The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Now they’re everywhere. Like locusts. That’s the bad news. The lionfish has Florida in a noose, and from Mobile, Alabama, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the lionfish is a blight, a plague, an epidemic. A perfect evolutionary machine for eating and ruin, every lionfish is the lace-collared cutthroat in your underwater Elizabethan costume drama.

  The good news? Lionfish is delicious.

  All this I learned at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, Florida. They have a team of molecular scientists and marine biologists there, and benthic ecologists and visiting zoologists and doctoral candidates and postdocs and technicians and reef experts. They have a research laboratory and a public aquarium where a couple of times a day you can watch a little lionfish get fed. This is out on Seaway Drive, and on a hot spring morning the light here is like the aftermath of a blast. In fact, when you drive from here to Pensacola, all of Florida feels like a trick of the light. Overbright or too dark, at once too soft and too sharp, under water or above it, you’re never sure what you’re seeing. At noon the asphalt shimmers and the sand dazzles and at midnight the stars swim in an ink-black heaven above the cypress and the slash pine. Is that a Disney castle rising in the distant murk, or just a jet of swamp gas? From Daytona to the Everglades to the Keys, from Universal Studios to the Fountain of Youth, Florida is a fever dream, an unreliable narrator. Florida is a fiction. It is an impossible place.

  And that’s how we all wound up in this little boat at the Lionfish World Championship. One of dozens of lionfish rodeos or derbies or hunts around the state, events like this are the first line of defense against the lionfish takeover. The premise is simple: whoever spears the most lionfish wins. Sponsored by Coast Watch Alliance and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Reef Rangers, the Gulf Coast Lionfish Coalition, and about a dozen others, over the last few years this tournament has cleaned thousands of lionfish out of the local ecosystem. In 2016 alone it brought in more than 8,000 fish—in a weekend. I’m here to watch one of five or six teams kill every lionfish it sees.

  Even before dawn the marina is loud with gulls and banging halyards and happy obscenity. As the sun rises so does the wind, and wary talk of what a wild, E-ticket ride the day’s going to be. Before any of us step aboard, the little boat is already filled with gear and we’re still lashing coolers to the deck. There isn’t a spare inch anywhere. But off we go.

  Captain Andy Ross is a fidget spinner of a man, quiet, apparently motionless, but going a thousand miles an hour. He is fit and tanned and of some glorious sun-worn indeterminate middle age. He is one of the tournament founders, too, and master and commander of the Niuhi, a 25-foot catamaran dive boat with a small deckhouse and cabin and twin Yamaha 150s to push us out into the Gulf. Generally soft-spoken, from time to time while I’m redistributing my breakfast over the port-side gunwale, he calls out to me with a small sideways smile, “Sporty today!”

  Why yes, Cap’n, yes it is.

  On the other hand, Barry Shively, the mate and dive master, never stops talking. Never stops. Never stops singing or storytelling. He is a dynamo, what Grandma would have called a real live wire. He dives and spearfishes mostly for fun. His day job is repairing MRI and CT scanners and other nuclear imaging equipment. He is exactly the kind of charming knucklehead savant you need on a day like today. I was able to sit upright long enough to ask him to describe the early days of the lionfish siege in this part of the Gulf.

  “So, we first started seeing them showing up here probably four or five years ago. The first year we seen like one or two. And we’d alert FWC and they were like, ‘Well where’d you see it? Let’s get some maps going.’ Then the science started and every time we came in they wanted to know . . . I mean they were meeting us at the dock asking questions. So, concern was growing and we didn’t realize it was going to bloom like this. The next year, it quadrupled. And then the year after that, it was one hundred–fold more than the prior year. It’s been an explosion and they have just taken over.”

