Bewhiskered and bewildered, J.C. Burke sips a hot drink as the sun wanes orange over Beaufort, thinking about all the ways he didn't catch a fish today.

Even more unusual than the meager haul, however, may be Mr. Burke's presence in these warm waters at all. He is one of more than 100 New England skippers who have followed the migration of bluefin tuna from the coastal waters of Maine and Massachusetts to the sand spits off North Carolina.

For the second year in a row, New England fishermen failed to catch the 1,400 metric ton tuna quota in their local waters, leaving 107 tons to harvest as the tuna mass near the North Carolina shore. So the bearded and booted skippers are steaming in force to Cape Lookout here to take part in a unique and emerging "Christmas fishery."

The apparent shift in tuna migration patterns is melding two disparate fishing fleets - one fledgling and Southern, the other experienced and Northern - in one sleepy Dixie port. So far, comity, even camaraderie, has prevailed between the camps from North and South. But against a backdrop of tense tuna politics, unexplained science, and shifting fortunes on the water, events can have a way of coming between even the finest of mates.

And how the two camps get along could be instructive for future relations on the nation's briny seas. As fishing stocks get depleted in one area, more skippers are taking their nets and reels to other waters - from Alaska to Maine to North Carolina. The nomadic trend is improving the fortunes of many fishermen. But it can also produce a clash of cultures and raises new questions about what the congregating boats mean for fishing stocks.

In fact, environmentalists are already warning that the North Carolina fishery may be a disaster in the making: They think the rumbling boats at the Beaufort docks veil a filament-thin truce that could fray over time. "When there's enough fish to go around, there's no bad blood," says Dan Whittle, a senior scientist at North Carolina Environmental Defense in Raleigh. "But scarcity breeds animosity, and when fishermen are faced with difficulty, that's when tempers flare."

Plenty of examples of tension already exist. Though few have heard of it, the decades-long "spiny lobster wars" between the Cubans and Bahamians is real enough. Alaskan salmon fishermen are known to shoot rock salt across each other's bows. And, last year, blue crab fishermen stole each other's pots in the swamps around Savannah, Ga.

In most cases, it's a depleted fishery that's to blame, a more and more common occurrence as fishery managers keep reducing quotas. Caught in the middle are these modern-day Santiagos, a salty amalgam of third-generation skippers and nomadic newcomers - people like Billy O'Connor. He was "Forcibly retired" from a Boston high-tech firm. Though he hasn't caught anything here yet, he's not overly concerned. "I just read 'Old Man and the Sea' for the first time," he says. He [Santiago] went for 85 days before catching one, so we've got a while to go yet."

Despite a rough reputation that precedes them, the New England crews are easing the minds of locals as they sip chai at Beaufort coffee houses and chow on soft-shell crabs in the restaurants.

Some say the presence of the boats is bringing as much as a $1 million into this town, a gentrified fish camp where few of the fishermen can afford to live near the white clapboard waterfront.

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