Out on the waters of Pine Island Sound, Shane Dooley is home.
“Dad built me a boat when I was 12 years old,” he said. “Been out here fishing with my buddies. Been all over.”
Dooley is from a true fishing family — three generations worth.
First, his grandfather became a commercial fisherman, and then his father, Mike Dooley, who has been catching mullet for some 50 to 60 years now — long before everything changed.
“Oh, it was beautiful out here,” Mike Dooley recalled. “Plenty of fish. And back then, the only boats you saw during the week were commercial fishermen.”
Over on Matlacha, another longtime fishing family runs the Barnhill Seafood Market.
It’s hard work, but it’s who they are.
“I love this — what I do. I love everything about it,” Carrie Grainger, who runs the market and fish house, told NBC2. “Except for some days, when I come home and I'm ready to just walk away from it."
At the Museum of the Islands on Pine Island, the story of the area is told through old pictures and artifacts.
There simply isn’t a story without the families that fished first.
“Hardy. They are hardy folks,” Vickie Duflo, the curator at the museum, said. “They carved themselves out a spot and decided what they were going to do, and they did it. No matter the adversity that hit them in the face."
But little did they know then how much more adversity — decades later — fishermen in the area would face.
THE NET BAN OF '94: ‘FISHERMEN COULDN’T MAKE IT’
The decline started in 1994, the Dooleys said, when Florida banned gill nets after a statewide vote.
Many commercial fishermen, still sour over it today, said those campaigning to ban the nets misled voters about the impact the equipment had on marine life.
Nonetheless, the ban is still in effect today, and so too are limitations on the size of the mesh fishermen can use.
As the Dooleys showed NBC2 out on the water, the equipment causes them to catch more small fish they can’t sell than those they can.
“We caught six big mullet and 26 little mullet,” Shane Dooley said on his boat.
What was once hundreds of mullet fishermen in the area can now be counted on a couple of hands, Mike Dooley said.
“They just couldn't make it,” he said. “Fishermen couldn't make it with the gear that the state gave us."
AFTER THE BAN: RISING COSTS, WORSENING WATER AND RAGING HURRICANES
The net ban was just the beginning. Imports, rising costs and worsening water quality have all made it harder to fish for a living, those in the industry explained to NBC2.
Then, in 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated commercial fishermen. The massive storm forced some of the few remaining fish houses on Pine Island and Matlacha to close, and it tossed around shrimp boats like toy boats on Fort Myers Beach.
“I didn't cry the day my father died. But the day I came down here after the hurricane, I cried,” Eric Schmidt told NBC2.
Schmidt spent four decades in the fishing industry in Southwest Florida. He said the demand for development and tourism has helped recreational fishermen but not those on the commercial side.
“All this property here is very valuable, and they'd rather have townhouses and tourists and not fish houses," Schmidt said. “They want to go out to eat, but they don't want to see how it gets done.”
For Schmidt, Ian was just too much. He decided to leave Southwest Florida after the storm.
“I have a lot of years. A lot of memories,” he said. “It's all going to go away."
CAN COMMERCIAL FISHING IN SOUTHWEST FLORIDA BE SAVED?
The question now, after all it's been through: can commercial fishing be saved in Southwest Florida?
Shrimp boats are up and running again, even if there are fewer of them. And there are still people catching mullet and crabbing in Pine Island Sound, even if there aren’t as many of them as before.
Those in the industry say it's important that people buy local seafood to support them. The main concern, though, is that the next generation likely isn’t one that’s going to fish for a living.
“Are there any younger guys that are going to get into it? And how long do the older guys have left in them? That's the question,” Grainger said. “(It’s) dying, really. It's sad."
With all the challenges, Shane Dooley said it won’t be worth it for his two sons to try to make it in the industry.
For the third-generation fishermen, it’s going to end with him.
“How do I put this? It's a tradition that's going away. Slowly,” Dooley said. “There's just a handful of people left doing this, and once they're gone, you're going to read about it in a book."