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| ** | As a new arrival to Florida in 1969, I remember walking down Tampa’s main drag, Franklin Street, thinking to myself, “what a nice sleepy little town. “ The entire area (later to be known as Tampa Bay) appeared to me at the time to be a typically quiet, low population Florida west coast community. Now let’s jump ahead 38-years to 2007 The Tampa Bay population has exploded to about three million residents, and that once sleepy little Tampa village has become a major city of more than one million. |
Meanwhile, People are still pouring in to grab their “part of paradise” and enjoy all the amenities of living in the Sunshine State --- especially fishing.
There was a time back in the mid 70s, when I could anchor up within sight of Anclote Key and be kept busy pulling in 20-pound gag grouper. There was no pressure in that fishery then --- and it was almost too easy. On one of my offshore trips I had a friend join me who actually complained that “this is too easy. Just drop a bait down an reel in a fish. What’s the big deal?”
With far less restrictive regulations then, most didn’t even think about fishery conservation issues. But all that has changed. Today, with more people pursuing fewer fish, the diminution of our fish stocks is on the minds of the vast majority of those who fish Florida waters, and we’ve all become plugged in to conservation strategies. Granted, federal and state regulators have been ingenious at managing our fishery in the face of the exponential growth. However, there is only so much they can do to mitigate the effects of enormous pressure exerted by our growing and enthusiastic angling populations.
So what are some of concepts that would maintain a viable Florida fishery? Usually, for answers, we would get some answers from the scientists – people whose job it is to constantly study the data and come to very serious scientific conclusions. However, this time we decided to get a few “civilian” points of view – from many long time Florida fishing enthusiasts who have been witnesses to this unprecedented growth. We think you’ll agree that they come up with some thought provoking and possibly viable concepts.
. “We need to put a big gate all across the Florida border and don’t let anymore people come in.”
That was the initial tongue-in-cheek response from Capt. Jim Bradley, a Tampa native who grew up fishing the abundant waters of Tampa Bay. For the last several years he’s been operating a seafood business in Hernando County.
As a youth Bradley pursued most popular inshore species, and was pretty darned good at finding and catching his share of snook, reds and trout. In his youth Bradley was fascinated by the giant silverkings, winning several Bay Area tarpon tournaments. Later, he transposed his fishing skills to offshore and became one of the genuine blue water experts.
These days, Bradley has some unique ideas and solutions that he believes would help the offshore resource.
First of all, he thinks the authorities should “shut the whole grouper thing down for a good period of time – both commercial and recreational. This way the fish would get a nice long break and have a chance to regroup.” Bradley also believes that our very abundant grouper fishing went rapidly downhill with the introduction of longlining in the Gulf. “By the time they pull up those miles of longlines, most everything on the hooks are dead. What a waste.”
Bradley points out that fish handling is a great problem – even with more hardy species like snapper and grouper. With many dying during the catch and release process. Capt. Jim suggests that “instead of size limits, how about keeping the first five fish you catch, and then you’re through?” And Bradley adds that “often when most fish get big enough to keep, they’re full of roe. “And besides, the smaller fish are always much better eating.”
Jay Brewington founded Paddle-Fishing.com, which caters to the interests of a growing legion of folks who do their fishing out of kayaks and canoes. Brewington feels that the vast majority of his paddle fishing colleagues is more in tune with what it takes to maintain a growing resource. He said that “nine times out of ten, we usually just take what we need for dinner – and are really good about proper handling of the fish.” He feels that “every paddler I know is really a great steward of our environment. That’s because the kind of fishing they do brings them so close to nature.”
Brewington also calls for stronger regulations and much better enforcement of the laws already on the books. Above all, he says, ”I would like to allow Mother Nature to control our environment. There is way too much development, seawalls, beach renourishment, reopening of passes, destruction of our precious wetlands – all of which diminish what has historically been a great and abundant fishery.”
Capt. Rick Frazier, who charters out of St. Petersburg also has some strong opinions of what‘s hurting our fish stocks. “They’ve got to quit pumping all that crap in our waters,” adding that “it might be hard to contain warm water runoffs and retention pond collapses. But we really need to keep it all to a minimum. I am frankly convinced that the horrendous red tide last year was fed by all those nutrients in the water.” Frazier also feels that our changing, warmer weather patterns are affecting the habitat as well. With the lack of rain, salinity levels have been much higher which also feed the red tide organism and has a dramatic impact on the fishery equation.
“Trout regulations just don’t make sense to me,” said Frazier. “More speckled trout get killed in the catch and release process than all of the ones that wind up in our coolers.” As with Capt. Jim Bradley, Frazier thinks that we should concentrate more on bag limits than size limits. “If you catch four – keep four -- then target some other species.”
He also worries that too many who fish with live shrimp tend to get the hooks deeply imbedded. “And when a seatrout gets hooked in the gut, it’s just too tempting to try to retrieve a lousy 3-cent hook – but kill the fish in the process.” Frazier highly recommends simply cutting the leader, giving fish an excellent chance for survival.
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