Going Deep

We launch the 22-foot pathfinder from punta Rassa, adjacent to the Sanibel Causeway. The heat is already climbing to July heights at 10:30 a.m. When my brother Steve Katz launches his boat, usually it is at dawn, and his boat is pointed toward Gulf waters. But today Steve and I are headed upriver, to journey the length of the Caloosahatchee from southern Lee County to its northeast boundary.

 I’ve lived in Lee County for 15 years, currently less than a block from the river. Yet I admit to casual indifference to the river’s presence. Worse yet, I’ve a true northerner’s ambivalence to calling Florida home, and frankly I’ve dismissed this area as being too new, too transient and too shallow a place to ever cast my roots.

As dedicated a boater and fisherman as my brother is, he has not traveled as far upriver as we plan to travel today. Steve realizes that his GPS isn’t working. He wiggles switches and fiddles fuses, curses, calls one of his marina buddies and decides that we can head out without the aid of GPS or the company of music. The other boat controls are working fine, and it’s only the river.

But after today, there will be no more indifference toward the river that exerts such economic, social and ecological significance on the land it runs through. Today, I will meet the river and learn some of her stories.

Channel marker 99 in pine island sound marks the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River. The immaculate white boat motors capably past mangrove islands and abandoned fish houses on stilts, gray skeletal structures that break up the repetition of distant shoreline, wide water and skies. My brother points out Shell Point Village on our right as we begin upriver. Like most avid fisherman in Southwest Florida, he knows the inlets and deep recesses of the mangroves. The confluence of the river and the Gulf create some of the best flats fishing in the world. Drop a line into a swift current or a deep pocket harbored in the shade of the mangroves, and you’re liable to catch a snook, a trout or a redfish.

Brackish water churned up by our boat propeller is the color of sweet tea, rich with tannins and stirred by recent summer rains. The Caloosahatchee throughout Fort Myers is actually an estuary, the mingling and meeting place for fresh and saltwater. In addition to the mangroves that continue for miles upriver, oyster beds and sea grasses are nurseries and feeding grounds for game fish, blue crabs and manatees. For the entire 25-mile distance to the W.P. Franklin Lock & Dam, the Caloosahatchee is subject to tidal fluctuations. This time of the year, the river is about 85 percent freshwater. According to David Fugate, a professor of marine and ecological science at Florida Gulf Coast University, “A big ecological issue for this estuary is the stress caused by salinity changes due to seasonal rainfall and planned releases of freshwater from Lake Okeechobee. Clams and worms and vegetation are particularly vulnerable to these fluctuations. They’re stuck where they are. Fish and other marine life can better adapt to salinity shifts because they can move.”

Near channel marker 73, the Cape Coral Parkway bridge comes into view. Round buoys scatter like pushpins across a map. They are tethered to crab traps. Several crabbers are out this morning pulling their traps, most working north and south of the Midpoint Memorial Bridge. About 70 percent of the local blue crab caught and sold in Southwest Florida comes from the river, and July is the busiest of crab season.

Bryan Pieper, the owner of Covenant Crab, knows the blue crab industry perhaps better than anyone else in Southwest Florida. We met at his Panda Seafood office in Fort Myers. Behind his desk, two large, aerated tanks bubbled, ready for the arrival of the day’s catch. A refrigerated glass case advertised the availability of mullet, sand bream, pork blood and fresh bamboo shoots. A walk-in cooler took up one corner of the large, cement-floored room. It contained jumbo male blue crabs selling for $45 a dozen as well as smaller blue crabs, a dozen of which can be had for $15.

In the early 1990s, Pieper began selling Gulf shrimp and blue crabs from a van parked roadside either downtown or in North Fort Myers. Eventually he moved the business to a large facility near Page Field Airport, and at its peak, Covenant Crab shipped between 3,000 and 5,000 pounds of blue crab a day. Much of the jewel-blue streaked crab ended up in Maryland crab cakes. Gross sales exceeded $2 million annually. Then four years ago, the blue crab business suffered a dramatic decline when seasonal migration patterns in the Gulf were disrupted. No one has explained the cause. But blue crab sales last year dropped to $250,000. Covenant Crab was forced to close the processing facility near Page Field.

Fewer crabs to catch and fewer people eating crab because of the faltering economy add up to a large economic wallop. I asked Pieper how the crabbers have survived the downturn. They haven’t. When the crabbing industry slowed, more than 60 percent of the crabbers were forced to find jobs in other fields.

The story gets better though. Our talk was interrupted when Pieper’s phone rang. He told the caller that he can’t take any more crab at the moment, but maybe next week. The blue crab migration is back to its full cycle again. This year, he says, “We’re getting as many crabs as we can take.”

My brother’s boat passes the mouth of Whiskey Creek. This landmark earned its name from a Tennessee moonshiner, William S. Clay, who settled in downtown Fort Myers after the Civil War. Using sugar cane, he set up a still on this creek several miles west of Monroe and Hendry streets, and his liquor was enjoyed by cattlemen and Seminoles.