Bill Harris scans the water and palms the wheel of his boat as it rocks in the morning tide. He is looking for pompano, a fish that skips along the surface, and he steers toward a spot where he caught some last week.
The horizon tells Harris he’s in the right place, lined up with a house and two posts to his right and the leg of a bridge to his left. This is how Harris knows all his fishing spots. He doesn’t have a navigation system on board. After more than 50 years of fishing the bays around St. Petersburg, Fla., he has a thousand places memorized.
Harris scans again and waits.
“Those fish ain’t here,” he says.
He turns his boat to go catch bait instead — not as profitable as pompano, but these days it’s better than nothing.
Harris is 70. His boat is worth less than a used Buick station wagon and is about the same size. Fishermen like him remember Florida before air conditioning. Back then, they used bars of soap to measure reef depth and kerosene lanterns to light their homes. They could depend on hauls of trout and grouper daily.
Today, commercial fishing on the Suncoast generates millions of dollars, and Harris is struggling to pay rent. He is Old Florida, a vestige of an era before companies ruled the gulf, before the bays were playgrounds for tourists, before developers turned wilderness into condos.
To be sure, Harris had chances to cash in on Florida’s meteoric prosperity after World War II. He says he couldn’t imagine, though, fetching cocktails for retirees on charter boats.
He was in the Navy for a year but was discharged after an accident left him with head trauma. He was married for a year, too, and that life wasn’t meant for him, either. He has a daughter in California he speaks with infrequently. He hasn’t seen her in 10 years. “She’s like me,” he says.
Harris casts off five days a week from Maximo Marine, where he sells his catches at Castaway’s Fish House, a bait shop and small fish market. Some days he makes $100. Other days, nothing. Development changed the whole environment, he says. Overfishing and recent Red Tides have left their marks, too.
People tell Harris he has it made, but he is ambivalent about his paradise.
“It’s not as consistent like it was in the old days,” Harris says. “All of them, millionaires, out here playing. I’m out here trying to make a dollar.”
After netting a cooler full of bait, Harris steers around Shell Island. This cove holds good memories for Harris, who quit school in seventh grade to fish. Not far from here, he learned as a boy how to catch pinfish, and how to cast against the tide when fishing for trout.
He learned from long-gone local legends — Horace Roberts, Pappy Kelly, Claude McCall. That’s one problem with “hotshots” around St. Petersburg today, Harris says. All you hear is me, me, me, I did this, and I did that. No acknowledgment of who they learned it from.
Harris resents the sport fishermen crowding spots he’s cultivated for decades.
“There’s nothing sacred out here anymore,” he says.
Shell Island, now called Shell Key Preserve, isn’t the same, either. Seawalls built in the ’60s to protect new homes on the water changed the current and eroded the pristine island, Harris says. To restore the beachfront, the state lifted sand from the Gulf of Mexico, but the sand shifted into the grass flats, filling in an ecosystem where fish once thrived.
“They don’t understand,” Harris says. “They don’t have no education on it at all.”
These bays are Harris’ refuge. He used to fish the gulf with crews and bigger boats, but it’s futile now, he says, to fish next to long-liners that cast 5 miles of hooks in one fell swoop.
Mike Metz, owner of Castaway’s, says the government has choked fishermen like Harris by raising the cost of competition. Small-business anglers, Metz says, can’t afford mandated requirements like tracking systems worth thousands of dollars plus monthly service fees.
Over the years, regulations tightened, economic costs soared, and cheap imports flooded the industry, says Mark Nahon of Triangle Fisheries, a wholesale company in Madeira Beach. Harris’ breed of independent fisherman couldn’t keep up.
There is a hint of pride in Harris’ voice when he calls himself the last of the Mohicans.
When asked what makes a good fisherman, Harris says it has to be in your blood, an addiction. It’s experience and moxie rolled up with the grit to stick with it and fight through the tough times.
“A lot of guys have given up,” he says.
Harris, whose tanned skin bunches at his elbows, is covered in signs that he has not given up. On his feet and hands there are lesions where skin cancer struck. His fingernails are worn like seashells. His shirt reads, “Keep Florida Green. Plant a Developer.” Its front pocket sags.
Harris has had days worth giving up on. In the ’80s, a wave sank his boat Thumper, which was his father’s since 1939. When Harris was younger, he was shipwrecked in the gulf for days and served on a crew where the captain died at sea.
For much of his life, he has lived at the marinas where he worked, fishing till sundown, unloading his catch in Gulfport, carousing with friends at bars, waking up and doing it all over again on two hours of sleep.
Harris hasn’t had a driver’s license since ’67, so a friend drives him to the marina from a Lutheran residence where he lives in Pasadena. The rent is cheap, Harris says, though he still sometimes draws from his savings to pay it.
Harris’ sister in Indiana occasionally offers him money, but he declines. In his free time he earns a few extra dollars by placing stickers on lure boxes for a friend’s fishing supply business, an easy job he can do while watching the History Channel, John Wayne movies, and reruns of “That ’70s Show.”
In a state known for its retirees, Harris says he will be fishing until he dies, if only because he can’t afford to do otherwise.
It’s still late morning, and Harris has decided to call it a day. The pompano aren’t jumping, it’s the end of the week, and Harris is tired.
He revs his boat toward top speed, only to slow it down with a jolt. He says he forgot this inlet, lined with Spanish-style homes and personal docks, is now designated a “No Wake Zone.”
Harris may have a thousand fishing spots memorized, but it’s hard for him to remember how quickly things change.
