CORTEZ – Red tide, blue-green algae, global warming, sea rise, sewage spills and oil spills combined don’t antagonize commercial fishermen as much as one single, 25-year-old subject.
On election day in 1994, Florida voters passed a state constitutional amendment banning Florida commercial fishermen from using gill nets.
The law made any commercial fisherman in the state an outlaw who used a gill net to catch mullet, as fishing families had done for generations.
Since then, they have lived the words of Winston Churchill: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never. In nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
One “enemy” is the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), which has so much power it is not legally obligated to extend due process of law to fishermen, says Ronald Crum, a Panacea bait shop owner who has a pending lawsuit against the state agency.
Next week, the case is set to come before Florida Second Circuit Court Judge Kevin J. Carroll in Tallahassee.
If Crum wins, he says it could be the beginning of the end of the net ban.
The Cortez Fishermen’s Memorial depicts a fisherman hauling in a gill net. – Cindy Lane | Sun
“If we win in the state court, we should finally have due process. If we don’t – and the FWC has argued that we don’t – we go to federal court with court rulings and FWC arguments that we don’t have due process,” Crum said. “How do you think that will look to a federal judge – Americans without any right to due process under the United States Constitution? The judge could eviscerate the FWC.”
The issue in the case is whether the FWC’s authority is constitutional or statutory, he said, adding that he believes it is statutory and subject to court rulings, which provide checks and balances on the agency.
Previous cases have indicated the FWC is immune from judicial rulings, he said.
No appeal, no amendment
A 2012 case ended in a stalemate.
Crum, the Wakulla Commercial Fishermen’s Association and mullet fishermen Jonas Porter and Keith Ward sued the FWC, arguing that its rules enforcing the net ban violate the equal protection rights of commercial fishermen, and cause the unwanted bycatch the ban is designed to prevent.
Leon County Circuit Judge Jackie Fulford found in favor of the commercial fishermen and lifted the net ban, ruling it a “legal absurdity” that FWC rules enforcing the ban allow small stretch mesh nets that catch and kill juvenile fish while prohibiting the larger mesh nets that let juvenile fish survive to reproduce.
Her ruling was appealed and stayed by the Florida Attorney General’s office, then reinstated, then appealed and stayed again before being reversed by the First District Court of Appeal, whose ruling the plaintiffs challenged at the Florida Supreme Court in 2014.
The high court declined to accept jurisdiction, ending the appeals.
Cortez commercial fisherman Mark Coarsey, the former president of Fishing for Freedom’s Manatee County chapter, which disbanded in March, led the local group for five years, working on the case and in other ways to regain and preserve the rights of commercial fishermen.
Cortez commercial fisherman Mark Coarsey demonstrates how legal-size mullet are caught, while mullet too small to be caught swim through the mesh of outlawed gill nets. – Cindy Lane | Sun
For years, he demonstrated at the Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival how legal-size mullet were once caught in now-illegal gill nets, while mullet too small to be caught swam through the mesh, saving the resource, Coarsey said.
“Legal nets have lots of bycatch,” Crum said. “Ninety-eight fish die for every two that go to market due to the net ban.”
Last year, Coarsey appeared with several members of the group at a meeting of the Florida Constitution Revision Commission (CRC) in St. Petersburg, requesting that a proposed constitutional amendment be placed on the November 2018 ballot to reverse the gill net ban.
The CRC did not approve the amendment, leaving voters no opportunity to vote on the issue.
A bad taste
When the net ban went into effect in 1995, “I was 45 years old and looking for a job for the first time,” said James ‘Wyre’ Lee, of Cortez Bait and Seafood. “It was nasty.”
The nastiness, fishermen say, is that when scientific evidence of mullet overfishing was disputed, recreational fishing groups and environmentalists published a photograph of a dolphin in a net with the slogan, “Ban the Nets – Save Our Sealife,’’ the inference being that commercial fishermen commonly caught dolphins in gill nets.
