July/August 2000 Issue

    A strong, fishy smell hits visitors entering the Ostego Bay Foundation’s Marine Science Center on San Carlos Island where they meet tour guide Betty Goodacre, a longtime local resident and vice president of the Ostego Bay Foundation.
    On Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to noon, the foundation gives walking tours of the center’s Exploratorium, the nearby Coast Guard station, and some of the commercial shrimping and fishing businesses along the waterfront of Matanzas Pass. The tours cost $10 for people aged 12 and older and they begin at the center at Fisherman’s Wharf, which is under the bridge to Ft. Myers Beach. (Tours aren’t conducted when summer camp is in session, but resume in October.)
    Goodacre has an informal manner and encourages questions, no matter how basic. She makes a quick call to the Coast Guard but learns it is training day, so our tour will have to stay outside the station.
    The foundation opened in 1991 and is run by volunteers. Its many research projects include water-quality testing, the Project Pod dolphin study, and Mission Manatee. It also sponsors the Ostego Bay Oil Spill Co-Op, a volunteer oil-spill emergency response team.
    Starting the Exploratorium tour, Goodacre points to a mounted stingray and urges people to remember to shuffle their feet in the water. She shows our group a blue crab that came from Ostego Bay and adds, “We have stone crabs, too. Crabbing is big business.”
    At a coral display, we are reminded it is against the law to take live coral, which grows in the Keys, and we look over a sea fan from the Bahamas. “We must impress upon children the fragility of marine life,” our guide says. Other exhibits include sponges, local shells, fossil shells from area quarries, and drawings depicting “Our Changing Shoreline.”
    Goodacre explains that the horseshoe crab, Florida lobster, and shrimp all molt. “Every month during a full moon, shrimp go in the sand and shed their skins. They live about 18 months but that’s how they grow, by molting.”
    She stops by scale models of two shrimp boats, whose actual sizes would be 65 to 85 feet. One is an ice boat and the other a refrigeration boat. Ice boats stay out 25 to 28 days and refrigeration boats stay 25 to 33 days. Goodacre adds, “A shrimp boat consists of a captain, rigger, and deck hand. They shrimp at night and nets go down for six hours at a time.”
“Every month during a full moon, shrimp go in the sand and shed their skins. They live about 18 months but that’s how they grow, by molting.”
    Next we view a fascinating exhibit of a loggerhead sea turtle nest, built with real sea turtle eggs, by Eve Haverfield, director of Turtle Time, Inc. We are amazed to learn that female sea turtles return to the beach on which they were born to nest. An important related exhibit explains the turtle excluder device, known as TED, designed to let sea turtles escape shrimp nets. A hard TED is a grid of metal bars, with an opening. The grid fits into the narrow part of the shrimp trawl but when a turtle hits the bars, the animal will flow through the opening.
   TED regulations, which have been enforced since 1989, currently require shrimp trawlers 25 feet or longer in the Gulf of Mexico to use them from March 1 through Nov. 30. Goodacre says, “Shrimp boats move 6 miles per hour and turtles go 3 miles per hour, but they must breathe air. Big nets go down as much as 600 feet. The shrimpers do say they lose as much as 30 percent of their catch using TEDs.”
    A divided open tank features a live male horseshoe crab, a Florida horse conch, a lightning whelk, starfish, needlefish, and hermit crab. In back is a walkway with many closed tanks containing such fish as sheepshead, puffer fish, spotted eels, and a nocturnal snowflake moray eel.
About midway through the tour, our group walks across the street to Coast Guard Station Ft. Myers Beach. Those stationed there are in charge of the waters from Boca Grande to Marco Island, and east to Lake Okeechobee. The Marlin, an 87-foot search-and-rescue cutter, is stationed there but left the dock just before our arrival. The Marlin crew handles drug enforcement from Venice to Key West to Cuba.
