For decades, the Peconic Star Fleet was a fixture of Greenport Harbor — one of the last of the great North Fork fishing charter institutions. But this week, Capt. Arnold “Speedy” Hubert and Capt. Matt Gilbert confirmed the fleet is shutting down.

In an interview aboard the Peconic Star IV on Wednesday, Hubert said he decided to sell his fleet for several reasons. At the center, he said, is a shift in lease terms for his boat slips at the village-owned marina. For many years, the Peconic Star operated under five-year leases in which annual fees were negotiated up front. Now, the new lease for the first time would charge him $20 a foot — a change Hubert and Gilbert claim would add to their costs.

“You can’t live on a year-to-year contract,” Hubert said.

Under his current contract — negotiated in 2021 by previous fleet owner Capt. David Brennan — the PSF paid $9,660 a year for two boat slips the first year, with a three percent annual increase. That agreement runs through May 2026; the new contract would have begun next spring.

Gilbert said that the proposed paperwork was vague even on basics. “There was no definition of what the ‘season’ was,” he said, “and the harbormaster had the power to move you anytime for any reason.”

Without a clearly defined season and guaranteed berth, Gilbert said, it was nearly impossible to justify new investment. “I was going to buy one of the boats,” he said, “but looking at that paperwork, it just didn’t make sense.”

Both boats had been up for sale for months, and Gilbert said a recent offer prompted Hubert to sell.

The captains also described a less obvious but costly hit: parking. For years, the lot in front of the East End Seaport Museum served fishermen and charter passengers. That changed when the village reconfigured the area to accommodate a new ferry queue and shifted parking to the Long Island Rail Road station.

All summer, they said, that lot fills with the commuter cars of workers traveling to Shelter Island — leaving charter customers with nowhere to park. The timing compounded the damage: the work on the new ferry queue this year cut them off from customers in May — prime opening season for fishing charters.

“That’s the best month for us,” Gilbert said. “We lost tens of thousands just from that.”

Even beyond the docks, the captains argued, the region’s tourism economy has tilted away from the working-class families who long sustained head boats. “We used to live on volume,” Hubert said. In recent years, even weekend trips that once filled two boats left the dock half-empty. “We wouldn’t get out on a Monday. We wouldn’t get out on a Sunday. Just no people,” he said.

They said waterfront conditions haven’t helped. Hubert and Gilbert criticized what they view as the village’s failure to keep up with basic maintenance — pointing to rotting pilings, bulkheads they said were “falling into the water,” and electrical volt boxes they considered unsafe.

“They talk about putting in new pilings, but they never do, because they’ve got no money.” The erosion, Hubert said, isn’t just physical. “Nobody from this [village] ever came to talk to me,” he said. “There’s no personal touch. No harmony.”

That lack of communication, the captains said, has left the waterfront fractured. Commercial scallopers, charter operators and even local restaurants often operate at cross-purposes. “None of the restaurants have ever approached us to bring groups here,” Hubert said. “There’s no effort to work together.”

Hubert said the fleet was down $200,000 this year. “It’s the worst year I’ve ever had in my life,” he said flatly. “Never had a year like this.”

Gilbert bristled at an early news report that the fleet had “gone belly up.

“We didn’t go belly up. That’s a little harsh,” he said. “There were a lot of economic decisions being made. But the truth is, without a stable lease and with everything else going on, it just wasn’t sustainable.”

As they prepared the Peconic Star IV for sale, both men looked back on long lines and fuller days — when 80 people were lined up for a spot on the Peconic Star.

“It’s a crazy business,” Hubert said. “But I carried millions of people and made a lot of people happy. That’s something.”

For the 88-year-old captain — who has owned 36 boats — the shutdown of the fleet amounts to a reluctant retirement. “My family wants me to retire,” he said. “I don’t, actually.”

The closing unfolded on social media.

On Sunday, Peconic Star captain Paul Ripperger announced the shutdown in a Facebook post: “Well that’s it. The party is over. After more than 45 years of serving the North Fork and Long Island fishing communities the Peconic Star boats have sail[ed] our last trip.”

Then on Tuesday, the Peconic Star Fleet Facebook page contributed to the confusion with an all-caps post: “OUT OF BUSINESS LOST OUR LEASE.”

Village Mayor Kevin Stuessi did not respond to emailed questions on Wednesday, but told the Suffolk Times that the “village absolutely would have liked to renew their leases. We’ve not heard anything from them.”

On Thursday, after this story was published, Stuessi replied to the email, saying that the railroad parking lot construction was completed the final week of April, and opened to the public on May 1, with 16 more spots that had been previously been available.

Deputy Mayor Patrick Brennan called the fleet’s departure “an unfortunate development” that’s nevertheless “new information to me.

“I am not personally aware of any lease considerations between the village and the fleet owner/operator,” he said in a written response. “Nor do I have any insight, positive or negative, about the owner’s business operations, goals [or] motivations.”

It was not clear by Wednesday evening who was directly responsible for changing the terms of the lease.

Mitchell Park Marina dockmaster Richard Albanese said the departure should not be seen as the village “kicking them out,” and said that “we never told them they can’t have a lease.”

Albanese, who oversees the village marina and the adjacent commercial dock, concurred that the sticking point appeared to be the fleet’s desire to continue under a multi-year agreement rather than the one-year arrangement the village now offers commercial vessels.

Peconic Star’s historic lease made the fleet an exception, he said. Years ago, when there were fewer commercial boats on the dock, the fleet held three- or five-year contracts that could be renewed “over and over.” In recent years, the village standardized the commercial dock to annual contracts, he said.

Albanese noted that the clerk’s office — not the marina — administers leases, and the clerk was out of town this week, limiting what he could confirm immediately.

The dockmaster said he “loves having those boats around.

“The last thing we want to do is push our guys out.”

This story has been updated to reflect commnents from Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi.