Florida's Commercial Fishing Heritage

Sebastian

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The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services is producing a series of documentary videos about several of Florida's coastal communities. The programs will detail the historical development of each area's commercial fishing industry, promote tourism, and spotlight the fishermen who bring home "Florida's Tastiest Catch." The script for the first video, titled "Florida's Fishing Traditions: Sebastian," appears below. The video can be viewed in the Flash viewer above.

Watch the Sebastian Video, Part 1 (WMV)

Charlie Sembler: To true fishermen, independent and rugged living mean more than any modern convenience. A true fisherman, a real salt, if you will, they like that independence. They like the solitude. They like the river. They like the ocean. It’s the thrill of the hunt. It’s the chase. It’s the pursuit. Most of the real true fishermen are self-reliant people. They fix their own equipment. They’re electricians, they’re plumbers, they’re welders, they’re fiberglass men, they’re carpenters. They very much don’t want to depend on anybody else. It’s really that rugged breed that you don’t see a lot of today.

Narrator: Stretching over 150 miles along Florida’s east coast, the waters of the Indian River Lagoon had been a source of food for centuries for the Ais Indians. During the winter months the Ais lived on the long barrier island that separates the lagoon from the Atlantic Ocean. While the swamps and mangroves that lined the island provided excellent habitat for the river’s fish, they also proved to be excellent breeding grounds for swarms of mosquitoes. So pervasive were the insects that even the hardy Ais Indians fled the barrier island in the summers.

The Spanish explorers also found the region intolerable, leaving the bug-infested area to the original inhabitants. By 1760, the Ais Indians had all but disappeared. The land was now open for the hearty folks who would brave the heat, the hurricanes and the mosquitoes.

During Reconstruction, The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was passed. It offered public domain land to any citizen who would improve their plot with a dwelling and crops. In Florida, a few settlers began to lay claim to the land along the Indian River Lagoon. Attracted to the area by its abundance of wildlife and fisheries, the rugged and independent pioneers carved a living out of the wilderness, improving the land with everything from citrus groves to pineapple plantations.

Barbara Smith Arthur: My grandfather came from southwest Georgia, Stewart County, after the Civil War and got a job in the pineapple fields in Melbourne Beach. He worked and made enough money to send for his brother, Charlie. There were no roads. They came in by sailboat and, together, they started looking for land to farm. So they came in to see what the land was like here and found it was high and dry. And so they laid claim to a government homestead. They had to build a permanent structure, which was their house. It had a dirt floor; the walls were made out of palmetto cabbage palm trunks. And of course, the roof was the thatched leaves of the palmetto. And they had to also plant a permanent crop. They had collards and sweet potatoes. And, it took them 15 years to prove up on the land. And Teddy Roosevelt signed the deed to grant them almost 159 point-some acres of land.

Narrator: Without roads to the region, the settlers depended on the river for more than just fish. Steamboats became a vital life line for the Indian River Lagoon.

Barbara Smith Arthur: They came by water, and that was their mode of transportation. The mail came by water. They had supply boats that would come by the waters of the Indian River, bringing goods, flour, things that people would need. And the people would take their little boats out to meet the big boat in order to buy supplies from them.

Narrator: Though dry goods and supplies were brought by steamboats, the main export of the Indian River Lagoon area was fruit. While the name Indian River would one day be synonymous with citrus, it was another tropical fruit that put the region on the map. A seemingly endless supply of pineapple was shipped by riverboats to the nearest railroad at Titusville. The plantations were so successful that by 1890 the area was known as the Pineapple Capital of the World.

The steamboats that plied the Indian River were renowned for service and luxury. But the era of the steamboat was soon coming to a close. On Dec. 11, 1893, the long awaited railroad finally arrived at Sebastian. And with it arrived a new wave of people. With its warm winters and abundant sunshine, the Indian River Area became a sportsman’s paradise; hunting and fishing evolved from necessity to recreation. This easy life was best represented by the “No Sweat Club,” an association that charged its members if any of them broke into a sweat.

But in 1895, a devastating freeze changed life in Sebastian forever. The area’s pineapple and citrus crops were decimated and many people were left without work. To make ends meet, a number of residents turned to the waters of the lagoon. In September of 1895, the first rail shipment of salted fish out of Sebastian left on Henry Flagler’s new Florida East Coast Railroad. By the end of the year nearly 104,000 pounds had been shipped north.