  John McCain, smiling a wide smile and vomiting calmly across from me, is a sales manager from Dive Rite, a manufacturer of scuba equipment. Next to him is Carl Molitor, an underwater photographer, calm as the Buddha and somehow eating a breakfast of yogurt and fruit. Next to Carl is Allie ElHage, who has been trying very hard to light a cigarette in the wind for the last few minutes. He invented and makes and sells the Zookeeper, a length of wide, clear PVC pipe with a plastic flange at one end and a Kevlar bag at the other, into which one stuffs one’s speared lionfish. He is smiling, too, and when he leans back and tips his face to the sun he is a picture of absolute happiness. Alex Page, salon owner and paralegal and recreational slayer of lionfish, sits on the midships gear locker with the peaceful mien of a man on his third morning at the spa. Everyone on this little boat but me is a lionfish serial killer.

  The last thing you see of Pensacola as you motor out into the Gulf are the checkerboard water towers at the naval air station. That’s what the town is famous for, naval aviators. Fighter jocks. And for prizefighter Roy Jones Jr. Otherwise, the travel posters are filled with beaches, seafood, board shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops. It’s the Panhandle Eden.

  Here’s how it works, even on a day as rough as this. You and your buddies head out past the horizon, about 18 miles. You’ll locate by GPS and by chart and by fish-finder an underwater structure likely to harbor a population of lionfish. Some of these structures are known to every charter captain everywhere, and some are jealously guarded secrets. There aren’t many coral reefs in the northern Gulf—it’s mostly a hard sand bottom down there—so these underwater features are almost entirely man-made. Picture a pyramid of I beams six or eight feet high, or a sphere the same size. The state sinks them to promote habitat for sportfishing. Most of them, anyway. There are some shipwrecks down there, too, and some “habitat” sunk by enterprising locals in less enlightened times, like rusted school bus bodies and little hillocks of old appliances.

  As a charter captain, Andy is a great example of a grassroots response to an environmental problem. He was taking folks out spearfishing for snapper and triggerfish and he was seeing more and more lionfish crowding them out of the habitats.

  “It just seemed like a light suddenly came on. I had written in to someone at one of the local chambers of commerce, I think we’ve got a big problem here. We need to probably address it and I wasn’t sure how to go about doing that. The Perdido Key Chamber of Commerce said, ‘Well, we’ve got some funds available for special projects. Why don’t we at least raise some awareness?’ I go, ‘That’s a great idea. How do we go about doing it?’ Let’s put together a tournament. It was a little rough at first, but we managed to pull off four or five small tournaments the first year that we had some funding. That just got the whole ball rolling pretty fast.”

  With the water coming over the bow, you’re not going to anchor, you’re going to circle while your divers head down in twos and threes. The water out here is between 90 and 120 feet deep, so the divers breathe nitrox from their tanks, a cocktail of nitrogen and oxygen that allows them to make safer trips up and down and stay a little longer on the bottom. Program all that into your dive computer, and it gives back a precise dive profile: how long it takes to descend, how long you can stay, and how fast you can resurface. These are quick “bounce” dives, about 10 minutes descending, 10 minutes on the bottom, 10 minutes back. And these are all very experienced divers. But even for them, it’s a bruising proposition trying to pull on gear while being flung from corner to corner, falling, colliding, tripping, swearing. Did I mention they’re all carrying spears? You hunt lionfish with what amounts to a modest trident, powered by a short length of surgical tubing.

  That’s okay, fellas, I’ll wait here.

  “Are we parked?” the divers yell.

  “Yep,” says Andy, and the guys wobble the regulators into their mouths and roll backward into the water with a splash.

  And that’s how we spend the day. Two or three of u
s always on board and two or three of us almost continually over the side hunting lionfish. Crocs and Kevlar gloves and weapons-grade sunglasses slosh around the bilge. We circle the divers’ bubbles until they’re ready for pickup. A lot of the exchanges at the stern ladder go like this,

  “How many did you get?”

  “Twenty-five or thirty.”

  “How many did you leave?”

  “None.”

