The people in the 2.2 square miles of Cortez rely on one another and the sea to embrace a way of life that's on the ebb.
Story and photos by KAREN HAYMON LONG
The Tampa Tribune
CORTEZ - Kathe Fannon sees two versions of her hometown when she takes visitors out on Sarasota Bay in her tour boat.
In her mind, she sees Cortez as it was when she was a child in the '60s.
Rustic wooden huts high up on stilts and filled with fishing nets overlooked the bay. Her father and his friends, men whose fathers and grandfathers fished these same waters, returned to Cortez with boats heavy with fish.
In today's world, only a few net huts are left. The dwindling commercial fishing fleet must now dodge speedboats, yachts and noisy water scooters. And there aren't as many fish in this vision, or birds.
"When I was a little girl, if you were out there and broke down, you'd have to pole home. You didn't see those recreational fishermen out there," says Fannon, a brown-haired, brown-eyed woman who looks younger than 44.
"If everyone could just see what I see in my mind. This was a wonderful place."
Now, instead of wild acres and beach cottages just outside Cortez, she sees sprawling condos and motels, a new upscale subdivision and strip shopping centers.
Fannon recalls an idyllic childhood on the water helping her dad, Frank Tupin, a third-generation Cortez fisherman, hoisting up huge nets filled with fish. She remembers him pulling up to a long shoreline of fishing docks, where she would leap from the bow onto the dock before he even stopped the boat. Many of those docks are gone now.
A lot has changed in Cortez since gill nets were banned in state waters in 1995. But a lot has remained the same.
Fannon still gets out on the water, even though nowadays it's to show tourists dolphins and tiny seahorses she scoops up with a basket on a long stick. Her dad and her husband still fish for a living, as do many of their friends and neighbors. It's just harder now.
Thankfully, visitors to this five-block village see mostly the charm of its longtime residents and the beauty of the water, the birds and the skies that still make this a wondrous spot in Florida.
Sandwiched between Sarasota and Longboat Key to the south and Bradenton Beach and Anna Maria Island to the north, Cortez has remained, well, Cortez, one of the state's oldest and few true fishing villages.
Indians first fished the area long before the 1850s, when mullet fishermen salted their catches and shipped them to Cuba. Forty years later, inhabited mostly by North Carolina mullet fishermen, the village was officially named Cortez.
Homes And Fish-Related Businesses
Only 2.2 square miles and running roughly from 119th to 125th streets off State Road 684, the village contains a couple of fish houses, fishing fleets, mostly modest homes, a few churches, a nautical antiques store, bait shops and a couple of waterfront restaurants.
Star Fish Co., where Fannon docks her tour boat, has a fish market out front and a dockside, outdoor restaurant in the back overlooking Sarasota Bay. Both specialize in shrimp, mullet, grouper and other seafood straight from the boats.
At lunchtime, you'll likely see Fannon and her cocker spaniel Pup-Pup, a few businessmen loosening their ties in the heat, fishermen wearing white rubber boots, and tourists and local retirees enjoying fried mullet, gator and pork sausage and boiled shrimp served in white paper boxes.
Oh, and you'll likely see Jessie Reed, taking a break from fishing for grouper and snapper on his long-line boat, the Miss Donna. He's the one with a tattoo of a scarlet lobster crawling down his left leg and an underwater scene on his right.
He's not a native, but he has lived in Cortez for 18 years and figures he'll live here the rest of his life, mostly because of the people.
"We don't take crap from one another, but we all look out for each other," he says. "If someone from outside messed with one of us, we'd all stand up together. It's just a big happy family, I guess. Thieves? We'd just run them off."
Michael Taylor, 16, whose family has lived and fished in Cortez for five generations, smiles and nods in agreement as the two eat lunch together at the counter.
Cortez was the perfect place to grow up, he says. He and his three brothers spent their childhoods swimming, boating and fishing "for anything that swims. If it pops, we catch it,"he says.
A Higher Power
Fishing reigns here. You can tell that in the pride of the people, in their wonderful, fresh seafood and even in their signs. One hand-painted sign in front of the Star Fish Co. says simply: "THERE'S A HIGHER POWER THAN COMMERCIAL FISHERMEN - GOD."