The following year, an ice plant and barrel factory were built in Sebastian, opening up new markets for fresh Indian River seafood. As the industry blossomed, fishing families from across the country began to arrive in the Indian River Lagoon, building the profession that would become its hallmark for the next century, commercial fishing.

John Massey: My grandfather came down in 1910 and he gill net fished.

Richard Thomas: My grandfather came in the area around 1901, and they were involved in the fishing business.

Viola Judah: My dad moved down here in 1924.

Coolidge Judah: We moved down here in 1940.

John Devane Sr.: I probably sold my first fish in about 1946.

John Massey: Old man Oscar Hefling owned this land along here, and he come from Dayton. But he owes my grandfather $45. My grandfather got on the train, come down here and told old man, Hefling, he said, you’re either going to pay me, or I’m going to shoot you. And he gave him all this land along there, about a thousand feet along the river.

Watch the Sebastian Video, Part 2 (WMV)

Narrator: As the industry grew, fishing communities along the Indian River Lagoon began to revisit an age-old desire: to cut an inlet through the barrier island to gain access to the fisheries of the Atlantic Ocean.

Ruth Stanbridge: It started with the Ais Indians; they lived on the barrier island. They were here when the Spanish came with the 1715 fleet. And the reason I bring that up, because they were always trying to get from the river over to the ocean with their boats. And they would haul the boats over the barrier island in the narrow spots to get into the river. So when the first settlers came down the river and they fished and they saw right across that little spit of land was an ocean with fish in it. They were forever trying to get across, too.

Narrator: Separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a barrier island, the Indian River Lagoon stretches from Cape Canaveral south to Jupiter Inlet. The region is so large that it spans two climate zones; the northern end of the lagoon is home to a variety of species that may range all the way through the Carolinas up to New Jersey; the southern end is sub-topical, housing a diversity of species found in South Florida and the Caribbean. The creation of the Sebastian Inlet introduced a flow of saltwater into the center of the freshwater lagoon. The brackish water allowed the Indian River to become the most species-diverse lagoon in North America.

Ruth Stanbridge: The St. Sebastian River, which provides a tremendous amount of freshwater, makes the brackish possible. I mean, you may have areas that are more fresh or more salt, but you have these species of fish that actually adapt and that causes a diversity in the lagoon that you don’t find normally in other places. I mean, we have tarpon, which is considered saltwater, from way up the St. Sebastian River.

Dr. Peter Barile: So we wouldn't have some species like some of these grunts, snappers and such, and groupers in the lagoon at all if we didn't have these Oceanic inlets where the adults need to come in, have access to these coastal nurseries and then once those young species grow up and they return to the open ocean.

Narrator: A number of attempts to open the inlet from 1881 to 1915 were foiled when sand washed in by the tides closed each breach almost as quickly as it was cut. But by 1918, entrepreneur and inventor Roy Couch began digging the permanent cut that would finally connect the Indian River Lagoon with the Atlantic Ocean.

Charlie Sembler: My great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather both had worked on it. Um, and they did that with mule pans and shovels and picks. The hydraulic dredges, when that came around in like the 1919 era.

Narrator: By 1924 the inlet was open to navigation. However, despite a protective jetty, recurring sandbars forced the inlet to be closed and re-dug several times over the next seventeen years. But in 1941, the communities around the lagoon finally allowed one last sandbar to form and close the inlet, not out of frustration, but out of fear.

Ruth Stanbridge: In World War II, they actually allowed it to close, because we had U-boats, German U-boats offshore, and they were afraid that they would actually come into the inlet, into the lagoon. But it was so important that after the war, the Corps of Engineers actually got involved in maintaining and keeping that inlet open.

After the sand was cleared and the jetties strengthened, the inlet was reopened in 1948, and has remained open ever since. Once again the Atlantic fisheries were an easily accessible option for Sebastian’s commercial fishermen.

Johnny Devane Sr.: According to what the weather was or what was available, a lot of time fished in the ocean; or we’d fish here in the river, go catch roe mullet, or earlier in the season catch spots with a gill net. So you had something that you could do all year around, if you wanted to, and bring home a paycheck.

Narrator: Most fishermen were paid for their catch by full-service fish houses that sprang up along the Indian River Lagoon. Here fishermen would tie up their boats, dry and repair their nets, and gather ice and supplies for their next fishing trips. While they did so, dockside workers would unload the fish directly off the boats and carry them to the fish house. There they would be sorted, weighed, packed with ice into large barrels, and shipped off to market every day. For decades the fish houses were the hub of the commercial fishing industry.

Charlie Sembler: The waterfront was the heartbeat of this community for obvious reasons. That’s where most of the commerce took place. That’s where most of the jobs were.

John Devane Sr.: Sebastian didn’t have many stores in it or anything, a little hardware store and a little old dry good store and a, and a grocery store and a post office and an ice plant that the power company owned and ran. And they made ice, fish ice, and the fish houses would have to go over and get big blocks of ice.

Coolidge Judah: They had an ice plant downtown, you'd go down and buy your ice, it was 300- pound cake of ice.

Viola Judah: They’d have to go the ice plant and get this ice and take it down to the dock. And then you had a thing to chisel the ice. You get it to where you could pack the fish.

Richard Thomas: Here, I was a kid with a chipper, the most dangerous instrument, I’d say, created by man to cut ice and to shave it. And you’d have to straddle that thing. My mother would always count my toes when I came home, because she knew what I was doing behind her back.

Johnny Devane Sr.: A lot of fish back then were shipped in barrels, 200-pound barrels and had to go to the railroad, had a depot and, right to the railroad track in Sebastian. The steam engine from Miami on 29 would come by late in the afternoon. Usually, he was always two or three hours late. And they would take and load those fish up in those boxcars, barrels of fish, and ship them to New York.

Narrator: Day in and day out, trains carried fresh fish to the northern markets, and Sebastian’s fisherman worked tirelessly to make sure there was a steady supply.

Johnny Thomas: But a typical week for a fisherman was seven days. And it usually, for me, I was very nocturnal, so it was from first dark to daylight. And that usually was, they used to call me the vampire, because a lot of times I came out at midnight, you know, after it was dark and so forth. And that’s, I’d fish from then till daylight and be home before the sun came up.

Nicky Hill: It’s just one of those jobs that you’ve got to love it or you need to get out of it. And it’s not a job; it’s a life. And it really affects your family, you know, like a, you have to have a special spouse to be a fisherman’s wife, because it’s a lot of time.

Tim Adams: But generally, you’re putting in 12, 15 hours a day hook and line fishing in the summer months. It’s generally long days, there’s very few short days in commercial fishing. And if you’re not fishing, you’re always working on a boat or taking care of some gear of some type. It’s never ending.

Narrator: But every now and then the fishing community would come together and relax. At these times the fish houses would take on a new role.

John Devane Jr.: We’d have big island parties, the Semblers would, probably a couple times a month. And everyone would bring a covered dish and come out to the local spoil islands, and it was a real nice time being a kid growing up barefooted around the fish house.

Charlie Sembler: The fish houses in the Sebastian area was, was really, it was a social place for barbecues and, um, impromptu oyster roasts. Sometimes there would be a little singing going on. Every now and then, there may be a little scuffle going on. But it was the focal point. It was the center of town. It’s where everything happened. It was where the activity happened.

Tim Adams: I think anywhere that you go in the State of Florida, where you have a commercial fishing village, a commercial fishing heritage, and a culture of people who have been there for generations of time, they’re like a family. They may not get along all the time. Of course, family members don’t. But you will find that there’s a sense of community in any one of these little villages that you go to, a very tight knit, sense of community. And, and I’m glad that it’s that way, because we try to protect what we have. We try to keep our identity. And unfortunately, in Florida today in these coastal communities, that’s rapidly disappearing.

Watch the Sebastian Video, Part 3 (WMV)

Ruth Stanbridge: I can remember we went up to see Alan Shepard go around. He was going around a few times and he’d come back down. And we took the dirt road, it was called Jungle Trail. It was a county road.

Barbara Smith Arthur: There were two deep ruts that formed the road, and it was high in the middle. And you usually didn’t meet any other traffic. But if you did, you timed it so that you could get out on, on a clearing in the palmettos at the same time that the other vehicle was coming and you put the left front wheel into the right rut, and they would do the same, and you’d quick just jostle each other and get back into the two ruts again. Sometimes you got stuck.

Ruth Stanbridge: Everybody got stuck on that road that had taken the children up to see the spaceship go up. And he was already back down, and we were still stuck on the dirt road, Jungle Trail. So it was a, a paradox here, you know, we were going into space, but we still had dirt roads, major roads in our county. It was our A1A.

