Captain Dave Dipre of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on out on the water.
Clean up from Hurricane Ian continues with getting migrant chugs out of the water.
Dipre said, “That’s a big deal because they are a huge hazard to navigation. Not only that, when a migrant chug is floating out there and nobody can explain where it came from then the Coast Guard is put on alert. They start doing search and rescue missions over nothing and we don’t want that. It happens with FWC, too.”
However, there are still more migrant ships coming in.
Dipre said, “Right now it’s been windy, but when it gets hot here in the Keys, and when the winds settle down, we will see a number of migrants still trying to come across, which is why the governor has kept this in effect. He sees it as a problem and I’m glad he does because he’s sending us the help to get the job done and it’s working. It’s going very well.”
The state budget might contain more funding for more FWC officers in the Keys.
Dipre pointed out, “I hope it goes well. I keep pushing up to my superiors that 51 people have been covering the Keys since about 1995 and 51 people still continue to cover the Keys here in 2023 and that’s not a sufficient number. They’re working at making more positions and I hope that’s what happens. If they gave me a half a dozen positions down here, it would increase the weekly patrols by 240 hours a week. That’s a lot of time on the water. That’s a lot of time up and down US 1 to do a lot of good. That would be a huge help.”
At the moment, the Keys are getting some help, but the officers are coming from other regions. So other regions are depleted.
Dipre said, “That hurts them in operations. I would like to have those positions. I hope we get them and if we do get them, I think it’ll make Monroe County a much better place as far as resource protection and boating safety.”
FWC looks to protect the environment every day and a big one is fishing.
Dipre said, “You have people coming down, mostly people from out of town who don’t have fishing licenses, who don’t know that there’s rules in place. Large cultural differences cause a problem because everybody thinks it’s the ocean and you can fish without having a license, that you can keep everything you can catch. That’s just not the case. There are a lot of rules in Florida. They’re there because we want to maintain the near shore fisheries. Everybody thinks fish have tails and they all swim right up here and it’s a minor depletion if you take undersized fish and it’s not.”
The near shore fisheries are the nurseries. That’s where hatchlings come up and then they move out to deeper waters.
Dipre said, “We have to maintain those small fish, those juvenile fish. We have to maintain those and we cannot have people taking them and people do. People do it all the time. So the FWC is out there trying to prevent that, trying to make sure that we are holding people accountable for what they catch.”