To the storms’ credit, many soft-bottom areas that previously made wade-fishing a sticky adventure now sport hard sand bottom. The first tiny tendrils of grass re-emerged in selective patches by mid November, and were up to three inches tall by early December.

Feeding frenzies marked hurricane-exposed Indian River Lagoon bait school.s

Other shorelines and spoil islands took a hard hit, but demonstrated the shoreline-stabilizing value of mangroves. While Australian pine roots gave way in the wet soil and now house snook instead of pelicans in their branches, mangroves lost leaves but stayed put. Forming a fringe around the islands, black mangrove breathing tubes trapped soil and cushioned crushing waves that inundated the islands for hours on end.

Beal is looking forward to a comprehensive aerial seagrass assessment of the entire lagoon that the St. Johns Water Management District will be conducting over the next nine months.

“In the 1940s, seagrass grew to a depth of two meters throughout the lagoon,” said Beal. “Even before the storms last summer, that depth had decreased to 1 to 1 1⁄3 meters due to lower water clarity. So it will be interesting to see if the hurricanes created further declines.”

The downside to the removal of silt from lagoon waters is that the silt now resides on offshore reefs, according to Beal.

Hurricane Andrew, which visited Biscayne Bay in 1992, served as a useful comparison. Despite over $15 billion of damage onshore, seagrass damage in most areas was minimal. Beds west of Totten Key, just south of Elliott Key on the eastern side of south Biscayne Bay, suffered the most damage. Localized grassbed losses of up to 80 percent were observed. The worst damage, according to the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM), was to mangrove shorelines. Larger trees especially were hard hit. There were a lot of questions about the recovery of the mangroves, but shorelines today compare with pre-Andrew photos.

While sponge and coral in Biscayne Bay did not fare as well, seagrass beds in the storm track survived largely intact. Biscaynefish stocks remained remarkably unaffected.

Some attribute the light seagrass destruction to Andrew’s rapid advance and short visit. That scenario appears consistent with hurricanes that showed similar characteristics last fall. Hurricanes Charley and Ivan struck hard, but didn’t stick around long.

“We monitor 50 seagrass locations around Charlotte Harbor, and we didn’t observe any significant changes to beds following Hurricane Charley,” said Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) Estuary Resource Manager Judy Ott. “We did detect temporary changes in our water chemistry—higher dissolved nutrient loads followed by depressed oxygen levels a week or two after Charley came through—as flood waters from the Peace River reached Charlotte Harbor. Most fish species simply moved, but species that couldn’t react quickly, like flounder and crabs, suffered some losses.”

Consistent with post-Andrew assessments, mangroves took the hardest hit.

“The red mangroves were trashed, and most of them won’t recover,” said Ott. “They have to regenerate from seed pods, so that will take some time. The good news is, their root systems will remain in place to protect shorelines for quite a while. Black mangroves, on the other hand, regenerate quickly from their stalks and root systems, so we could see them replace red mangroves in many areas.”

Although some species temporarily changed locations in response to oxygen levels, “fishing remained good, according to fishermen I talked to,” said Ott. That is consistent with reports from the Pensacola area.

“The redfish were here before Ivan struck, and they were still here when the water cleared up two weeks later,” declared Capt. Wes Rozier, as he described a December Pensacola Bay charter which produced 80 bull redfish releases in four hours. Hurricane Ivan didn’t seem to affect them at all.”

Rozier describes the area’s seagrass beds as fine.

“The only difference in the grassbeds is that they’re now decorated with pine tree branches and furniture. Trout and flounder never stopped biting. Shore anglers face the biggest impediment right now. They’re hurting due to the loss of so many piers and bridges, and access to beaches is limited. The beach at Fort Pickens was breached. The Pensacola Fishing Pier was the one bright spot in this whole mess. It was built with this kind of storm in mind, and lost a few railings and planks, many of which just popped up and were put right back on. And the bait shops all reopened by December.”

As anglers watch the recovery process in their respective fishing grounds, every Floridian maintains a wary eye on something else—the calendar. The 2005 hurricane season starts June 1. And while Colorado State’s Dr. William Gray, the nation’s leading prognosticator of hurricanes, foresees nothing close to the hurricane activity of 2004, his annual forecast again calls for slightly above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin, with higher than usual probabilities for landfall in the U.S. U.S., as in us.

FS