Many Cortez fishermen cite the Bible as their authority to net fish. On a wall in the fishing village is a mural depicting Jesus walking on the bank of the Sea of Galilee, saying to two fishermen, Peter and his brother Andrew, “Come, follow me,” as they cast a net into the sea. – Cindy Lane | Sun
The photograph “was staged by a Florida Marine Patrol officer who was busted” a decade later, says Cortezian Mark Taylor, former president of the Organized Fishermen of Florida, who lost his wholesale seafood trucking business after the net ban.
Voters were misled, he said. For example, they did not know that Cortez commercial fishermen pioneered habitat restoration in the state by drafting a proposal to use funds from gill net permit fees to pay for two full-time employees at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
“We were devastated because we couldn’t use our nets,” said Mary Fulford Green, 94, whose family was one of the founding families of Cortez.
“That’s when the price of fish became prohibitive for ordinary people to eat,” she said. “If you can afford a $1,500-a-week vacation rental, you can afford a $19.95 shrimp dinner. Ordinary people can’t afford that. People on Social Security can’t afford that.”
“People didn’t vote in ‘94 to hurt commercial fishermen,” Crum said. “They voted to limit gill net fishing, but it’s overkill.”
CORTEZ – Cortez may be the last fishing village in the state, and was certainly one of the first, settled in the 1880s by fishermen from Carteret County, North Carolina, Cortez native Allen Garner told a tour group on Saturday on Cortez Heritage Day.
About 15 people toured the village by bus, starting at the community’s second-oldest 1912 schoolhouse – now the Florida Maritime Museum – with stops including the old Cortez jail (now a homeowner’s laundry room), a home that was once the Cortez post office, a home with a foundation that was a former loading dock for an icehouse, and the village’s oldest 1890 schoolhouse, also a home.
The area, formerly known as Hunters Point, was misnamed “Cortez” by “someone who didn’t know their history,” said Garner, whose family has a long history in the village, beginning in 1902 (he holds Cortez P.O. Box 2). The name was intended to reflect the nearby landing of 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in Bradenton, but 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez accidentally wound up as the village’s namesake, he said.
Garner recounted how the Albion Inn, a hotel and store relocated to the Florida Maritime Museum property, was the only building in Cortez besides the museum that survived the hurricane of 1921, before storms were named.
Cortez native and local historian and author Dr. Mary Fulford Green, 93, dressed as her grandmother, Sally Adams Fulford, the first bride in Cortez, told visitors at the Cortez Cultural Center about other difficulties villagers have faced, such as keeping boatbuilder Chris Craft and condo developers from building in Cortez, and saving the Cortez Trailer Park from redevelopment.
She recounted Cortezians’ successful efforts in 1995 to fight a new, higher Cortez Bridge, using the argument that federal funds cannot be used to build a bridge if it will impact a federal historic district; Green was instrumental in getting federal historic district status for Cortez. However, the bridge fight was lost last year when a new, 65-foot-tall bridge was approved by the state Department of Transportation.
1995 was a tough year in Cortez, not just because of the bridge battle, but because Floridians voted for a statewide ban on gill nets used by Cortez mullet fishermen, Garner said. Voters were misled into thinking the nets created “bycatch” – unintended catch of dolphins, sea turtles and other species – by recreational fishermen who had launched the effort to ban the nets, he said, adding that the gill nets actually targeted mature mullet effectively, letting juvenile fish swim through.
Partly as a result of such regulations, local fish are more costly than those processed in other countries, Garner said.
“Regulations cause us more problems than red tide,” he said.
Fishermen use purse seine nets now, he said, and traps to catch blue crab and stone crab, pointing out a historic net camp preserved in Sarasota Bay by villagers and once used to dry and store cotton and linen nets.
Visitors saw the Cortez Fishermen’s Memorial, commemorating the village’s veterans in U.S. wars, including 67 who served in World War II, and local fishermen lost at sea, including Cortez crew members of the Andrea Gail, whose story was told in the film, “The Perfect Storm.”
They also watched as people forged metal knife blades by hand, one of the Folk School classes offered by the Florida Maritime Museum.
After the tour, the Cortez Village Historical Society welcomed everyone for an early St. Patrick’s Day celebration with corned beef and cabbage with live, local music by Cortez fisherman Soupy Davis and his band to close Heritage Day 2019.
