October 20, 2022 — A bipartisan group of Florida lawmakers sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Tuesday urging her to approve the state’s request to declare a nationwide fishery resource disaster in response to Hurricane Ian.
A disaster declaration would allow for further federal assistance to seafood businesses harmed by the storm. Ian was the strongest hurricane to hit the Tampa Bay area in a century and killed more than 100 people in the state.
October 17, 2022 — Gov. Ron DeSantis is requesting that the areas affected by Hurricane Ian be declared a federal fisheries disaster by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which would open up channels for more aide for those in the fishing industry.
DeSantis announced the request Saturday at a press conference providing updates on Hurricane Ian relief efforts, highlighting support for those who work on the water. If approved, NOAA will be able to provide more support to commercial fishermen, wholesale dealers, charter boat captains and fisheries, he said.
“Clearly a storm of this magnitude — this is appropriate for this declaration,” DeSantis said. “So once this is approved, then that provides these groups and people in the industry to work with NOAA to be able to get more support. So we’re happy to help facilitate that request.”
October 14, 2022 — Southwest Florida’s commercial fishing industry has been struggling for some time from the recent red tide and the graying out of the fleet. But now, Hurricane Ian has put the fishing industry on the ropes.
“Lee County’s seafood industry took a major hit,” said Casey Streeter, a commercial fisherman and the owner of Island Seafood Market on Matlacha.
Hurricane Ian’s powerful storm surge destroyed a large portion of Southwest Florida’s fishing industry from boats to docks to fish houses.
“Fort Myers beach, our shrimp fleet is decimated, that’s about a 200-million-dollar loss with what they do,” said Streeter. “Their boats are obviously tanged up onshore…Here on Pine Island, we lost four of our five fish houses. We lost many of the grouper boats. The infrastructure of our fishery is gone.”
October 14, 2022 — With an impending stone crab season opening, Southwest Florida fishermen whose boats and traps survived Hurricane Ian are working hard to get back on the water.
On San Carlos Island, the commercial fishing homeport of devastated Fort Myers Beach, stranded shrimpers continue doing what they can to repair boats in the state’s largest fleet. But much heavy equipment is needed for the task ahead.
“There’s 300 people who work for us and all of them are out of a job right now,” Jesse Clapham, fleet manager at Erickson and Jensen Seafood told the Associated Press. “I’m sure they’d rather just mow all this stuff down and build a giant condo here, but we’re not going to give up.”
October 7, 2022 — Casey Streeter lost everything to the monstrous winds and storm surge of Hurricane Ian when it roared over southwest Florida.
His Island Seafood Market in Matlacha? Gone. Home in St. James City on Pine Island? Gone. Retail market on Sanibel Island? Gone. It’s pretty much the same for most of his commercial fishing colleagues and neighbors in the region.
“We are devastated here,” Streeter said. “Four out of five fish houses in Pine Island are gone. The shrimp fleet is gone. Nowhere to unload. No docks are here. Everybody went out of business at one time. We worked ten years and it was gone in ten hours. We’re dealing with impossible things.”
Despite his overwhelming losses, though, Streeter vows he’s not giving up on the commercial fishing industry here. He’s got four grouper boats that got tossed around that he’s hoping he can fix, and a seafood truck he’s been using to ferry food, ice, and other supplies from the mainland to Pine Island, now that a temporary bridge has been erected.
“We’re gonna build back, “ Streeter declared. “This is the next chapter of our island. It’s important for our area to have a fishery. It’ll be the people here that bring it back. We’re not going to let this go away.”
October 5, 2022 — While the damage may not visible from land, the wind and waves from Hurricane Ian destroyed and damaged thousands of spiny lobster traps off the Florida Keys.
The storm came about a week before commercial fishermen will start soaking their stone crab traps. Commercial fishermen are allowed to start soaking their stone crab traps Wednesday, Oct. 5. Commercial fishermen can start soaking their traps 10 days before their first pull.
Lower Keys-based trap fisherman Josh Nicklaus said he has lost between 600 to 800 of his spiny lobster traps. Nicklaus placed traps in the waters in Marquesas Keys to the waters off Snipe Point, he said. The bulk of his lost and destroyed traps were oceanside, west of Key West, he said.
