After Aldridge was safely in the helicopter huddled under blankets, Deal flipped the radio to channel 21 and called Sosinski, who was somewhere below them, staring out at the water, still looking for Aldridge. “Anna Mary,” Deal said, “we have your man. He’s alive.”

There’s a bar in Montauk, a few steps from the Anna Mary’s slip, called the Dock, a dark, wood-paneled place with stuffed animal heads on the wall and signs that say things like “No Shrimpers, No Scallopers,” and “We’ve upped our standards. Up yours.” It is one of the dwindling number of places in town that feels as if it belongs to the people who live and work there year-round. If you step inside the Dock any given afternoon, you’ll very likely find fishermen drinking and talking about ballgames and elections, D.U.I.’s and divorces. You’re very likely, too, to hear them talking, sometimes overtly, sometimes not, about the loss of a way of life — the government regulations that make it harder to make a living as a commercial fisherman, the vanishingly small margins for doing the dangerous work they do, the way this place where they’ve made their home is less recognizable to them with each passing year.

In the weeks after Aldridge’s rescue, I talked to several local fishermen on the docks about the search, and not only did they all admit that they cried when they heard the news that Aldridge was safe, but most of them teared up again, despite themselves, as they were telling me the story. It was hard to say what, exactly, was bringing them to tears. But what seems to go mostly unspoken in their lives is the inescapable risk of their jobs, and the improbable fact that Aldridge hadn’t drowned in the Atlantic somehow underscored that risk for them even more. He’d kept himself alive in a way that few people could, had managed to think and work his way through a situation that, for most of us, would have been immediately and completely overwhelming. And he’d willed himself to live. To be a fisherman and to really know the danger of the sea, and to think of Aldridge in the middle of the ocean for all those hours refusing to go under — maybe that was too much to contain.

The person who seems least shaken by the experience is John Aldridge. He spent the night after his rescue in a hospital in Cape Cod, being treated for hypothermia, dehydration and exposure, but he has no post-traumatic stress, he told me: no nightmares, no flashbacks, no fear when he goes out on the water to work. The Coast Guard pilots and the men in the search unit in New Haven express a certain understandable pride when they talk about their work that day, and when Aldridge talks about it, he sounds the same way. “I always felt like I was conditioning myself for that situation,” he told me one day in September while we were sitting in the Dock. “So once you’re in it, it’s like: All right, I can do that. I did it. I had that sense of accomplishment. I mean, thank God I was saved, yes. Thank God they saved me. There’s no better entity than the U.S. Coast Guard to come save your ass when you’re on the water. But I felt I did my part.”

For the people around him, though, things haven’t been quite so easy. Aldridge’s father told me that he still often wakes up around 3 a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. “It’s something that you can’t kick,” he said. “It’s never out of my mind. Never.” A few weeks after his son’s rescue, John Sr. got a tattoo on his arm: a pair of big green fishing boots, and between them, the G.P.S. coordinates where his son was found.

Anthony Sosinski still seems shaken as well. For all his happy-go-lucky charm, his love of life, something changed for him on July 24. The last time he and I talked about it, we were sitting in the wheelhouse of the Anna Mary, which was tied up at the Town Dock. “More than anything, I think about it when I’m out there working,” he explained. “It was the whole feeling of helplessness. Something was torn out of me, and that part doesn’t just show back up.”

For Montauk as a community, the ocean remains a blessing and a curse. It is the lifeblood of the town, the essence of its economic livelihood, the reason the tourists keep coming back. But it is also a constant threat. In September, a 24-year-old Montauk commercial fisherman named Donald Alversa was killed on a fishing trip on a dragger off the coast of North Carolina. Alversa grew up in Montauk — he went to school with Sosinski’s older daughter — and Sosinski and Aldridge attended his wake.

The funeral home was crowded, and the mood was somber. When it was over, the Dock filled up, and the mourners drank late into the night. The next evening, after Alversa’s funeral, Sosinski and Aldridge met at the Anna Mary. They loaded on bait and ice, steered her past the lighthouse and went back to work.