Copyright 1998 Stuart News Company
The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart,FL)
April 6, 1998, Monday
SECTION: A Section; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 965 words
HEADLINE: FISHING AT INLET CALLED WORST IN MANY YEARS
BYLINE: Debi Pelletier of the News staff
BODY:
SAILFISH POINT - A snook leaps into the air, its silvery body
lit by thereddish glow of the rising sun."Let it run! Let
it run!" urges MarciaFoosaner,a lifelong fisher. "Now,
pull your rod up! Reel it in!"
It's 6:30 a.m. and the first fish of the morning has been hooked
in the St. Lucie Inlet. Foosaner is excited. It's taken more than
an hour to get this strike. Her inexperienced companion is trying
to land it.
The snook is about 6 pounds, Foosaner estimates. It looks like
there's more mouth than fish on the line.
"It looks clean," Foosaner says as it's reeled up
onto the beach. "It looks good."
She doesn't get the chance to do a closer inspection. A wave
comes in, the snook leaps up and it shakes off the hook. It's
gone in a splash.
"I always catch fish here," she had promised during
the 40-minute trek to the inlet from Bathtub Reef park Thursday.
She was sounding less sure, however, after an hour of futile casting.
Around the point, another fisherman is at the water's edge.
Unlike Foosaner with her bare feet, he's wearing rubber boots.
She says she sees him out there all the time.
"Are you catching anything?" she hollers out at the
man.
"Got a jack," he responds. "It's better than
it's been in a week."
Foosaner, 49, has been fishing in Florida "since I was
old enough to hold a reel," she says. Born in Miami, she
remembers going out with her father in Biscayne Bay and in the
Snake Creek canal, "before all the development killed it
off."
Fishing is her life, she says, so much a part of her that what
she's been seeing in the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon
"is like a knife in my back." It makes her eyes water
talking about it.
She's considered an expert fisher, although she says the fish
probably outsmart her "more than I outsmart them." Walking
along the beach, she reads the swirls and eddies, distinguishing
which are caused by fish moving below.
"Some people say I don't fish - I stalk my prey,"
she says with a laugh.
It's an apt description.
Foosaner has given talks to the Back Country Fishing Association,
she teaches others how to fish, and she's the reigning champion
of the Women's World Invitational Tarpon Fly-Fishing Tournament
in Islamorada. She plans to defend her title this year.
"I probably hike into this inlet 50 days a year,"
Foosaner says. She's been doing that for about seven years, and
she's never seen things so bad.
The fishing's bad, and what fish there are look diseased. The
grassbeds in the river are going. The river, she says, seems to
be dying.
"I haven't launched my boat in three weeks because I can't
stand to look at it like this," she says. "I'm almost
afraid to pull anything out of the water because I'm afraid of
what I might see."
The last snook she caught in early March was bleeding from
its gills, she said. This week is the first time she's been out
since.
Although pleased with the snook, Foosaner doesn't like the
color of the water where the Indian River flows into the Atlantic
Ocean. It looks mucky. There are foamy balls of brown guck floating
on the surf and washed up on the beach. She grabs a handful, rubs
it between her fingers and sniffs at it.
"It's greasy," she notes. "But it doesn't smell."
Her companion hooks another fish. This time it's a jack and
it's reeled in. With a practiced ease, Foosaner grips it behind
the gills and cleanly pulls out the hook. She examines the jack
closely as it wriggles in her fingers.
This fish is clean, too. There are no lesions or spots. She
looks in its mouth and gets splashed in the face, causing her
to grimace and shake her head. "I didn't use to worry about
this before," she says, wiping her mouth with her arm.
She carefully returns the fish to the water. She hates to kill
anything "that's going to give me such a good time,"
she says.
It's 7:30 a.m. and people are showing up on the beach. Several
fishing boats head out to open water. Two small ones stick around
to try their luck in the inlet but quickly move on. Several fishermen
wave to Foosaner.
Horseshoe crabs are everywhere this morning, flipped over onto
their barnacle encrusted backs. Foosaner thinks they might be
trying to escape the freshness of the water. Ann Forstchen, a
biologist at the Marine Fisheries Institute agrees that's possible.
Forstchen also suggests the mucky foam could be caused by the
stirring up of the sediment.
Bird carcasses litter the beach. Three of them are pelicans,
one is a loon.
"Oh, there's my poor little loon," Foosaner says,
dismay in her voice. "I found him here yesterday. He was
literally dragging himself down to the >water by his beak."
One of the pelicans died very recently. Like the other two,
it's an adult bird, its yellow head feathers poking through the
sand. It's hard to tell whether they look sick or merely scrawny.
No one wants to touch them.
Necropsies have been done on four pelicans so far, according
to Marilyn Spalding, a pathologist at the University of Florida
college of veterinary medicine in Gainesville. She says she expects
to be doing more. Die-offs >are not uncommon this time of year,
she points out, acknowledging that "there seems to be more
this year than usual."
So far, however, there's nothing to link the birds' deaths
with Cryptoperidiniopsis, the toxic microalgae in the St. Lucie
Estuary that's thought to be responsible for the epidemic of sick
fish.
Some scientists point out similar problems with marine and
bird life have occurred in the past and the populations have recovered.
But that's not good enough for Foosaner.
"Somebody has got to do something to help this," she
says, looking out across the inlet. "If (only) somebody would
do something, just to get it started."
Story Filed By The Stuart News,Stuart,Florida
GRAPHIC: (color) photo by Deborah Silver: Lifelong angler Marcia
Foosaner, 49, of Palm City, heads out in her boat Sunday from
the Jensen Beach Causeway >for a trip on the Indian River Lagoon.
Foosaner said she's never seen area waters as damaged as they
are now.
(color) photo by Ian Solender: A blue-claw crab remains in
a trap after >being pulled from the Manatee Pocket last week.
The crab, which is normally blue, shows a red discoloration some
think might be linked to the incidents of sick fish in the region.
(color) photo by Ian Solender: A Crevalle Jack fish caught
in the Indian River Lagoon last week bears several lesions.
(B/W) news graphic: Reports of diseased fish: This map represents
the locations of mullet with lesions reported to the Florida Department
of Environmental Protection fish-kill hotline ((800)636-0511)
by anglers from >March 2 - April 2
LOAD-DATE: April 7, 1998