This chapter explores the informal practices of residents of the Romanian Danube Delta, particularly those connected to the most important local activity, fishing. We show that locals come under the scrutiny of a labyrinth of regulations, designed such that nobody can abide by all of them simultaneously. We argue that this regulatory complexity is the way through which the state controls marginal territories. Dissent is minimized by the possibility of always having one foot in illegality. This adds a new dimension to the scholarship on informality in Romania, bringing the Danube Delta into the debate on the proper relationship between legality, criminality, and informality. In the Romanian Danube Delta, many activities involve some degree of concealment from state authorities. Residents live off strategies that are largely illegal, and authorities are largely in the business of making sure that everyone knows that most of their strategies are illegal. If the phrasing of the previous sentence sounds vague, it is because it is formulated to reflect the vagueness of the law and its implementation by the authorities, as well as the lack of certitudes that residents have regarding their daily activities-the only certainty being that it is almost impossible for them to abide by all formal regulations. Why is it so? If formal regulations are designed in a way that they cannot be abided by, what are they for? And what does this say about how governance is produced through formal institutions and informal strategies co-opted into those same governance structures? In order to answer these questions, this chapter unpacks the case of the village of Sfântu Gheorghe in the Romanian Danube Delta and, more specifically, the issue of fishing. We focus on this activity in order to show how state presence and governance are shaped and what they mean to locals: a minefield of regulations that make it impossible for them not to fall into illegality and devise complex informal systems. The chapter is based on extensive field research, which took place during the course of three years (2014-2017). 1 The result is 1 This research was carried out as part as a larger project, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), on the political and cultural implications of rewilding projects in the Danube Delta. It gathered data through participatory observation and unstructured in-depth interviews which took place over the course of three years and focused on different aspects of the residents' strategies in the Danube Delta. These interviews targeted, among others, authorities, law enforcement agents, fishermen, residents, and NGO