The Net Casts

Raymond Moss moves through the shallow, tea-colored waters of Apalachicola Bay with the slow, deliberate grace of a heron. At seventy-one, his skin is the texture of salted cod and his hands are permanently curved into the shape of an oar handle. Moss is a mullet fisherman, one of the last who still uses hand-woven monofilament gill nets to harvest the silver-sided fish from the grass flats. To the tourists who crowd the seafood shacks along the waterfront, mullet is a cheap, oily bait fish, but to Moss, it is the true soul of the panhandle. He fishes from an unpainted, flat-bottomed wooden skiff that his father built from cypress boards in 1952.

The paradox of Moss's life is his deep environmentalism, which exists alongside his resentment of modern conservation laws. He has spent decades fighting state regulations that restrict gill-netting, arguing that the true threat to the bay comes not from local nets but from upstream agricultural runoff and luxury waterfront developments. He knows every oyster bar and channel marker in the bay by memory, yet he uses a high-tech satellite GPS to chart the movements of the schools. "They think we are raping the bay because we use nets," Moss said, tossing a handful of cornmeal into the water to attract a school. "But the developers are the ones who are drying it out from the top down."

As the afternoon sun sinks toward the pine forests of St. Vincent Island, Moss begins the long process of hauling in his net. The silver fish thrash in the mesh, reflecting the yellow light of the dying day. He removes them one by one with a practiced flick of his wrist, placing them into an insulated cooler filled with crushed ice. His catch today is modest, barely enough to cover the cost of his outboard motor's fuel, but he is satisfied. For Moss, the value of the day is not measured in dollars, but in the quiet satisfaction of a craft preserved, if only for another season.