A group of tour boat guides took a step toward stopping the illegal harvest of marine organisms in Sarasota Bay during an Oct. 28 meeting in Cortez.
Capts. Katie Tupin of Captain Katie Scarlett Boat Tours of Cortez, Joe Sweet of Sweet Sunsets and Dolphin Tours out of Anna Maria, Bruce Adamo of Passage Key Dolphin Tours of Anna Maria, and Matt and Beth Wright of Island Time Boat Tours of Holmes Beach assembled for the first time at Fishermen’s Hall, 4515 124th St. W., Cortez, to discuss a poaching problem in the bay.
The captains were joined by Jay Leverone, staff scientist for the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, a conservation group dedicated to preserving the habitats of the bay.
Sweet, who organized the meeting, has been trying to bring guides together to help stop poaching.
The purpose of the meeting was to organize what Sweet refers to as “a neighborhood watch for the water.”
Adamo said he and Sweet became aware of the issue in spring 2022 after finding a pile of empty fighting conch shells on a sandbar in Sarasota Bay. The animals had been harvested the shells discarded.
“All of a sudden, it’s like your eyes open up and you’re looking and seeing boatloads of these groups of people,” Sweet said. “And they’d be working like they were on a farm gathering things from the water.”
Other guides said they also had observed groups working from boats anchored on shallow grass flats and sandbars with buckets and bags.
The guides have been documenting the harvests for more than a year and much of their evidence has been turned over to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
According to the guides, the poachers are focused on edible shellfish such as whelks, clams, pen shells, sea urchins and other bottom-dwelling marine life that are normally visible on the grass flats and sandbars during their tours.
“Last spring is when I last saw a healthy population of sea urchins,” Adamo said. “It used to be the north sandbar of Jewfish Key — they used to be everywhere. Thousands of them. That’s all gone now.”
The group discussed methods to draw attention to the destruction, with Leverone suggesting contacting elected officials.
“Kevin Van Ostenbridge, your local commissioner, serves on our local policy board. I will try to bring it up to him,” Leverone said.
Leverone said he expected to see Van Ostenbridge at a ribbon-cutting for work the SBEP completed at the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage Preserve in Cortez.
Captains at the meeting also expressed a need for more timely responses from the FWC to their hotline calls.
The FWC has issued more than 20 citations to 11 alleged poachers since July 3.
Adamo recounted a recent encounter by another guide just days before the Oct. 28 meeting of poachers using personal watercraft to access shellfish on a sandbar in Palma Sola Bay.
Tupin, who followed up on the sighting, reported that FWC did not respond to a call about the event.
Adamo said the poachers work day and night, following the lowest possible tides. He said extremely low night tides make it less likely they’ll be seen.
“The bad guys aren’t stupid,” Adamo said. “They also know Fourth of July, holiday weekends, that they can blend right in and the FWC guys aren’t going to have time to deal with them.”
Sweet said the meeting needed to be a starting point for an organized presence on the water and might serve as a forum to systematically stop the poaching.
After the meeting, Sweet said he hoped to organize another in November and invite a broader audience.
“I feel like today’s meeting was a huge success in the sense that we lit the fuse,” Sweet said.
He said the next step would be for the group to bring the issue to the attention of local and state officials and find ways to apply more severe penalties for poaching.