Narrator: Since the days steamboats first traversed its waters, the Indian River Lagoon had changed very little. Sea grasses along the river bed and mangroves along the shorelines provided plenty of habitat for the fisheries. And while activities around Cape Canaveral put America’s Space Coast on the map, the waters around the Sebastian Inlet were set in timeless beauty.

Richard Thomas: The river shore was very pristine, and there was a lot of greenery, coconut palms, sable palms, you know, there was no Brazilian peppers back then. And it was, it was wild. And nobody built right on the river shore.

John Devane Sr.: Well, you didn’t see many houses. You saw no high-rise. All the bridges were wood. There was no causeways. There was no dredge holes, and there was no filling -- bulkhead filling in. That’s, that’s been done in the, in the last 30 or 40 years.

Narrator: In the 1960s, the lagoon’s unspoiled shore line faced a disturbing threat: the State of Florida was selling the surrounding wetlands and islands for development. By buying the rights to the bottomlands of the lagoon, developers could dredge and fill along the river to build up waterfront property. These methods, however, threatened the very existence of the nation’s first sanctioned wildlife refuge, Pelican Island

In 1881, a German immigrant named Paul Kroegel arrived in Sebastian. From his homestead, he could look out over a five-acre mangrove island in the Indian River Lagoon, where thousands of brown pelicans and other water birds would roost and nest. But when bird feathers became highly prized in the fashion industry, Kroegel witnessed the slaughter of countless herons, egrets, spoonbills and pelicans for their plumage. Taking an interest in protecting the island’s birds, and without state or federal laws to back him, Kroegel would sail out to Pelican Island with his gun and stand guard.

A well-known ornithologist of the day, Frank Chapman, discovered that Pelican Island was the last rookery for brown pelicans on Florida’s east coast. Along with fellow bird protection advocate, William Dutcher, Chapman met with President Theodore Roosevelt and appealed to his strong conservation ethic. On March 14, 1903, President Roosevelt designated Pelican Island as the Nation's first National Wildlife Refuge.

With a monthly salary of one dollar, Kroegel was hired as the first national wildlife refuge warden. With his gun, boat and badge, Paul Kroegel stood watch over the island until his retirement from federal service in 1926.

When the dredge and fill plan began in the 1960s, a group of local commercial fishermen, citrus growers, and sportsmen banded together to form The Indian River Preservation League. They worked diligently to protect the island that had over half a century earlier started the US Conservation movement.

Charlie Sembler: Being commercial fishermen, obviously, and on the water every day, they saw things and they knew how the environment worked. They knew how things were linked together, and they knew when one of those links was broken, what the potential could be.

Narrator: The League convinced the State of Florida to stop the sale of these important wetlands as well as to set aside 422 acres of mangrove islands as part of the refuge. Through their efforts, Pelican Island was preserved. But other areas along the Indian River continued to be developed. Paved roads and a new causeway opened the inlet to a new wave of growth. With its abundant estuary and access to the ocean, the Lagoon regained its reputation as a “sportsman’s paradise.” Marinas and condominiums became gathering spots for vacationers and sport fisherman. And the river, once a serene waterway for small commercial fishing boats, began to move at a different pace.

Nicky Hill: You would be out there sometimes a week or two in the river and never see another boat. And that was awesome. Now you’ve got to, it’s like being on the freeway. You’ve got to check behind you and to the side or you’ll get run over, literally. You know, somebody doing 40, 50 knots.

Charlie Sembler: Sebastian, growing up, was a typical small town, American waterfront, fishing village, if you will. That was a fantastic place to grow up. Um, it was no rules, um, other than listen to your parents and do what your parents told you to do. The freedom was enormous. You could come and go. But it was all based around family and work and friends. It was a great place to grow up as a boy.

Johnny Devane Jr.: On Saturday mornings, I had my household chores to do. My mom had chores for me and my sister to do and then after then I could go to the fish house to play; that’s what we would do. We would, hunting fiddler crabs on the river shore and fish off the dock, laying on the dock, fishing on the pilings for sheep head, mangrove snappers. And then when my dad would come in, I would have to go catch bait with him.

Johnny Devane Sr.: As a little fella, he went fishing with me, he'd get seasick, so sick I thought he was gonna die, of course, I used to get seasick, too.

Johnny Devane Jr.: I hated the seasick part, but I loved the fishing. And, so I just stayed with it.

Johnny Devane Sr.: But it gave them something to do; he could earn his earn money.

