Tag Archives: St. Augustine
Boaters clobber rare Right whale and calf, but they avoid legal consequences
There’s nothing like a good shipwreck story. The crash happened near dusk on Feb. 12, 2021. A captain and seven passengers were aboard the 54-footer. They were returning from a day of competing at the Northeast Florida Wahoo Shootout. The boat was doing about 21 knots, 24 mph if you’re a landlubber, as it headed for the Conch House Marina in St. Augustine. Nearing their destination, in the St. Augustine Inlet, the boat smacked into something — hard. The boat stopped dead in the water. So did whatever it had hit. Suddenly the “About Time” didn’t have much time. Both its twin engines shut down and the damaged boat began sinking fast. When a pair of Florida wildlife officers showed up, the owner of the boat, Dayne Williams of New Smyrna Beach, blurted out, “I think we hit a whale. I saw fins and blood.” Biologists immediately identified it as an endangered North American right whale. >click to read< 12:34
Research vessel Lady Lisa may be nearing its end
Beach visitors were captivated by what appeared to be a shrimp trawler meandering close to shore along St. Augustine Beach last week. But this was no ordinary shrimp trawler, nor was it actually “shrimping.” The vessel in question was the Lady Lisa, a 75-foot former shrimp trawler, and now a research vessel, which has appeared for more than three decades in local waters – usually twice a year. Although it appears that it was in violation of off-shore limits, the regulations do not apply to the Lady Lisa, which was built in St. Augustine in 1980 by St. Augustine Trawlers Inc. But it was not the shrimp business that its owners had in mind. >click to read< 21:04
The city of St. Augustine now has an official seafood: Wild-caught shrimp!
The move received unanimous support from commissioners, who adopted a resolution. “The historic San Sebastian River hosted an important chapter in U.S. maritime history,” the resolution says. “Northeast Florida is the birthplace and home to the U.S. commercial shrimping industry … innovators, including Mike ‘Sollecito’ Salvador, Salvatore Versaggi and Antonio Poli, moved to St. Augustine in the early 1920s to set up fish houses and shrimping fleets that supplied northern markets … the industry grew rapidly, and a boatbuilding enterprise began in St. Augustine that became a cultural and economic mainstay of the city for most of the 20th century. 22 photos, >click to read< 09:43