  Then empty the Zookeepers into the cooler, get the lionfish on ice, and head for the next spot. Andy peers into the fish-finder; Barry tells another story; Allie lights another cigarette. It’s all jawboning and affectionate insult and classic rock on the loudspeaker, “Radar Love” and PG-13 punch lines. Barry hauls the jumbo sandwiches out at midday and the Italian dressing and the peanut butter crackers and I excuse myself to go below. The boys are bringing up fish a dozen or two at a time. At one point, Alex brings up more than 100 fish himself. This is why we came. He is a giant killer.

  “Be afraid, lionfish, be very afraid,” says Barry.

  The rest of the day is a montage of iridescent water and Tintoretto sky, wisecracks and tattoos and lionfish. The coolers slowly fill, and by late afternoon we’re surfing back to the pass. The wind is up and the trip home rolls like a motocross track. “I’m tired, man,” says Allie to no one in particular.

  “But it’s addictive, man, like Angry Birds,” Barry says, and we rise and fall and ride the crests home.

  Somewhere far to the east of us, over the horizon, there is an all-women’s team, the first ever, and from what we can make out on the radio, they’ve been taking many, many fish. But it’s hard to know for sure; sandbagging and gamesmanship are a big part of the competition. You never want anyone to know your real numbers until the fish are totaled on Sunday. For now, the women and their lionfish are a distant rumor.

  We’re back at the dock just before sunset. We might have speared more than 400 lionfish. Or we might not have. I am asked to keep mum on the matter. We are met by a couple of marine biologists. These tournaments are a terrific resource for scientists. Tonight, they’re checking the females for egg sacs, researching effective ways to interrupt that prodigious lionfish reproductive cycle. They’ll be at it for hours, well into darkness, and will handle every one of those fish.

  As it says on Barry’s Zookeeper, LEAVE NO LIONFISH BEHIND.

  Saturday

  It’s so windy today, and the surf so much worse, that most teams do not go back out. We do not go back out.

  The women’s team goes back out. No one has seen them yet. They remain a whisper filled with static, a ghost across the horizon, a figment. Talk of their courage and their madness is a near constant for the day.

  For the rest of us, it’s a hot sun and calypso on the loudspeakers and 700-horsepower pickup trucks in the parking lot.

  The point of the dry land portion of the tournament, the weekend-long lionfish festival in the small park out on the Plaza de Luna, is educational. Informational. And tasty. Once you see the banners in the little park, you begin to understand the statewide strategy for lionfish management.

  “Eat ’em to beat ’em”

  “Edible Invaders”

  “Be the Predator”

  “Remove—Eat—Report”

  The exhibition tents and displays are evenly divided between things you can read and things you can eat. There are lionfish cooking demonstrations all day, given by well-known local chefs, and long lines to taste the samples. This morning it’s Asian wraps done up with lionfish tenders. By noon it’s a 10-minute wait to try one. One tent over, Captain Robert Turpin of the Escambia County Marine Resources Division is delivering an informational presentation to the crowd. “Remember folks,” he says into the wind noise, “lionfish are venomous, not poisonous.”

  This is a central tenet of the “Eat ’em to beat ’em” master plan. Consumers don’t know lionfish very well. Even though a lionfish sting is sharp and painful, the meat of the fish itself is safe to eat. Unlike fugu, Japan’s riskiest delicacy, lionfish is harmless. The fish has to be handled carefully when caught and when filleted, but for customers in a restaurant or at the seafood counter of their local grocery, lionfish is no more of a threat than salmon or flounder or cod. Venomous, not poisonous, is the drumbeat of the whole weekend.

  Because the only way to control the lionfish invasion in this hemisphere will be to create a market large enough to turn them into a national cash fish.

  But you can’t do that by spearing them one at a time. Especially not at depths greater than commercial divers can safely and routinely cull them. You need to start harvesting them in large, dependable numbers. And for that, you need to figure out how to trap them. Or kill them with submersibles, drones, or remote-operated vehicles.