Charlie Sembler: Not only were we fishing and catching fish and having fun, but as young boys and teenagers, we were making, very good wages.

Neal Adams:
I would actually ride my bike down to the fish house and I’d take the boat out and I’d fish. And when I got to high school, I would fish, I would go out and make a first set at night, and I’d have to be back home by 10 o’clock. So I’d go out and I’d fish. And I started making money in high school. I made enough money in high school to buy my first truck.

Ed Silva: It was all there was to do when we were growing up around here and kept us all out of trouble, kept some money in our pockets, and you know, kept us honest and kept us fishing, and, I mean, that's about all we had to do.

Charlie Sembler: And it wasn’t necessarily the money, although that was, for young folks, it was nice, but it was, it was who we are. It was the fiber and the fabric of what we’d always done and who we were. It was a, it was a great time. We were net fishermen, mullet, mackerel, bluefish. And there’s, it’s hard to describe into words, but there is nothing like it.

Narrator: In November of 1994, a long-standing debate regarding the harvesting of Florida’s nearshore finfish came to a head with the passing of Amendment Three of the Florida Constitution. The amendment, which came to be known as “The Net Ban,” was implemented in July of the following year. Citing the over-harvesting of nearshore species, environmental groups and sport fishermen lobbied for the banning of gill and trammel nets in Florida waters. The effects to Florida’s commercial fishing industry were devastating.

Charlie Sembler: When the net ban came down, it was a crippling blow to our family. It’s what we had done for almost a century, and realizing at that point in time that Florida changed from when we first came to Sebastian in the early 1900s.

Roland Hill: When the net ban started was the worst year, I think, of my life, because I had fishermen that all they'd every done was fish and some of them were 55, 60 years old, and tears would come in their eyes and their wives would cry and it was terrible.

Johnny Thomas: And it was all I ever wanted to do is retire fishing. If you call it retire, because I’ve known fisherman being 90 years old and still going. So, just like me, I’m 67 now. I figured I had me another 23 years, at least, you know, of fishing that I could have gone.

Narrator: The effect of the net ban on Sebastian was swift and devastating. Many commercial fishermen were forced to work onshore to make ends meet. The once impressive fleet was cut down to a handful of boats. Most of the remaining turned to handline mackerel fishing in the Atlantic.

Albert Quatraro: And once the net ban in state waters went in, the fish houses really were in trouble because all they had to depend on was the hand line king mackerel fisherman. And now they're sitting on a piece of property that's worth millions of dollars, dealing a few hand line king mackerel, and what happened was most of them sold out and they're fancy marinas and restaurants now.

Watch the Sebastian Video, Part 4 (WMV)

Ed Mangano: So what a lot of fishermen did was they said, well, maybe we should start figuring out how we can still use our boats and our docks and what we do for a living and turn that into also farming, at least as a part-time thing. So in 1994 when the net ban went into effect, it had a lot of commercial fishermen also get into clam farming.

Narrator: Harvesting clams was nothing new to the Indian River Lagoon. For thousands of years wild clams had been gathered from the river. Their shells, piled high along the river bank to build mounds called middens, were later used to pave the area’s first road. What was new was that clam harvesting was now done through aquaculture. Through clam farming, fishermen treated their catch more like a crop, planting seed clams in mesh bags and allowing them to grow through harvest time.

Ed Mangano: And once the technology was developed to be able to predictably grow clams to market size, I think that many fishermen, on days that maybe the fish they know aren’t going to bite, can plan a day or two a week to go and do their clam farming. And it kind of helped, I think, supplement their income and also helped us tremendously, because we have a lot of good commercial fishermen that became really good clam farmers in the State of Florida.

Ed Mangano: One of the main factors that affected the commercial fishing industry in Sebastian as recently as 2004, were the hurricanes.

Tim Adams: And then the storms of ’04, with Frances and Jean, that really set us on our rear ends there,

Ed Mangano: And many commercial fishermen lost their boats. I’ve seen a lot of boats washed up. The docks got devastated.

Tim Adams: We lost anything that even resembled any operable fish houses on the water, which the last real operating fish house that we had was Archie Smith’s Seafood, and it was completely and totally destroyed.

Narrator: Built in 1935, Archie Smith’s fish house was the last operating fish house on the water in Sebastian. Its destruction in 2004 left a void in the fishing community. More than the loss of a landmark, it was a turning point in the way fishing was done in the lagoon.