Cortez native Mary Fulford Green told a tour group about the many challenges Cortez has faced over the last two centuries in its struggle to stay a fishing village. - Cindy Lane | Sun
Mary Fulford Green dressed as her grandmother, Sally Adams Fulford, the first bride in Cortez. - Cindy Lane | Sun
A brown pelican paddles in Sarasota Bay off the Cortez Bait and Seafood working dock. - Cindy Lane | Sun
Metal blades are hammered like horseshoes. - Cindy Lane | Sun
The forge heats the metal blades that were shaped today on Cortez Heritage Day. - Cindy Lane | Sun
The handmade blades are sharpened on a wheel. - Cindy Lane | Sun
The old Cortez jail is now used a laundry room, but still has bars inside separating the two former cells. - Cindy Lane | Sun
Cortez native Allen Garner led a group of 15 people through the historic fishing village of Cortez today to celebrate Cortez Heritage Day - Cindy Lane | Sun
Cortez fishermen's memorial - Cindy Lane | Sun
Cortez native Allen Garner led a tour group on Cortez Heritage Day. - Cindy Lane | Sun
CORTEZ – It’s after Thanksgiving and a cold front has passed through, but what should be mullet season hasn’t really started yet, thanks to red tide, commercial fishermen say.
Mullet are not schooling around the docks or jumping in the Cortez Kitchen off the fishing village like they should be this time of year, said Karen Bell, of A.P. Bell Fish Co.
“We still seem to have concentrations of red tide that are killing fish here,” she said.
Until local mullet begin to spawn, Bell is buying mullet from north Florida, Alabama and North Carolina, she said, recalling that her father used to say that mullet stay in the Manatee River to avoid red tide.
“But when they come out and hit the red tide, we don’t know what will happen,” she said.
“It’s too soon to tell if the red tide has impacted adults, because they have to leave the estuaries to get out for spawning,” said Angela Collins, extension agent for the IFAS Florida Sea Grant Marine Extension Program in Palmetto. Red tide could affect where they swim, and could also impact their larvae, she said.
“I hope they make it out past the red tide before they spawn,” said Charlie Hunsicker, director of the Manatee County Parks and Natural Resources Department, noting that mullet were taking refuge at Robinson and Perico Preserves.
At Robinson on Monday, red tide levels were high, and dead mullet floated along the shoreline.
At Cortez Bait and Seafood, fishermen brought a few mullet in last week, but it was too windy for some boats to be out, Kim McVey said, adding, “I hope red tide won’t affect them.”
Mullet are few and far between at the moment, said Bob Slicker, of the Swordfish Grill and Tiki Bar in Cortez, adding, “But I’m optimistic.”
CORTEZ – As fishermen from nearby states pull into town with their boats in tow for the annual battle over lucrative mullet roe, Cortez fishermen are reminded of the war they lost 15 years ago this week.
When Floridians voted to amend the state Constitution to ban gill nets in 1994, their aim may have been to save dolphins and sea turtles, but their target turned out to be commercial fishermen and their families who lost their livelihoods.
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The net ban was proposed by environmental and recreational fishing lobbyists whose scientists testified that mullet were being overfished. The proposal won support with the slogan, “Ban the Nets – Save Our Sealife,” and photographs of dolphins and sea turtles drowned in commercial gill nets.
Caught on the underfinanced end of the political tug of war, commercial fishermen tried to adapt. Some went into bait fishing or crabbing. Some went into dockbuilding or beach maintenance. Some graduated from smoking pot to smoking heroin.
None were left with their lives intact.
And some Cortezians fear they are seeing it happen all over again.
Hook, line, and sinker – the net ban
“It’s hard to dredge it all up,” said Cortez fisherman Thomas “Blue” Fulford, who lost his leg in a fishing accident, and his livelihood when the net ban was passed in 1994.
Now he makes cast nets, which are still allowed. On his business card, he calls himself a “dispossessed net fisherman.”
Blue Fulford, who describes himself as a “dispossessed net fisherman,” makes cast nets. – Cindy Lane | Sun
“I did everything that could be done. Wrote everyone. The Cabinet, the House and the Senate,” he recalled, as a mullet jumped in the canal behind his workshop. “I got one answer, from Secretary of State Jim Smith, who wrote that it was six months before the vote, and I should get to work.”
