Guided trips on the Steinhatchee filling up quickly

Fish following the food chain wind up in sewers

Florida paddlers and fishing-doers who can take longish trips on short notice must hurry to get in on the Fifth Annual Hidden Coast Paddling Festival and kayak fishing tournament on the Steinhatchee River and Deadman Bay. It’s scheduled for Oct, 3-5, and the 27 guided river trips were filling up quickly in mid-September.

Luckily there is no limit to the number of participants in the fishing tournament on Saturday, Oct. 4. Seatrout are swimming upstream at this time of the year, so you may not need to paddle out of the river’s more protected waters to the open bay.

If you can, the outside fishing prospects are enticing. In addition to seatrout there should be redfish, bluefish and Spanish mackerel on the flats of Deadman Bay, a shoreline part of big Apalachee Bay.

The festival looks like an enticing bargain. The all-in-one cost of $100 includes a Friday breakfast and bag lunch, a Friday night dinner, fishing tournament entry and Sunday brunch. Primitive camping is free and there will be discount coupons for restaurants in the city of Steinhatchee and Jena, the smaller town across the river.

This event is growing year by year, so it would be wise to mark your computer calendar for next August to surf for early news of the 2015 festival.

For this one, check the website http://hiddencoastpaddlingadventures.com/index.html.

It has a link for registration with guided trip details and to an archive of past festivals.

Everglades’ canals get some funding

In ancient times, when the standard response to swamps was “Oh boy! Let’s drain that place, grow stuff, build stuff and get rich!” canals were dredged to exploit the marshes upland of Cape Sable in what is now Everglades National Park.

If anyone cried “No, let’s not,” his voice was unheard or ignored. That one might have tried to explain that someday there would be regrettable consequences — for example, that saltwater tides would push up those canals and into the freshwater marshes.

“Next thing you know (that futile voice would have gone on), nutrients deep in the marsh soil would be unearthed by the tide and flow across the cape to the Gulf of Mexico, causing calamitous algae blooms out there. You can scarcely imagine how bad that would be for fish and wildlife habitat as time goes by, and it will be really bad for fishing.”

We cannot say if anyone back then, in the 1920s, really knew all that. We can say that if someone did, and if he objected to dredging, he wasted his breath.

“Tommyrot and balderdash,” the dredging interests would have replied in the vernacular of their time. We can infer this nearly 100 years on because the canals they wasted their money dredging are still there, making environmental trouble.

There’s the history. Here’s the news: Something is being done about it.

The Everglades Foundation, whose purpose is to restore the Everglades to its natural state, is granting $143,000 to the National Park Service for half the cost of an environmental assessment of the canals.

That’s a standard preliminary step in defining more precisely what is wrong and planning what to do about it — probably including plugging the canals some time after the assessment, itself an estimated 18-month project. The foundation’s science staff will join NPS scientists in carrying it out.

“Cape Sable has suffered enormously and the damage threatens Florida Bay,” said Eric Eikenberg, head of the foundation, in announcing the grant. “Restoring a functioning freshwater ecosystem on Cape Sable will not only improve the water quality in Florida Bay, but will also improve the Everglades’ resilience against sea level rise,” said Bob Krumenaker, acting superintendent of the park.

The Everglades Foundation’s work goes well beyond restoration of the park. For more about what it does, visit its website: www.evergladesfoundation.org.

Red snapper deadline looms

If you haven’t told NOAA Fisheries and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council what you think of their red snapper management plans — also called Amendment 40 — time’s awasting. The deadline for public commentary is the night of Monday, Oct. 20. The issue is whether to establish a two-piece plan for recreational red snapper fishing in the Gulf: One piece covering charter and headboats operating under federal permits and a second piece for fishing from private and for-hire boats operating under state permits.

If that’s done, NOAA would try to assign a separate seasonal catch quota for each segment — each with its own management rules including separate open and closed seasons.

Theoretically, such a system would reduce the chance of overruns that could hurt hopes to rebuild the Gulf’s red snapper population.

Good idea? Not? Before approving or condemning, it’s a good idea to delve into the details. Visit the NOAA Fisheries website at http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/sustainable_fisheries/gulf_fisheries/reef_fish....

There’s a place to submit your comments online at www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=NOAA-NMFS-2014-0107. You can also write an old-fashioned letter addressed to Peter Hood, Southeast Regional Office, NMFS, 263 13th Ave. South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701.

Be sure to it gets there by Oct. 20.

Coral reef draft plan

NOAA also has an Oct. 20 deadline for public comment on its draft plan for the recovery of elkhorn and staghorn corals, which have been classified as threatened since 2006.

The plan lists criteria for the corals to meet in order to be removed eventually from the list of endangered and threatened species. It also includes research and monitoring, threat reduction and outplanting — growing coral in nurseries for replacing those that have died or been scoured off their reefs.

That looks like it works. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation (FWC) researchers are doing it at Tropical Rocks, 4 miles off Marathon. The scientists watched staghorn coral raised in nurseries and transplanted to the reef spawning for the first time in September for the first time this month at Tropical Rocks, just over 4 miles offshore of Marathon. The corals were supplied by the Coral Restoration Foundation and Mote Marine Lab nurseries and outplanted by the FWC.

Not all threats to coral can be readily eliminated. For example, increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a global and regional problem. That heats the oceans too much for corals to take. It causes bleaching and susceptibility to diseases that kill corals. It’s a global-regional public that the boating and fishing public can’t do much about.

On another hand there are local threats that can be dealt with in practical ways. Roger Crabtree, southeast regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries, said habitat loss, pollution, reduced reproduction and physical damage are on that list.

“Reducing these local threats can help improve the ability for corals to cope with global threats such as climate change,” Crabtree said. “Similar to the higher likelihood of getting sick when you’re under stress, corals may be more susceptible to and less able to recover from global and regional threats.”

Sewer fishing?

Question: Other than a naïve, adventurous toddler, who would think of fishing in a sewer, much less expect to catch fish that way?

Answer: Kyle Naegeli, 16, a high school junior in Katy, Tex.

There’s a lake in his neighborhood west of Houston. Storm sewers drain into that lake.

Makes sense now, doesn’t it? Freshwater fishing-doers know that fish — butterfly peacock and largemouth bass in South Florida — hang out at culverts, some of which connect to neighboring lakes and canals, and others that are merely storm drains that carry bugs and other things that fish eat.

There usually are some fish in those culverts, too, as far back as the gutter where rain flows in. That’s where Naegeli finds largemouth bass, baits them and hooks them. To see for yourself go to: www.youtube.com/user/fishboy242.