  Walk this way to the tent of Steve Gittings, chief scientist for NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary System. If you were asked to paint the portrait of a distinguished, thoughtful, slightly-gray-at-the-temples National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration PhD, he’d be your guy. On his display table are a number of models of a bell trap, a kind of semiautomated snare that rests on the sea bottom, then closes over, catches, and hoists up lionfish in quantity.

  I asked him to thumbnail Florida’s lionfish problem, just so we know.

  “I think it boils down to two levels of activity that lionfish do. One is eating any small fish that they can eat, but that means those fish are not available for other fish to eat, commercial or otherwise, so that’s a whole ecosystem-trophic effect. It’s a collapse. Could be a collapse.

  “On the other end of the spectrum,” he goes on, “they’re eating juveniles of the fish that would become commercially available. So, why are people not yet saying, ‘There’s no more grouper. There’s no more snapper’? Well, it might be the juveniles of those species have not reached adulthood—and won’t, because they’re being eaten by lionfish. So if lionfish are eating a lot of juveniles of snapper, grouper, there’s all of a sudden going to be a collapse at the level of species entering the adult phase. That will eventually show up as no more snapper-grouper.”

  That’s it, that’s the lionfish apocalypse. But Gittings is an optimist.

  “I’m still hopeful that it’ll be a non-apocalypse because I hope nature will figure it out. But, at least, as far as the evidence goes . . . so far, apocalypse. It could be.

  “But I have to trust in nature, because for a lot of previous invasive species, land or sea, nature eventually figures it out. With disease, with parasites, with predators. So something’s going to get these things. Right now, they’re taking over. They reproduce better than rabbits, eat like crazy, and nothing eats them.

  “There are these places, though, where you just go, ‘Where are the lionfish?’ So, does that mean non-apocalypse, or does that mean they haven’t gotten here yet? Does it mean they will? Does it mean they won’t? Does it mean local control is taking care of the problem? I think it’s that in large measure.

  “Local control does do a lot of good. You hear people here talk about how they are not finding lionfish near shore. That’s probably because people are shooting them. The farther offshore you get, the more fish you see.

  “So, I think we have to treat it like an apocalypse, but even as a scientist I think it’s going to work itself out, and become some kind of balance of nature.”

  And the deep-water traps?

  “You can talk about local control in shallow water using divers. That’s doing a good job. I think we ramp it up as much as possible to minimize anything that inhibits that from happening. But that helps us down to that depth.

  “But now we’ve got to tackle the deep-water problem. And do regional control. And how do you do that? You’ve got to engage lots of people, and maybe lots of different ways. I believe the fishing communities, they answer to that. I don’t think that conservation people like myself can buy a bunch of ROVs and go down and shoot them and do things. The fisherman who has a good ROV or some other way of catching lionfish
might do that, and that’s a good thing, because they get to (A) kill fish and (B) sell fish and make money. And take the pressure off the other species while they’re doing it.

  “So that’s why I got into the thinking about traps to deal with deep-water populations. My logic was, let’s design traps that fishermen would be comfortable with, which is mechanical. Fully mechanical, easily deployed, easily retrieved, you can put a bunch of them on a fishing boat. And then we’ve got to deal with the regulatory matters related to that.”

  In the next tent over, there’s a beautiful mermaid in a chaise longue talking to children about ecology and our collective responsibility to the environment. There’s a long line of kids—and their dads—waiting to speak to her.

  Around the corner, I talk to Brian Asher, a diver and spearman, and one of the directors of SEALEG, a nonprofit trying to grow the lionfish business into sustainability.

  “As a business problem, we have this incredible supply of lionfish. They’re breeding rapidly. And on the other end, you have restaurants and grocery stores. You have this huge demand, and there’s really no efficient way of connecting the two right now.

  “The traps, though, haven’t been available until the last two or three months when NOAA published the plans, and that’s an inexpensive, easily deployable trap design. Taking commercial fishing operations, and having them focus on this would be . . . I mean, just huge gains can be made out of that. But it’s convincing that fishing community, and then, on the flip side of that, convincing the public that, hey, this is something good to eat. And there’s still a lot of resistance in the public.”