Another, painted by Rhonda Kitchens, who lives in a psychedelic motorsailor in the bay behind Star Fish, says: "Jesus chose Fishermen NOT Politicians."
"It's a wild little village, but deeply religious. They may party, but they feel a special connection to Jesus because he chose fishermen who fished with nets," says Kitchens, a Tampa librarian who took a year off, bought her boat for $1 from a St. Petersburg salvage yard and climbed aboard to enjoy the scenery.
Supporting herself by painting whimsical signs and by working as a librarian at Mote Marine Lab and the Ringling School of Art, she hopes to prolong her sabbatical, due to end in three months. She has grown attached to the little fishing village she discovered while writing a story about it for The Weekly Planet.
"It's one of the last places around where you can park your boat that you paid for in front of the house you paid for and your neighbors won't complain," she says.
She writes of her life in Cortez and sells her signs at www.rhondakwrites.com/.
Out On The Water
Making a living around here, where the annual median household income is only $36,577, can tap creativity.
For $15 an hour per person, Fannon treats visitors to a boat ride, history lesson and dolphin-hunting tour with Pup-Pup, whom she found one day and adopted. Pup-Pup has a sixth sense for spotting dolphins and will run to the bow barking before anyone else spots one. Fannon doesn't know whether he smells them or somehow sees them underwater.
Once out in the bay, she anchors her boat and jumps in the water with a giant scoop she calls her Cortez Critter Getter.
"You cannot purchase these at Wal-Mart. You must have a Cortezian make one for you," she says, grinning.
Shuffling through the water shoveling, she scoops up tiny seahorses, puffer fish, shrimp and baby crabs.
"I played in these waters all my life and never thought anyone would want to pay to see these," she says, spilling tiny shrimp onto the deck.
She's careful to put them back into the water quickly so they won't die, especially the seahorses. It's bad luck to kill a seahorse, she says. She did accidentally once and felt very sad afterward.
As she scoops, Pup-Pup starts barking at the water.
"He sees a dolphin. He wouldn't be barking like that if he didn't. Trust me," she says.
In a little while, a dolphin arches from the turquoise waters. Pup-Pup, keeping watch from the bow, wags his tail and barks, his ears flopping in the wind.
Later, as she steers the boat, Fannon talks about the net huts she calls "net camps" and says how much she misses seeing them out in the water.
She and her mom used to get in the water to hoist the heavy nets filled with glass minnows.
"That woman had some pulling power - serious pulling power," she says.
Cortezians To Their Core Her dad still fishes for a living at 69. She saw him earlier in the day heading home with 660 pounds of jacks.
"My daddy has corks and leads older than I am," she says. "He loves it. You do not commercial fish for money. You do it because it's in your blood. You do this because it's in your heart. It's in my heart."
It's in her dad's, too. Cortez fishermen like her father and husband build their own boats and still make their own nets. Many sell their fish for bait and for animal food to SeaWorld, Busch Gardens and bird sanctuaries.
Most eat what they catch and give extras to friends.
"That's the thing about us Cortezians. We can't pay a damn bill on time, but by God we eat good. We'll never starve," Fannon says.
She brags on her mom's fried snook, then generously shares her family recipe:
"You soak it in buttermilk overnight. Season it with salt and pepper. Dip it
in flour, then egg, then flour again, then fry it."
Like many Cortezians, Fannon worries about development, especially when she's out on the water. She wishes there could be a development moratorium along the waterfront.
That's not an idle wish. Six years ago, many of the village's 4,500 residents donated to a project spearheaded by the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage to buy 95 acres along the bay at the south end of Cortez to create a fish preserve buffer zone that can never be developed.
Locals have long called that area the kitchen because it teems with fish many have caught to feed their families over the years.
"People come from all over the world to see this part of Florida because it is still Old Florida," Fannon says.
Yet, many local politicians are pro-development.
"Once you take this away, you will never see Old Florida again," she says. "Look at this place. Is this not a beautiful area? Leave it alone. It doesn't need to be improved. It doesn't need to be bigger. Why do they want to ruin paradise?"
Karen Haymon Long can be reached at (813) 259-7618 or klong@tampatrib.com.