Moving forward is often done best at times by looking back to evaluate past successes and failures. The year 2014 marks Florida’s twentieth anniversary of its landmark constitutional amendment, the Net Ban. The Net Ban amendment (Save Our Sealife, Ban the Nets) removed monofilament gill nets from our state’s waters. Looking back, it was clearly the best thing we could do protect our fish and marine wildlife. For the next ten-to-fifteen years, Florida’s overall number of gamefish and forge (bait fishes) species rebounded significantly because of this amendment. This amendment’s success hinged on a huge grassroots action carried on by both recreational fishing and conservation groups.

Today Florida and its residents face an entirely different beast, a steady decline in water quality is choking the life out of many of Florida’s essential estuaries (fish nurseries), rivers and springs. Because of this North America’s greatest and most diverse estuary, the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), is following Chesapeake Bay’s tragic, and deathly path. An overload of nutrients, pesticides, and herbicides is killing the IRL.

Sister Pat made it clear, to better protect our Earth’s biodiversity we must change our culture, its laws and the ways we view nature.

Another grassroots campaign similar to the Save Our Sealife, Ban the Nets campaign is needed. If we want to restore clean water to Florida, changing the ways we live our lives on the IRL watersheds and estuaries, springs, lakes, and bays is a must.  If we fail to act now, our generation will continue to be spectators watching a slow, but steady demise of our fisheries, habitat, water quality and all the things that depend on clean water. We must pursue government to enact and enforce strong clean water laws that will better protect the quality of our lives.

In early January I attended a talk sponsored by Preserve Brevard by Sister Pat Siemen, Director of the Center for Jurisprudence at Barry University. Sister Pat’s presentation touched heavily on establishing legal ecosystem protection as an essential part of sustainable communities. Sister Pat made it clear, to better protect our Earth’s biodiversity we must change our culture, its laws and the ways we view nature. Checkout:  http://www.barry.edu/law/future-students/academic-program/center-earth-jurisprudence.html

Sometime during the late-1960’s when I was ten or eleven years young, I told mom my plans to become a fishing guide.  At that time the outdoors was the only place where I felt completely comfortable.

In the spring of 1989, I took the Coast Guard Captain’s license test in Miami; and within a couple of weeks purchased a 1987 Hewes Redfisher, I named the Mangle Tangle. The lessons learned from this experience have carried me a long ways. In 1996 we started publishing Coastal Angler Magazine, paving the way to a whole other range of lessons and fishing experiences, many of them completely beyond my childhood imagination.

Looking back over the past twenty-five years I’ve learned more about fishing, and met more wonderful fishing clients, anglers and fishing captains and guides than I could’ve ever dreamed of encountering. Fishing has been good to us! We could’ve never been able to duplicate our family’s richness without the marine resources we utilized during these past three decades. Like so many of you, the outdoors and all we have received from our waterways has been central to our lives.

Today I ask myself what it will take for us, recreational anglers and professional fishing captains and guides, to restore the next generation’s chances of living the thrills and experiencing the life changing rewards we had have received from fishing.

Here’s the first step, as anglers we must start asking ourselves what we give back to the resources we take from each time we get on the water. I suspect we will not be able to effectively change the recent steady decline of the habitat and water quality of our waterways until we realize our responsibility as stewards.