GLOUCESTER, Mass. – When Arthur Sawyer was a teenager, fishing boats packed Gloucester Harbor, and all you had to do to land a job on the waterfront was ask. On a late fall afternoon 40 years later, Sawyer’s boat, Miss Carla, was one of the few working vessels around.

“All the boats I went dragging on when I was younger, they’re all gone,” the 53-year-old Sawyer said with a glance around.

The no-holds-barred fishing of Sawyer’s youth will probably never return to this historic, centuries-old New England port north of Boston that was the setting for the book and the movie “The Perfect Storm.” But community leaders are working to protect what is left of the industry and preserve a way of life in towns like Gloucester.

They have set up multimillion-dollar trust funds that buy up fishing permits and then lease them to local fishermen at discount rates.

The idea is to make it more profitable for local fishermen to ply their trade and also prevent big, out-of-town companies from snapping up all the fishing rights and putting the locals out of business.

“I don’t know anyone who would say, ‘We would rather Gloucester be something different,”‘ said Vito Giacalone, a former fisherman who runs the Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund.

Over the past decade or so, tough restrictions aimed at preventing overfishing of the waters off New England have made it hard for fishermen to make a living and difficult to break into the field. As a result, the number of working fishing boats is sinking fast.

Maine, for example, has seen its fleet of groundfish boats – that is, those that catch cod, flounder, haddock or other groundfish, but not shellfish – drop from 350 in 1990 to 75 today. On Cape Cod, 249 vessels caught groundfish in 2001, compared with 57 last year.

Even with a smaller fleet, the Gloucester waterfront is still filled with refrigerated seafood trucks and the smell of fish and the sea. Gloucester without a vibrant fishing industry is unimaginable to Sawyer and would probably be of little interest to tourists.

“They want to come down to see what I’m doing,” Sawyer said. “They don’t want it to be a recreational marina. They want to see what I’m doing.”

Trusts have been set up in just a few scattered fishing areas around the country. Alaska has had a small program since the mid-1990s. But interest is growing.

Gloucester’s $12.6 million fund began operating last year with restoration money set aside by natural gas companies building terminals in nearby fishing grounds.

A second, $10 million fund relying on grants, loans and charitable contributions started in September on Cape Cod. In Maine, fishermen and the environmental group The Nature Conservancy are trying to set up a fund, too.

In Gloucester and other New England fishing towns, fishermen have to obtain permits that give them only a certain number of days at sea per year. Many survive by leasing unused days from other fishermen.

But as the number of allotted days has been reduced, they have become more precious. It now costs $200 to $600 for a fisherman to lease a day. And the permits now typically cost at least $200,000.

Many small fishermen have been selling their permits and getting out of the business altogether. Some of the buyers are bigger fishermen who aren’t based in the community and do not necessarily employ local men and women. There is also fear that eventually, big international food companies will scoop up the permits.

The Gloucester fund has bought up about 20 permits so far and leases out fishing days for only about $50 to $100 a day.

A major obstacle to making the concept work is the high cost of the permits. With limited tax dollars available, the trusts will probably rely heavily on charitable donations, Giacalone said. And that’s difficult even when the economy isn’t in crisis.

“The community would have to recognize the value in its community and reach into its pockets to do that,” he said. “And that’s why it’s a very hard sell, I’ll admit.”