass and scup go hand in hand with flounder," Bogan said. "We are looking at reductions between 30 and 40 percent there too. The species we might fall back on are being blocked too."

In Washington, the Magnuson-Stevens law has been going through the reauthorization process in Congress, and key lawmakers say a final version could emerge before the August recess. Recreational and commercial fishing industry groups from New Jersey have been working closely to get some changes in the law, particularly a loosening of the recovery schedule for building species up to goal levels.

Fishing advocates are pushing to get allowances that would avoid dramatic harvest cutbacks, as long as the fish species in question is "continuing on an upward trajectory," Bogan said.

"Those of us who are working on the Magnuson-Stevens act now feel if we don't get reform through legislation, we'll continue to suffer losses," he said.