Albert Quatraro: We were down to no fish houses on the water at all and it got so difficult to be a hand-line commercial king mackerel fisherman that a lot of guys got out of it. All of the old timers gave it up. It was just too tough, because when you were done fishing, you would have to come in and you kept your boat in a marina, then you would have to load the fish in the truck, your own truck, truck them to the fish house, it was not on the water anymore, and then bring your ice back. And the same with the fuel. And it took a tough, tough breed to do that, because, you know, in the old days you pull up to the dock, there was a guy there to help you unload and everything. It was tough and the fleet was narrowed down, a handful of people, a tougher breed.

Narrator: Those that remained to carry on Florida’s fishing tradition adapted to meet the new challenges head-on. Just as the creation of the Sebastian Inlet gave their fathers access to new fishing grounds, the use of cell phones and Interstate highways are allowing today’s fishermen to be more mobile, to gain access to new fisheries around the state.

Tim Adams: Today, I’m sitting here in Sebastian. I may get a cell phone call from a friend of mine that fishes out of New Smyrna Beach or Jacksonville or Mayport or Pensacola or Key West, or whatever, and say, we’re catching whatever. Within several hours, you could be at that location and fishing. And that’s what’s really changed in the State of Florida is the ability of fishermen to move on almost a moment’s notice to a different locale and be very effective.

Johnny Devane Jr.: Around September, I’ll start fishing for Spanish mackerel in New Smyrna, up by Daytona Beach. And the fish, the Spanish mackerel migrates out to Cape Canaveral, and I’ll usually fish until around Thanksgiving at Cape Canaveral. And then the fish will migrate to Sebastian and I can come out of my hometown, which is pretty nice. You don’t have to live off sleeping in the truck and a lot of motel renting, which is, in my father’s time, they couldn’t trailer their boat up to the interstate and they didn’t have all the boat ramps to use and all the access that you have now, which makes it convenient for me, but it costs more money to do it. But that’s what you have to do to survive in this industry.

Narrator: Commercial fishing is no longer the town’s focal point. But subtle reminders of how it built this community can still be seen around the lagoon. Many of the old landmarks are gone. A few that still stand are weathered and time-worn, serving as memories of a bygone era, while others serve as a source of inspiration, challenging those who carry on to reclaim and rebuild Sebastian’s fishing tradition.

Charlie Sembler: To fishermen, it’s a place where they feel comfortable, because, they’re in control, they don’t rely on anybody else, and they can push themselves and work as hard as they want without anybody giving them directions or, you know, a set of rules that they have to live by, um, and can continue to do what they love to do.

Johnny Thomas: I was very independent, and that was one of the nice things about being a commercial fisherman, that you’re very independent and stuff and you don’t have to, if somebody asks you a question, you can tell them what you think.

Tim Adams: There’s not somebody looking over your shoulder pushing you either. It’s the freedom of it. It’s the ability to go out on your own against Mother Nature or with Mother Nature, depending on how you want to work it and make a living.

Ed Silva: You still have to be competitive and, you know, you actually have to work harder than you would at any other normal job, but it’s, you know, just like to be free.

Albert Quatraro: The freedom. The best part of commercial fishing like that on a daily basis is the freedom of it....

Coolidge Judah: Well, you just seemed to be, I don't know, more free up, freedom out there doing your work and you wasn't having to punch a clock.

Albert Quatraro: And you got the gratitude of knowing that, you know, you're feeding thousands of people. I don't know how many, I must, I put probably 100,000 meals a year on the table, easy.

John Massey: Oh, man, yeah. Along the river, that, you make a good man, some that’s raised along the river. Makes a good man, yeah. He stays busy.

Neal Adams: What I love about fishing more than anything is just being out in the open water and seeing the beauty of everything and not having to deal with somebody telling me what to do or where to do it or how to do it.

Tim Adams: And I don’t know of anything that I could do that would even equal that or rival that. And I’m not going to go looking for it anyways. I’m happy right where I am as a commercial fisherman, and that’s where I’ll stay.

John Devane Sr.: The best part is you bottom fishing and catch a great big old sow snapper about that big on a hand line or a big old grouper on the hand line and the water is clear and you’re pulling real hard and you don’t want to break him off and you don’t want him to get back in a rock or something. And then you look and you can see him coming up. You see that big fish coming up, and then you start talking to him, baby needs a new pair shoes, hold onto that hook, hold on, don’t turn it, don’t turn that hook loose.

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