Battered By Irma, Florida Fishermen Pin Their Hopes On Stone Crab Season
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
In Florida, Hurricane Irma upended a number of industries, including commercial fishing. It smashed equipment and left many fishermen homeless. Now, as NPR's Frank Morris reports, fishermen in South Florida are pinning their financial hopes on a different seafood delicacy.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Here on Marathon, lobster boats are pulling up to the docks - same as usual afternoons this time of year. But instead of hauling in thousands of valuable lobsters, boat Captain Carlos Moreira has just been roaming the seas, searching for lost traps.
CARLOS MOREIRA: Well, you've got to start somewhere. So you just look for one. Yesterday, from where I had my traps to where I found them, they were seven miles away. And, you know, to travel around and try to find a 7-and-a-half-inch buoy in the Gulf of Mexico is a challenge.
MORRIS: Some lobster fishermen say they've lost 90 percent of their traps. Boat Captain Ray Saladino says Irma, Category 4 storm here, scattered them far and wide.
RAY SALADINO: They don't just scoot across the bottom and stay flat. You see some of them that are just torn apart on the top. It's all scuffed up right here. See that? That's been flipped around, upside down, right side up. It's a mess.
MORRIS: The traps aren't going to do them much good now, anyhow. Standing by the meager catch he hauled in today, Alfaro Crespo says hurricanes disperse lobsters.
ALFARO CRESPO: It's a mess. Soon as the lobsters recognize the weather - gone.
MORRIS: Most lobster fishermen around here are packing it in for the season. In good years, they might otherwise fish until Christmas. And quite a few of them lost more than their traps and their livelihood.
MOREIRA: I'm sleeping on my boat because I lost all the contents of my house, as well. But we ain't going nowhere. We're going to hang in there.
MORRIS: Carlos Moreira built a narrow bunk padded with a hunk of foam in the wheelhouse in his Spartan fishing boat. At least he's got a place to stay in the Keys. Others have had to move to the mainland. So labor is scarce. Lobsters are scarce. And boat owner Elizabeth Prieto says everyone around here feels it.
ELIZABETH PRIETO: It takes from everybody. It starts with the crew and then the fishermen. And then there's the fish house. And then there's the restaurants. And, I mean, it just - boom, boom, boom - it's like a domino effect.
MORRIS: There is a bright spot, though, or at least the shiny hope for this industry. And its epicenter is in a tiny town on the mainland.
HOWIE GRIMM: Hi. My name's Howie Grimm. I'm the mayor of Everglades City, which is the stone crab capital of the world.
MORRIS: Of the world?
H GRIMM: Of the world - because they don't have them anywhere else but here.
MORRIS: Grimm's exaggerating a bit there. But it's probably fair to say that no place relies on stone crab more than this hard-hit little town. Stone crabs aren't much to look at. Their bodies - they're about 6 inches across, often kind of mud colored. But they can grow big, tasty claws. A single claw can fetch a fisherman upwards of $20. And Grimm thinks it's going to be a good crab season.
H GRIMM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the water's fine. I think it's going be better than it was before.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAMMERING)
MORRIS: And people are racing to get ready for the first day of legal crab fishing next week. Ron Ouellette and a couple of crab fishermen are hustling to cobble together a dock that was battered by Irma.
RON OUELLETTE: We're trying to do a guerilla repair job. Eventually, it will be rebuilt properly. But this is just to get this season in.
MORRIS: And there's a lot riding on it. Justin Grimm, Howie's son, runs a business buying, processing and selling crab.
JUSTIN GRIMM: But we've got to go back to work. I mean, just our one little facility here to open is going to mean jobs for about 40 guys, between the boats, the captains, the crewmen, employees here. So it's a very big deal that we get up and running. It ain't just about us. It's about the community.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOAT MOTOR)
MORRIS: Everglades City isn't the only place banking on a big crab harvest. Back in the Keys, boat captains like Ray Saladino are, too.
SALADINO: It's got to be huge because that's where our income has got to come from.
MORRIS: Saladino says that, with almost all local fishermen turning away from lobster now, they are ramping up to catch stone crabs. He just hopes there's enough of them to go around. For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris in Marathon, Fla.
Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.