Katrina Maims Lobster-Trapping Industry in Florida

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It wasn't even crustaceans Charlie Renier was trolling for when he took his 60-foot boat, the Cheyenne Rose, out last week off the Lower Keys. Renier, a fisherman, wasn't looking for lobsters. He was scouring miles of water for the wooden traps that are the tools of his trade.

STOCK ISLAND — It wasn't even crustaceans Charlie Renier was trolling for when he took his 60-foot boat, the Cheyenne Rose, out last week off the Lower Keys.


Renier, a fisherman, wasn't looking for lobsters. He was scouring miles of water for the wooden traps that are the tools of his trade.


Though the locations of the three-foot-long crates were marked on a Global Positioning Unit, that didn't help. Some were found smashed against rocky sea bottoms, others sunk with sand, still more just drifted away, scattered by a surprise storm, Hurricane Katrina, from the ropes that rigged them to buoys.


Katrina's unexpectedly close brush brought the Keys sustained, tropical-storm force winds and torrential downpours, prompting a trap scramble that has thrust the state's top lobster producing fishery into crisis.


Between one-fourth and one-half of the commercial traps used to snag lobster on the ocean-side here may have perished with the storm, according to estimates.


"Some people lost 75 percent of their business; other people lost 25 percent," said Ralph Boragine, executive director of Monroe County Commercial Fishermen, an advocacy group.


About 600 people hold a license to fish commercially for lobster in the Keys, laying a half million of the wooden traps annually from hundreds of boats. The Keys account for at least 80 percent of Florida's lobster harvest.


"I think people are beginning to get woefully sick inside," Boragine said.


Renier, who fishes out of Stock Island, where he also owns a fish house, hasn't yet surveyed all the locations from Key West to the Marquesas where earlier this month he and a four-man crew deposited 4,000 pressure-treated pine traps.


But of the places he has eyeballed, about half the traps are missing or destroyed.


"I have been finding about half of my gear and the other half is destroyed," Renier said.


"We didn't expect any of this. NOAA weather was calling for 20 to 26 knot winds so we never moved our traps. We left 'em on the hard bottom and we got demolished."


The second-generation lobsterman says he may lose up to $125,000 worth of lobster from the trap mess. The traps -- which can hold a dozen lobsters each -- cost about $30. Fishermen pull their traps repeatedly during the eight-month season, which runs through March.


Renier's fish house, Fishbusterz, also buys lobster from more than two dozen boats that now find themselves in the same situation. Compounding the captains' difficulties: a number of them borrowed about $300,000 from Renier to pay for thousands of new traps that are now gone. They had planned to pay him off using profits from lobster sales.


"I will probably lose half of my fleet this year. That leaves my business basically bankrupt. We need help bad," Renier said.


"Everybody says, 'Oh it was just a little storm. Key West was fine.' Yeah, the town of Key West was fine, but I know that I have approximately 30 lobster boats that fish for me, and if I lose half of them, I won't be able to stay open."


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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News