Post by nutsberryfarm 🏜 on Apr 18, 2020 23:25:17 GMT
www.miamiherald.com/sports/article242066826.html
The coronavirus pandemic has kept most South Florida boaters off the water. But scuba divers with boats that are parked at a private dock or marina will be targeting lionfish on area reefs when they get offshore.
The month of April is prime time for local divers to shoot lionfish because the lobster season closed on April 1 and doesn’t reopen until the lobster miniseason at the end of July. In addition, the seasons for grouper and hogfish don’t open until May 1.
“April is sort of a dead month,” said Jim “Chiefy” Mathie, a retired Deerfield Beach fire chief whose 29-foot SeaVee is docked behind his house. “We’ve kind of devoted April to just harvest lionfish.”
Lionfish are an exotic species from the South Pacific and the Red Sea that were first discovered off South Florida in the mid-1980s. One theory is that the lionfish were someone’s pets and when they outgrew their aquarium, the owner dumped the fish in the ocean. From there, the invasive lionfish have spread down to South America, throughout the Caribbean, into the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic coast to North Carolina.
