Saving Seafood

FLORIDA: After Hurricane Ian, reckoning looms for Southwest Florida fishermen

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.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

FLORIDA: Ian wreaks havoc on lobster traps

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.

Read the full article at keysnews.com

FLORDIA: They rode out Ian on shrimping boats. Now they fear their livelihood is destroyed

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.

Read the full article at the Tampa Bay Times

Hurricane Ian makes landfall in Florida, bringing record-breaking flooding and high winds

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.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Red grouper could be precedent for new Gulf catch reallocations

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.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

One man caught 62 out-of-season lobsters. Another tried to hide some in his shorts, cops say

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

 

Florida captain pays $22,300 to settle federal fisheries case

May 20, 2022 — A Florida commercial fishing captain agreed to pay $22,300 restitution in a settlement with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and National Marine Fisheries Service for resource-related violations dating back to 2015, the agencies said in a May 17 statement.

Darrell York of the commercial fishing vessel Watch Out settled on charges of illegally taking red snapper and grouper, according to the agencies.

“This case is a great example of our commitment to working with our state and federal partners in bringing those who show complete disregard for Florida’s natural resources and are actively evading officers to justice,” said Col. Roger Young of the state commission’s Division of Law Enforcement.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Gov. DeSantis announces record funding to fight red tide in Florida

May 5, 2022 — Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke at Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill in Clearwater Wednesday afternoon to announce what was called record-level funding for red tide mitigation in Florida.

Signage at the event was for “Protecting Florida Together,” his office’s environmental initiatives slogan. The governor was joined by Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Shawn Hamilton, and a variety of lawmakers and state leaders.

The governor started the event by thanking Frenchy’s for hosting him, saying the last time he was there was to watch the Super Bowl when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers played. He introduced a variety of officials with him as “a great cast of characters,” then jumped into the speech.

“We’re here today to announce some new funding that I’ve approved in next year’s budget, now I’ve not signed the whole budget yet because we’re still going through those, I’ve got line item veto authority,” DeSantis said. “We’ve gotta make sure we get it right. But we have done more than any governor to help put resources to bear for research and mitigation efforts against red tide. If you look at the four years before I became governor, those four years, there was a total of $2.5 million dollars that was allocated to address the research and mitigation of red tide. Once I make this announcement today, for my four years, we went from $2.5 million to $40 million.”

DeSantis said he and state leaders were excited about the funding efforts.

Read the full story at WFLA

New Study Links Red Tides and Dead Zones Off West Coast of Florida

May 4, 2022 — Researchers are closer to understanding favorable conditions for combined events

A new study found that when red tides began in early summer and continued into the fall, low oxygen areas—or dead zones— were more likely to also occur. This study by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and NOAA collaborators is the first study to link low oxygen—or hypoxia—to red tides across the west coast of Florida and offers new information to better understand the conditions favorable for combined events as they are expected to increase as Earth continues to warm.

Red tides are becoming a near annual occurrence off the west coast of Florida, which are caused by massive blooms of the algae Karenia brevis fueled in part by excess nutrients in the ocean. These algae blooms turn the ocean surface red and produce toxins that are harmful to marine mammals, sharks, seabirds and humans causing a range of issues from respiratory irritation, localized fish kills to large-scale massive mortalities to marine life. Hypoxic areas are typically referred to as ‘dead zones’.

Read the full story at Environment Coastal & Offshore

 

NOAA puts limit on red grouper harvest for commercial fishermen, prices may soon soar

May 4, 2022 — At the Star Fish Company fish market in Cortez in Manatee County, the price for a pound of red grouper is $24.95 – which may seem a bit pricey, but could be a bargain in the near future.

Karen Bell owns the market and is president of her family’s business, A.P. Bell Fish Company. It’s a commercial fishing company that’s been around for more than 80 years.

NOAA Fisheries recently announced it is reducing the number of fish that commercial fishermen can bring in, due to the increasing number of fish recreational fishermen are harvesting.

Bell says that new limit will no doubt impact the price of the fish.

“What this does is push prices even higher,” Bell said. “Grouper already is a really high-end product and the prices are crazy high.”

Andy Strelcheck, the regional administrator for NOAA, knows the decision to limit catches is not popular with everyone.

“This has been a very controversial action,” said Strelcheck. “The commercial harvest is being reduced by approximately 20 percent from the previous catch levels. Today, ironically, we just published another rule that will increase red grouper catch levels if that rule goes through.”

Read the full story at WFLA