So Fulford, the former director of the local chapter of the Organized Fishermen of Florida (OFF), went to work, as did his successor, Mark Taylor.
Taylor got flak from both sides, as he explained to friends and family in Cortez that the amendment that would ban their nets was based on hotly-debated evidence that there weren’t enough mullet to go around.
He also explained to a hostile Legislature, many of whom listed recreational fishing as a favorite sport in the 1994 Legislative directory, why the net ban would take food out of the mouths of Cortez residents and everyone else down the economic food chain, to no avail.
Commercial fishermen were an easy target because their activities are obvious and more easily regulated than nitrogen-polluted runoff, mangrove destruction and other causes of fishery declines, Fulford said.
“How many people are willing to stop using plastic bags?” he asked. “Plastic bags kill turtles, too.”
Riding back and forth to Tallahassee, Fulford saw new developments springing up and recalls thinking that Florida newcomers who didn’t know anything about commercial fishing were going to make the decision.
“They swallowed the propaganda, hook, line and sinker,” he said.
Most voters were uninformed, agreed Karen Bell, office manager of the 70-year-old A.P. Bell Fish Co., one of two Cortez fish houses that survived the net ban.
Three months after the November, 1994 vote, she got a call from a recreational fisherman announcing that the fishing was already markedly better.
“The ban didn’t go into effect until July 1 (1995),” she said.
Still angry after all these years
The bad blood between recreational and commercial fishermen goes back to the 1960s, when anyone could sell fish to a fish house, said Cortez fisherman Mark Ibasfalean, who has been selling fish since he was about 12 years old.
“I remember long lines of people at Bell’s, both recreational and commercial,” he said.
After regulations were passed requiring a commercial license to sell fish, recreational anglers were cut out of the loop, he said. Years of finger-pointing over which sector was responsible for overfishing certain species and using bad fishing practices made for constant skirmishes.
By the 1990s, the recreational fishing lobby had found common ground with environmentalists concerned about bycatch – non-targeted species that wound up in gill nets – and funded the successful net ban campaign.
To stay on the water, some commercial fishermen reluctantly switched sides to work in the recreational sector, as fishing guides or tour boat captains.
After all these years, Kathe Fannon is still angry.
First mate Pup Pup, Capts. Kathe and Mike Fannon – Cindy Lane | Sun
A member of a five-generation commercial fishing family, she now offers boat tours around Cortez and Anna Maria Island. Her customers learn about Cortez, its fishing heritage, its wildlife, its rising status as a film location, and her take on the net ban.
“The Bible says ‘Cast your net on the waters,’ ” she said. “It does not say cast your rod and reel.”
Pleading for a lifeline – the longline ban
With gill nets outlawed, some Cortez fishermen turned to longline fishing. Instead of catching fish in a net, they lay out five to 10 miles of line on the sea bed, baited with between 750 and 1,200 hooks, normally reeling it in before any sea turtles that may have been snagged can drown.
One fisherman who left a line out too long earlier this year and killed five sea turtles prompted a federal lawsuit under the Endangered Species Act and an emergency longline ban that began in May, putting fishermen out of work.
The ban was softened last month with an interim rule allowing longline fishing in water 35 fathoms or more with 750 rigged hooks until a permanent rule is implemented next spring. Local fishermen say the rule helps little since they harvest most fish between 20 and 30 fathoms.
Recent debates on the longline ban at hearings of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council evoke hearings in the early 1990s over the net ban.
Proponents of both the net ban and the longline ban include environmentalists and recreational fishermen. While the citizens of Florida made the net ban decision and regional and federal fisheries regulators are making the longline ban decision, the evidentiary process has been similar.
At public hearings, scientists with doctoral degrees speak in highly technical terms, debating the effect of the gear on marine life, both targeted species and bycatch.
Fishermen often can’t put their experience into words, and feel out of their depth, Ibasfalean said.
“I’m not calling anybody dumb, but a fisherman is not designed to understand highly technical stuff,” he said. “They’re farmers. They’re not scientists.”
