02/18/2015
http://www.amisun.com/headlines.htm
Plenty of sun, fun at Cortez fest
CINDY LANE | sun
BY CINDY LANE | SUN STAFF WRITER
CORTEZ – Grouper groupies schooled in Cortez last weekend for the 33rd Annual Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival, enjoying blue skies, sunshine and seafood prepared every which way.
There was good music by local bands, nautical art, a playground, pony rides and a good dose of education about how the seafood that made the festival famous is caught.
Mark Coarsey, of Fishing for Freedom, used frozen mullet to demonstrate how a white roe male mullet can fit through a four-inch stretch mesh gill net to live another day, while a fat, female red roe mullet is caught by the gills. The nets reduce unwanted bycatch and preserve the resource, he said.
But they were banned in 1995 in Florida. Coarsey’s group is appealing the decision to the Florida Supreme Court.
Bringing the nets back would solve the problem of mullet washing up on the beach during mullet runs in the fall, he told festival goers, explaining that red roe mullet brings top dollar, and fishermen sometimes toss white roe mullet overboard to wash up on the beach because the nets they have been required to use since the net ban entrap both sizes of fish.
Coarsey’s dad, Wyman Coarsey, the former postmaster of Cortez for 26 years and a renowned harmonica player, received a Pioneer Award at the festival from FISH, the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage.
When someone gave him a microphone to say a few words, he broke out in song, with lyrics he wrote to the tune of “Home on the Range” about tourism and fishing, received with howls of laughter. The last verse ended, “We welcome you all to stay here through fall until all of your money is gone! Home, home in Cortez, where the snooks and the mullet do play… where seldom is heard a sensible word from all of us Crackers who stay!”
By Cracker standards, it was a chilly weekend in the 50s and 60s, but many visitors from up North, like Ronnie Fondy and her daughter Timothy, of Dayton, Ohio, said they were thrilled to see sunshine and blue skies when it was 6 degrees back home.
Snowbirds strolled the Cortez Bait and Seafood docks, looking at true snowbirds – white pelicans that migrate to Cortez every year in winter – and watched Nathan Meschelle mend a seine net.
But eventually, everyone made their way to the food court for fried, grilled, smoked, broiled and boiled seafood, fried green tomatoes, greens and the Cortez Village Historical Society’s famous strawberry shortcake.
Nobody knew it, but it was also a retirement party for Cortez artist Linda Molto, who chose this year’s festival as her last art show. Molto has been an art exhibitor and festival organizer almost since its inception more than 30 years ago. But the Cortez resident has no intention of going anywhere else to retire – why would you, when you live in the best little fishing village in the country?
Nathan Meschelle demonstrated how to mend a seine net
at Cortez Bait and Seafood on Sarasota Bay during the festival.
