In many parts of Florida, a temporary but almost total collapse of recreational fishing followed the epidemic of hurricanes last summer. Plentiful and willing fish went ignored as anglers cleaned yards and tarped their roofs blue. Guides took up construction work. Some bait shops took months to reopen.

Unlike mangroves, Australian pines did little to protect shorelines.

When lives of coastal residents returned to normal, anglers began taking stock of the storms’ effects on fishing grounds. Giant swells and flood tides clearly impacted vital marine nurseries below the waterline, but didn’t make The Weather Channel’s continuous coverage. The Indian River Lagoon, Charlotte Harbor and Pensacola Bay bore the brunt of the multi-pronged assault.

It is the lingering, long-term impacts to marine ecosystems that we’re beginning to fully assess going into the spring of 2005.

Hurricane Frances and Jeanne, while individually not as powerful as Ivan or Charley, may have brought the biggest changes.

Although Hurricane Frances’ Category 2, 105 mph winds were the lowest of the four hurricanes, the southern Indian River Lagoon’s near-absence of shallow bottom vegetation can be blamed on her unwillingness to budge from the landfall point at Stuart. Frances parked herself over the area for a day, a 140-mile-wide washing machine that scrubbed the estuary floor from Stuart to Vero Beach. Then the remnants of Hurricane Ivan circled back with heavy wind and rain and Jeanne struck before the water even began clearing. Researchers with the St. Johns Water Management District recorded the highest turbidity levels ever noted in areas remote from inlets following the onslaught.

A month after Jeanne, slowly clearing water revealed a bottom scoured clean, largely devoid of seagrass or other vegetation. Wave action scraped oysters and barnacles from dock pilings more efficiently than any herd of sheepshead. Silt was flushed from channels, many of which were miraculously left several feet deeper.

Despite the lack of bottom cover, schools of glass minnows, juvenile pilchards, mullet and pinfish still swarmed the naked flats and shorelines. Lake Okeechobee water releases banished most lifeforms from the St. Lucie Estuary, but snook continued to make life miserable for bait schools in the IRL. Spotted seatrout threatened to reach nuisance levels on some outings, including numbers of big trout. And redfish, which are normally a hit-or-miss species south of Fort Pierce, maintained a welcome presence throughout the winter.

Jeff Beal, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission IRL Marine Habitat Coordinator, said the consistent fishing and even the increase in redfish numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“Larger fish are largely unaffected by storms,” he explained. “They find holes in the rivers and inlets or just offshore and quickly return. And redfish, which are somewhat sensitive to temperature but very sensitive to salinity levels, would find preferable conditions in the southern end of the lagoon, since the southern lagoon is naturally saltier. Normal salinity would have returned to the area between Fort Pierce and Stuart sooner due to the proximity of the inlets versus areas farther north.”

It’s the next three years that have Beal concerned.

“It’s the plankton and juveniles—fish larvae, microscopic organisms, shrimp, crabs—the bottom of the food chain—that are really at the mercy of the storms. The small stuff that survived the storms became easy prey for predators, since they had nowhere to hide. Couple that to the loss of habitat, and we might see the real effect on fishing next year.

“Post-storm studies in Texas show a three- to five-year recovery period for seagrass. We’re particularly concerned about Johnson’s seagrass. Even under normal conditions it has such a narrow range—from Sebastian to southern Biscayne Bay—but the only places in the lagoon we’ve found it since the storms are right around the Fort Pierce and Jupiter inlets. It normally dies back somewhat in the winter, making it hard to find, so we’re hoping it will re-emerge when warm weather arrives.”