Fishing line runs deep in local history
Around here it was not a hobby, but a way of life
 Sun Herald photo by Steve Reilly Norma and W.H. "Homer" Monson prepared a historic photographic display for commercial fishing life in Punta Gorda. Monson's family helped found the Punta Gorda Fish Co. in 1897. It remained in business until 1977. |
Staff Writer
Ancient Indian midden mounds, refuse piles left by tribal villages, testify to how long fishing was the lifeblood of Charlotte Harbor, Cape Haze and Lemon Bay.
According to Robert F. Edic's "Fisherfolk of Charlotte Harbor," published by the University of Florida in 1996, nomadic people began settling along local shorelines more than 8,000 years ago, feasting off the local bounty of marine life. From 2,000 B.C. onward, Indian villages grew and lasted until they first made contact with Spanish explorers in 1513.
"For the Calusa (Indians), fishing was not just an economic endeavor -- it was the mainstay of their lives," Edic wrote. "As fisher folk, their lives were no doubt organized around the rich marine environment."
Establishing themselves in the New World, the Spanish, too, discovered the marine resources of Charlotte Harbor and established fish "ranchos," established by Cuban Spanish. By the late 1700s, Edic noted, historical reports said 1,000 tons of dried mullet and roe was shipped from Charlotte Harbor to Havana over a three-year period.
In the 1870s, a U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries reported how 550,000 pounds of mullet and 44,000 pounds of roe was harvested from the northern end of Gasparilla Island.
Looking at the 20th Century, Edic described how ice and railroad lines changed the local fishing industry at the beginning of this century, how local fishermen earned exemptions from service in World War II because fishing was considered essential to the war effort, and how in the 1980s a Japanese market for mullet roe caused wholesale prices to reach $12 a pound.
Edic, who worked as a mullet fisherman himself, recorded what he heard as the death knell for commercial fishing.
"In 1991, the Florida Conservation Association (FCA) and the 'Florida Sportsman' magazine began lobbying for an amendment to the Florida Constitution to ban the use of gill and entanglement nets in Florida's inshore waters," Edic wrote. "In 1994, Florida voters approved the amendment by a three-to-one margin."
Edic wrote that he didn't know what the ultimate result of the net ban would be. But for Englewood resident Larry Evans, the net ban cut forever the line connecting "old Florida" with "new Florida."
Fishing the bay
Evans grew up in the Englewood area when almost every one of the 300-plus residents either fished or had a relative or friend who made a living from fishing.
"Let me tell you about the pristine water of those days," Evans said. "The water was clear enough on a flood tide that you could wash your fish out in that bay and eat it."
Evans' family settled in the Englewood area in the 1920s. His mother, Daisy McGee Evans, was from central Florida, and his father, Leland Evans, was from South Carolina where his great-grandfather had owned a large plantation on the Black River in Georgetown County. Evans believes his father's love of fishing came from fishing on the Black River.
Leland Evans originally came to the Englewood area to work for his uncle and drive a log truck. That wasn't to last long, Evans said, and his father thought fishing was better than driving a log truck. His father's brother, C.E. Evans, who was simply known as "C," would join him to fish local waters.
"And I might say, they were some of the best fishermen," Evans said.
While his father and others fished for grouper, trout and other species, mullet remained the mainstay of commercial fishermen.
His father and uncle were stop netters, a method of fishing where crews of five or six men trapped, herded and then seine-netted the fish. Evans estimated his father and he could run up to three miles of stop nets.
"You'd lose a lot of fish, but you also caught a lot of fish," Evans said, recalling how catches in the thousands weren't unusual, including one catch where he and his father hauled in more than 36,000 fish.
"Now, remember, we're going back 55, 60 years ago," the 73-year-old Evans said. "(Stop netting) was illegal in most of Florida, except for Charlotte County and the Lemon Bay portion of Sarasota County. There were only a handful of stop netters, three or four, from Placida to Englewood."
The stop-net fishermen would divide waters into territories, and each one respected the the other's territory. Turtle Bay and the southern tip Cape Haze coast line were what Evans called "free territories."
"One thing I'd like to make clear is that the stop netters looked at the bay as a farm they had to take care of," Evans said.
"They did not mess it up. They caught the fish -- yeh, they caught a lot of fish -- but it was an industry and was like farming."
Evans recalled that he could see the waters "tar black" with schools of mullet.
Traditionally, Florida had a closed season on mullet, between Dec. 1 and Jan. 20, the spawning seasons. Evans said his father and other fishermen would then fish for redfish, speckled sea trout and other inshore species, as well as heading offshore for grouper.
"Keep in mind, in those days, the only instruments we had on the boats were compasses," he said.
"It's amazing how the old guys, like my dad, would go out 200 miles offshore, fish two or three days until the boat was loaded, and then come back and hit Stump Pass right on the head -- without any radio direction or anything else."
Stop netting wasn't the only fishing method employed by his father and other fishermen. Evans said they fished with gill nets or with hooks and lines.
"There was really an art to trout fishing; it was a ballet," he said, describing how his father would fish with a 24-foot cane pole with an equal amount of line. In what appeared to be one motion, Evans said, fishermen would catch one trout after another.
"You'd catch trout, bring it back in and caught it on your hip. The cane pole went into the crook of your arm, broke the trout's neck, hooked the bait on and swung it back out again."
He explained how breaking the necks of the sea trout kept fish from flopping around in boats.
Evans continued to fish with his father until Jan. 20, 1947, when Lemon Bay experienced the first major red tide outbreak in recent memory. Red tide is an algae that produces toxins, which affect shellfish; large outbreaks can deplete water of oxygen, killing fish and other sea life in large numbers.