    Next, we get in our cars and drive half a mile down Main Street to aptly named Shrimp Boat Lane. The boats line the dock and the group enjoys a laugh when shrimper William Arreata calls out from his boat that he is looking for a cook.
Nearby is a nature walk established by San Carlos Island’s Community Redevelopment Agency. “County land here is where we’d love to move the Ostego Bay Foundation in the future,” our guide adds wistfully.
    It is noisy inside Trico Shrimp Co., 1300 Main St., where employees are sizing shrimp in the packinghouse. There are also hoppers for fish, although fish make up only about 10 percent of the catch. During the next hour, we also visit Villers Seafood Co. Inc. at 1200 Main St., and Beach Seafood Market at 1100 Shrimp Boat Lane.
    Winter months are the best for shrimping locally. As many as 300 to 350 shrimp boats work out of the Ft. Myers Beach area at that time, catching pink shrimp. From July 15 to Nov. 15, most shrimpers are in Texas, hauling in brown shrimp.
    A refrigeration boat has just docked at Trico and 40-pound onion bags full of shrimp are being unloaded. The bags are emptied and the shrimp go onto machines with rollers that sort by size. Shrimp are sized according to how many are in a pound: The tiniest number 51 to 60 per pound, the largest only 10 to 12 per pound. Then the shrimp are packed into 5-pound cardboard boxes and go into a big freezer called a “blaster.”
    When shrimp come off an ice boat, they are vacuumed out of the boat into big tubs of water to remove ice. Then they are sized and packed in 5-pound boxes, or in 100-pound wooden crates for grocery stores. The shrimp must be kept at 40 degrees or colder.
    Our next stop is Erickson & Jensen Marine Supplies, where sales clerk Jim Tharp smiles and says, “You’re lucky. It’s a real zoo when the shrimp boats are here but quite tidy when they aren’t. You can find everything you need—chains, line, locks, hooks, paint.” In here, boat lovers feel like kids in a candy store.
    When shrimp come off an ice boat, they are vacuumed out of the boat into big tubs of water to remove ice. Then they are sized and packed in 5-pound boxes, or in 100-pound wooden crates for grocery stores. The shrimp must be kept at 40 degrees or colder.
    Nearby, a repair shop is filled with fuel oil tanks. Goodacre points across the way to Matanzas Ice Corp., which sells to the fishing industry and stores. It can produce 50,000 pounds of block ice in 24 hours. At a nearby woodworking shop, new doors are being made for some shrimp boats.
    We next enter a shop where nets and TEDs are made and repaired. A bar runs the length of the building and is used for stringing nets. Two men, Noe Santana and Chung Se, are deftly working on older, soft TEDS, which often get wrecked or torn on the bottom of the bay, scraping along on rocks and other debris.
    The crab trap shop nearby is quiet and nearly empty, since it is crabbing season. A few traps remain; each contains 40 pounds of cement and a cup to hold a fish head or chicken neck. The traps are dropped into 30 to 50 feet of water and checked every two to three days. In the fish and shrimp business, Goodacre notes, “There is no garbage. The shrimp heads are used as chum and fish guts are used for crabbers.”
    It is noon when we get to the tour’s final stop, Beach Seafood Market, which operates four businesses: shrimp packing, wholesale and retail seafood, and a grill restaurant. Leaning against a wall in its vast packinghouse are huge props from the Ft. Myers Beach Lions Club Shrimp Festival, a popular event held every March at Ft. Myers Beach. The market is busiest from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., when area restaurant chefs stop in to select their specials of the day. Goodacre opens a door to a cold storage area full of enticing stone crabs, red snapper, and grouper. It is the perfect time to head for the grill restaurant, where employee Toni Mendres serves eat-in or take-out conch fritters, shrimp salad, tuna salad, oysters, or grouper, to name just a few of the menu items. The hard part is deciding what to order.
    For further information, contact the Ostego Bay Foundation, Inc. at 941/765-8101.