Stone Stories..

[wade]

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article...tter?p=1&tc=pg

CORTEZ - The net fishing ban caused paralyzing depression, and John Campbell became so despondent he lost his house, car and dignity.
"I laid around until everything was gone," he said. He was a fifth-generation fisherman born in a brown stilt-house in the waterfront village of Cortez, and was a commercial net fisherman for decades until the industry was shut down in 1995. Now what? He knew nothing else. Campbell was raised on the turquoise water of the Gulf, fishing with his father even in diapers. In fact, he ate so much fish growing up he had to stop for 10 years. Stone crab fishing. That would be his salvation. So 16 years ago he teamed with younger brother, Wade, and a friend, Chris Baker, and together they joined one of the most dangerous, competitive, demanding and pressurized occupations imaginable. Aboard the 31-foot Lacey Jean the three men will kick off stone crab season Saturday, hoping to cash in with the 3,000 crab traps they have set in the Gulf. The season ends May 15.Dangerous? The Campbells once found the body of a close friend, Craig "Dutch" Lutz, floating in the water at midnight. He drowned while crab fishing.Competitive? Once, a rival boat hired an airplane to fly over the Gulf to find the Campbells' traps and their successful spots.Demanding? Try hauling in 400 barnacle-covered, wet, wooden traps weighing 75 pounds each by noon in rough seas. Oh yeah, don't get bit, either. The crab claws clamp down with the force of 19,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.Pressurized?
"My son did it for a while, but I steered him away," said John Campbell, who used to smoke five packs a day, is known by locals as "Lightning" and wears a cap that says "Captain Crabby.""It's a rough life. If you don't produce you don't get a check. "Every day there's pressure ... whether you eat or not."
Sunup to sundown They build the crab traps themselves, under the same stilt house John Campbell was born in 63 years ago. They can build 100 a day. This year they made 1,000 new ones. They get the wood pieces from Arcadia and staple them together. The traps are 16 inches by 16 inches by 12 inches and the bottoms are made of concrete. The traps cost $25 each, meaning the Campbells will have $75,000 worth of traps in the water this season. Frozen pig feet are used for bait because they won't decompose in warmer water. In the winter, mullet is used. They buy the pigs feet from A.P. Bell Fish Co. in Cortez for 37 cents per pound, and they'll use 700-800 pounds each day. Attached to each trap line is a foam buoy or "tag," and each boat has its own recognizable colors. The Campbells use yellow and white buoys with the state-issued number X363 hand-painted in black. John Campbell's wife and grandkids have "buoy-painting parties" each summer and this year they made 5,000. Wade Campbell, 53, owns the Lacey Jean, which cost around $50,000. The boat is named after his oldest daughter.They fish each day from sunup to sundown, unless the wind is over 25 knots. They take three bags of groceries with them. They usually fish in 30-40 feet of water, and each trap is attached to a rope that takes it to the bottom. Stone crabs love hard surfaces, and John Campbell knows the Gulf terrain in his head from decades of fishing. They have gone as far out as 17 miles.
The crabs enter the trap by climbing up the side. Then they walk through a 4-inch hole and drop down inside. Since they can't swim, they can't get out.
"They're bumfuzzled, I guess," John Campbell said.
Chris Baker is usually the one who pulls the buoys in by hand with a hook and then connects them to a motorized pulley. Once the trap is onboard, Baker removes the legal claws by hand and throws the rest of the crab back in the water. The claws regenerate in 18 months. Baker then resets the trap and the boat moves to the next trap. That trap is pulled and replaced with the previous one. About 30 seconds are spent on each trap, and at least 500 traps are pulled each day. Work and laughs . A pound of stone crab per trap is good, 10 pounds is exceptional. The partners get roughly $7 per pound from a local fish house, Wade Campbell said. As the season opens the claws are expected to sell in stores and seafood markets for between $9 and $19 a pound, depending on size Statewide, last year's harvest produced 2.74 million pounds of claws, with a wholesale value of $25 million. Half of the claws harvested came from waters off Southwest Florida and the Florida Keys. The Campbell brothers also fish for bait fish much of the year, and will catch 20,000 pounds per day. They need the bait fish haul to survive financially. It's a brutal business but some humor exists. Crabs, for example, are not the only things they find in their traps. Octopuses have dragged in golf balls and bullets, John Campbell said. Practical jokes happen too. The brothers have pulled up traps only to find them nailed shut and they have found things like toy dump trucks and power drills inside. A fishing friend from Venice was the culprit. The same guy once put a toilet seat inside one of their traps. It was a reminder that they were "losing their butts" that day.
"My son ain't going to do it," Wade Campbell said. "He's going to USF. It's too hard to make it anymore, just way too hard, man. I wouldn't want to put him through it." On the plus side, if you are having trouble putting food on the table you can always eat the stone crabs ... right?
"I'll eat them maybe twice a year," John Campbell said. "I'm not that fond of them, really."

[blitzburgh]

Very interesting read.