"We had floating, white islands of dead fish," he said. "Nets hung out until they rotted."
Taking his father's advice, Evans left Englewood, eventually pursuing a career in engineering.
When he looks out onto Lemon Bay now and thinks about impacts on the bay -- such as the creation of the Intracoastal Waterway and increase of boating traffic -- Evans said he believes Lemon Bay will only remain a shadow of what it was when his father worked its water.
Packing the fish
The Albritton family still operates the Fishery Restaurant, located at the junction of Charlotte County Road 771 and C.R. 775. But in July 1999, the family decided to shut the doors permanently on Placida Fish Market and the Boca Grande Fishery, the family's wholesale seafood business.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Albritton's fish house, like other fish houses, served as the economic backbone when Lemon Bay and other local waters served as the life blood of the Englewood and Cape Haze communities.
The Punta Gorda Fish Company Inc. was also an economic mainstay for the first half of the century to 1977. As many as 200 fishermen -- and as many as four to five generations -- sold their catches at the Punta Gorda Fish Co., which operated off a municipal dock, extending from the end of Maude Street, and had been one of the eight fish houses in the city.
The importance of the local fish industry can be seen in a 1947 Punta Gorda Herald article reporting how Punta Gorda fish houses shipped out 17 million pounds of fish, which was then 18 percent of the state's fish production.
Eugene C. Knight and L.B. Giddens first formed the fish company in 1897. Knight's son-in-law, W.H. "Bill" Monson, took over operations in 1935, and Knight's grandson, W.H. "Homer" Monson operated the fish company until 1977, when the city council decided not to renew its lease.
Five crews worked out of the Punta Gorda Fish Co. The fish house also operated fish camps, silt houses that can still be found in Charlotte Harbor and Pine Island Sound. The camps would be supplied with "run boats." Fishermen would often be out on the waters for a week at a time, with one boat bringing in the fish to Punta Gorda, Monson said.
The Punta Gorda fish house processed pompano, redfish and other saltwater species, but, like elsewhere, mullet was the mainstay, Monson said. In the 1950s, the Punta Gorda Fish Co. also worked its own shrimp boats.
The heyday for the fish companies, Monson said, was during World War II. Meat had been rationed, like other goods, to help the war effort, but the government didn't ration fish.
"We would load four or five train cars every other day," Monson said. "There was 40,000 pounds on a train car."
While still in school during WWII, Monson said, he'd ride his bicycle to the fish house where he would lay fish flat in the railroad cars under layers of ice.
After the war, the local fish industry still thrived. Monson said his company started transporting fish on semi-trucks and would fill three or four trucks a week. Primarily, he said fish would be shipped to the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Miami, but Punta Gorda fish even made their way to New York City's Fulton Fish Market.
Life in the fishing industry was never a nine-to-five job.
"The fishermen worked on the tides, and the tides were an hour later each day," Monson said.
"They'd come in later and later, and we'd come home for supper, and we had a night watchman who'd call us, and we come down, help them unload and ice the fish."
Like Evans, Monson believes the tide has gone out on the life he and the fishermen lived.
Hanging up the nets
"I'm still convinced that I'm a dinosaur," says Tim Dixon, a 43-year-old mullet fisherman who, like others, turned to clam farming when the net ban went into effect.
"It's just a matter of time before I become extinct, and then I don't know what I'm going to do," he said.
Dixon's great-grandfather was a fisherman in North Carolina before settling in Placida area in the late 1890s. Many of the older families in the Englewood area, especially those who made a living fishing, are descended from Carolina fishermen. A house his great-grandfather built in 1909 still stands off County Road 775.
"They all came here because of fish," Dixon said. He decided to carry on the tradition in his teens and became a fisherman because it's in his blood.
"It's something that gets in your system, and you can't get it out," he said. "You can't explain it to someone. It's just part of you."
Dixon is an active member of the Organization of Florida Fishermen, the local OFF chapter director and is on its statewide executive committee.
"We still have a lot of stuff politically going on," he said.
Dixon still fishes for mullet, as much as state law allows. Fishermen are allowed to use 500 feet of gill nets or cast nets for mullet. Dixon, however, said he believes the opponents of commercial fishermen, specifically naming the FCA, won't be satisfied until they drive fishermen like himself from Florida waters.
"These people won't be satisfied until they ban the sale of fish, and when they do that, then we're history," he said.
Mullet was a favorite fish of poor and working-class people throughout the South and had been less than $1 a pound, Dixon said. After the ban, the price shot up more than $2 a pound. The industry, he said, also depended upon "mom-and-pop" stores that went out of business when the ban dried up the availability of mullet.
"The consumer was the one that was lost," Dixon said. "That was always my point: the consumer, in the end, was the loser. But all that is history."
Dixon is so pessimistic about the future for fishermen that he steered his 19-year-old son away from taking up the family tradition.
"He's a nail banger on Boca Grande," Dixon said. "When he got out of school, he wanted to fish and would do anything to fish with me. I wouldn't let him go and feel he's better off over there banging nails than being out there on the water."
The clam co-op is made up of 35 to 40 clam farmers, but Dixon isn't sure about the future of clam farming. Right now, he said, the market is too new and volatile to make any predictions.
"This thing has expanded to the point where we have more clams right here, on our farms, than the entire state of Florida was producing 15 years ago," Dixon said. "That's hard to imagine."
An acre can produce as many as three million clams.
The state issued 80 leases in Charlotte Harbor waters, between Placida and Pine Island Sound. More than 250 acres of clams can now be found beneath local waters from Cape Haze to Pine Island Sound, Dixon estimated. Clam farms are also growing elsewhere in the state, he said.
An immediate goal of the Placida Clam Co-op, Dixon said, is to build its reputation for quality product.