“At a time when we should be preparing for stone crab season, we are running around looking for crawfish (lobster) traps,” said Nicklaus, president of the Florida Keys Commercial Fishermen’s Association.
October 3, 2022 — Shrimp Boat Lane is a crook in the middle of San Carlos Island. Inside pulses the heart of a storied fishery.
But with little warning and punishing winds, Hurricane Ian shredded it.
Huge swells tossed shrimp boats into the mangroves and washed away docks. Jesse Clapham walked through what was left Friday morning, sweat soaking the back of his black T-shirt.
“My dad was a fisherman. His was a fisherman,” said Clapham, fleet manager for Erickson and Jensen, a seafood and marine supplies company. “This is life-changing.”
Just three of the company’s 12 boats are still in the water, he said, and one has a hole in the side. Clapham is sure he can patch it.
What to do with the others, however, is overwhelming.
Joined by a handful of coworkers, Clapham, 47, gathered tools and set to work repairing the flooded engine of a front-end loader, so he could clear debris. A mash of rubble fringed the Double E, a 96-foot, steel-hulled shrimp boat left listing sharply to port on the ground.
Clapham’s head mechanic, Jerry Richards, 54, had stayed onboard during the hurricane with a captain and the captain’s wife and five kids. He watched the swelling sea overtop his Chevy Silverado, parked nearby on land. The waves lifted the Double E onto an old dock, before the surge rushed back out, he said. The force caused the ship to lean so far over that they decided to climb down a ladder and off the vessel Wednesday night.
“When they said it was going this way, it was too late to do anything,” Richards said, recalling forecasters’ predictions for Hurricane Ian. He had avoided evacuating to Tampa, where he worried his mother’s home would face intense storm surge in Town ‘N Country. The Erickson and Jensen crew hadn’t even had enough time to drive all the boats up to a safer spot in the Caloosahatchee River before Ian descended.
September 29, 2022 — Spinning out wind gusts to 190 miles per hour, Hurricane Ian made landfall at 3:05 p.m. Wednesday, 28 September, near Cayo Costa State Park on the southwest coast of the U.S. state of Florida, pushing storm surges that swamped neighborhoods in the city of Fort Myers and moving inland into the evening.
Record surges rolled into the streets of Key West and Naples as Ian made its way north overnight into Wednesday as a powerful category-four storm, with sustained winds to 155 miles per hour. Authorities warned that surges as high as 12 feet could continue into Thursday, 29 September. A tide gauge at Bonita Beach reported a rise to more than 10 feet around 6:15 p.m. as Ian weakened to a category-three storm and pushed northeast toward Orlando.
June 17, 2022 — Gulf of Mexico reef fish fishermen expect to face off in court against the National Marine Fisheries Service later this summer. They’re challenging the agency’s recent reallocation of some of their red grouper Individual Fishing Quota to the recreational sector.
Fishermen have more at stake than the cut in their grouper quota: NMFS and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council are already forging ahead with serial reallocations of other fisheries. The lawsuit may be their best, if not only, chance to stop them.
“We’re 2 and 0 against the NMFS in the courts,” said Eric Brazer, deputy director of the Galveston, Texas-based Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders Alliance. Other plaintiffs in the suit include A.P. Bell Fish Company, of Cortez, Florida, and the Southern Offshore Fishing Association, a longliner group based in Madeira Beach, Florida.
The courts sided with commercial fishermen in 2014 and 2017 when they challenged the council and NMFS over actions to extend the recreational red snapper season and reallocate more quota to the sector.
“The council took action that harmed the commercial fishermen and rewarded the recreational fishermen. We told them it was not legal, they didn’t believe us. They approved the document, we took them to court, and we won,” said Brazer.
June 14, 2022 — Florida spiny lobster season is about two months away, but the draw of the tasty crustaceans was simply too hard to resist for two men who were arrested in separate state fish and wildlife police busts over the weekend in the Keys, according to reports.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers were watching one of the men, Rafael Larduet Carrion, as the 43-year-old snorkeled just off shore from Duck Key on Saturday. The eight-month recreational and commercial spiny lobster season doesn’t start until Aug. 6, but FWC investigators say they saw Carrion catching them in addition to separating the tails from the carapace in the water — which is illegal.
All harvested lobsters must be brought to shore whole, per Florida law.
Read the full story at the Miami Herald