Sarasota Herald Tribune Oct 10, 2003, pBM1

COPYRIGHT 2003 Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Byline: Jeff Schweers

Kathe Fannon pulls the flatbottom deck boat up alongside the old fishing dock where she and her daddy hung their gill nets to dry, back before the state's voters told them they could no longer use gill nets, back when the people of Cortez still made a living from fishing.

The dock used to belong to Sigma International, a St. Petersburg fishing company that pulled out of here years ago. The dock hasn't seen an honest day's work since then. It just sits above the shallow waters of north Sarasota Bay, its pilings stuck in the muck among the oyster banks and mangroves, abandoned and neglected like the once-thriving fish houses that now stand in dilapidated grandeur along the banks of the bay.

"Before the net ban, these fish houses were working," Fannon says. "Now it's all shot." Last year, a bunch of Hollywood carpenters converted the old net-drying docks into a tin-roofed shack, artfully touched up to give it that rusticated Florida cracker look. It was for a movie, "Out of Time," starring Denzel Washington.

Denzel plays the local police chief, caught up in a double-cross, and this tin shack is his house and refuge. If you go see the movie, you can see him fishing off the back porch of his shack, drinking a beer, casting his line into the flats, reaching for the mangrove islands on the horizon.

Denzel's Dock, the confluence of reality and illusion, sits 100 yards from the dying fishing village, not far from the old oyster beds that sea birds pick over for a scrap of lunch.

"We had our name nailed right here," Fannon says, pointing to the wooden beam that holds the roof up. The shack has been dismantled and carted off somewhere, leaving nothing but the artificially rusted tin roof and its beams.

The dock has been restored to its natural, historical condition -- that is to say, an empty dock with big nails sticking out of the roof's rafters. Life has returned to normal in Cortez, with people struggling to stay on the water, to make a living as best as the state regulators will allow.

Fannon and her daddy kept their fishing gear in the last two net stalls of that dock. If you see the movie, you can see those two stalls left alone, not gussied up as a faux-cracker fishing shack. "Every nail you see in the rafter, there'd be a cork line," Fannon says.

The cork lines haven't been used since the 1995 gill net ban, imposed by voters afraid the commercial fisheries were depleting the Gulf's fish. Fannon figures the best way to see the damage the net ban has visited on her village is by boat.

She shows where once-busy docks were pulled out, docks where her daddy's boat, the Miss Karin, was tied up, docks where fishermen spread their cotton nets to dry.

Fannon and her husband, Mike, grew up here in Cortez. She's from a fourth generation fishing family. He's the first of his generation. Her fondest memories are of fishing with her daddy, of jumping off the fishing docks into the bay, and yes, of cleaning fish before running off to school.

The Fannons now live in northwest Bradenton, but Kathe and her husband are struggling to make a living from the sea. Mike fishes for grouper on longline, deep sea boats. When they're not running, like now, he sets crab traps. This is the time the state lets fishermen set traps for stone crabs. He and her nephew have been out early each morning, setting hundreds of traps.

And when he isn't fishing, he's building docks.

"It's nice to have something to fall back on," Kathe Fannon says. But it's the fishing that makes Mike happiest. "That's all he knows. He's never done anything but fish."

Fannon herself has waitressed, worked for UPS, and even lived in Atlanta for a while. But she's always returned to Cortez. "We're trying to stay on the water. We're hanging in there."

Jeff Schweers can be reached at 742-6167 or by e-mail at jeff.schweers@heraldtribune.com