"Stop" Fishing

 

Stop Fishing With Gill Net
One night in the late fall Chuck, Kenny, and Joe camped out on Atsena Otie on the beach.

They had gone up inside the creek and run their net across.  They were stop fishing.   Stop fishing is when you close off the creek and wait for the tide to drop.   



Taking in the Net



Cast Netting the Holes

As the tide drops the fish come down the creek, trying to get out before the creek goes dry, and are caught in your net.   The fish you don’t catch in the net, you use a cast net to catch the rest that are in the holes.  In those days it was all legal.

Now that has all been outlawed!

The net ban put a lot of commercial fishermen around the entire coast of Florida out of work. Some of these men were too old to learn another trade, they had fished all their lives, and they had to turn to the welfare system to survive.

Many of the ones who did go to the poles and vote to BAN net fishing are also the ones who complain the most about the welfare system!

And the laws that were passed did absolutely nothing to stop the problem that they were intended to. We all hope that eventually it will be put on another referendum to be voted on again.

Not only did it put commercial fishermen out of work, it closed a great number of fish houses and other trades related in some fashion to commercial fishing.

After they came back from setting the net, Chuck decided before he crawled into his sleeping bag for a nap while they were waiting for the tide to drop, he’d shake the sand out.  

Water Moccasin

He noticed it was a little heavy when he picked it up but thought surely it couldn’t have that much sand in it. He shook out a nice sized moccasin that had found a warm place to crawl into and hole up for the night.  

There used to be a lot of snakes on this island, and then someone put hogs over there to eat the snakes and thin the population. There are still snakes on the islands but not as many as in those days.

To be continued