During the net ban hearings, scientists and fishermen debated in their different languages whether gill nets were catching too many mullet, making it difficult for the species to propagate.
Fishermen argued that it was in their best interests to avoid overfishing.
“We have to be good stewards,” Fulford said, echoing testimony at several longline hearings this year when fishermen disputed statistics of turtle mortality, saying they had seldom, if ever, caught and killed turtles.
During longline hearings, fishermen pointed to other man-made causes of sea turtle mortality, including nest poaching and illegal artificial lighting, which can kill 100 turtles at a time in a single nest, channel dredging machines that suck up turtles and spit them out in pieces, recreational fishing bycatch, offshore racing collisions, oil spills, coastal development and pollution, beach renourishment and other factors.
Pleading for a lifeline, they asked for alternatives, including gear adjustments, such as shortening the length of the lines, reducing the number of hooks on the lines and banning bait that sea turtles prefer.
They suggested that turtle farming and better enforcement of land-based turtle laws could replenish natural stocks.
They also requested a gear buyback program, which helped a few fishermen who acted quickly after the net ban to cut their losses before the funds ran out.
The final decision, expected in spring, will likely limit longline endorsements to 61 commercial vessels in the Gulf using 750 hooks in 35 fathoms or more during June, July and August, and in 20 fathoms or more the rest of the year, said Glen Brooks of the Gulf Fisherman’s Association, who owns six longline boats in Cortez.
The ripple effect
That’s not enough to keep the industry in business, according to Brooks, who paints a grim picture of the ban’s ripple effect on the local economy.
Unemployed grouper fishermen don’t use bait, so bait fishermen go unemployed, making bait shops flounder. Marinas don’t sell as much ice or diesel fuel. With fewer fish to process, fish houses lay off workers. Truckers who transport fish to other parts of the state are idled.
And, ultimately, consumers see less local fish in markets and on restaurant menus.
“The longline ban is already having the same consequences as the net ban,” Ibasfalean said.
Designed to avoid a “jeopardy call” – the death of a threatened loggerhead sea turtle – the ban is causing livelihoods to become extinct instead, Bell testified at an August regulatory hearing.
“I’m willing to take my chances with jeopardy,” she said. “We’re almost gone anyway. We’re just about ready to close the doors. The boats are in jeopardy, the fishermen, the employees, my family are in jeopardy.”
Where are they now?
The impending longlining rule will undoubtedly leave many fishermen dead in the water, Cortezians say.
Those who own boats might re-rig them to fish with less-effective vertical gear, or use cast nets, or put out crab traps, if they can afford to buy new gear and pay the licensing fees. Crews may have to learn new skills, or get different jobs altogether.
Some may not make the transition.
“The net ban wiped out the old timers,” Ibasfalean said. “There was no grandfathering. People, when they reach a certain point, they can’t adapt.”
After the net ban, some fishermen turned from smoking pot to smoking heroin, Fulford said. Jokes spread about fishermen catching “square grouper,” or bales of marijuana dropped by plane into the Gulf.
But some stayed afloat.
Fannon switched to providing sightseeing tours after the net ban, and now works with her daughter, also a captain. Her father, Frank Tupin, made a living until his death last month catching bait shrimp with her husband, Mike Fannon.
Mark Ibasfalean and his brother, Bryan Ibasfalean, build docks, make independent films and videos, mostly about fishing, run www.TrueHollywoodScreenTest.com, and fish and crab. His wife, Kim Ibasfalean, works as a Bradenton Beach tour boat operator.
Like the others, Taylor went out of business overnight when the net ban was passed.
“I had just hung a $10,000 net that had never been used. Suddenly, it was illegal,” he said. After working as a truck driver and a motorcycle instructor, he eventually landed his present job, raking Anna Maria Island beaches for Manatee County. It’s as close to the water as he could get, he said.
Fulford continues to make cast nets and is chairman emeritus of FISH, the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage, which supports the 95-acre FISH Preserve and the Florida Maritime Museum at Cortez, where the local commercial fishing industry may one day be reduced to an exhibit.
Regardless of how fishermen adapt to the impending longline regulations, a bumper sticker on a boat trailer in Cortez says it all.
