Saving Seafood

FLORIDA: Amid wrecked shrimping fleet, Biden and DeSantis promise unified response

October 7, 2022 — Declaring “we’re here to make sure the people of Florida get what they need,” President Biden stood at the wrecked fishing port behind Fort Myers Beach this week, joining his political rival Gov. Ron DeSantis in pledging an accelerated recovery after Hurricane Ian.

“We’re the only nation on Earth that can come out of something like this better than we were before,” Biden said in an informal, earnest televised talk after he and DeSantis were briefed on damage assessments and recovery efforts.

The setting was close to Trico Shrimp Company and other commercial docks on San Carlos Island, the maritime industrial side of the Fort Myers Beach resort community. Bulldozed by the storm surge as high as 18 feet, beach neighborhoods are still the scene of intense searching for victims.

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