A stone crab fisherman’s risks and rewards
CORTEZ — The Lacey family prays a lot this time of year and 4-year-old Hunter is no exception. Each night, before he goes to sleep, he closes his eyes and says:
“Please let the crabs find my daddy’s traps.”
Brian Lacey is Hunter’s dad. He is a 34-year-old stone crab fisherman who quit his job, sold his house and invested it all in a business full of risk, danger and exhausting physical demands. His livelihood, in essence, is at the mercy of the deep.
“I’m scared every day,” he says. “I’ve put my entire life into this. Everything I have and will have comes from the Gulf of Mexico. There are nights we pray a lot.”
Lacey is new to the stone crab game. He grew up around the water in Sarasota as a kid, but later moved to Virginia to work in construction for a Fortune 500 company. One day his father called and said a fishing business was for sale in the area. Lacey and his wife Nikki both resigned from their jobs and paid $30,000 for the company.
Lacey first went to Key West to learn the profession. It was there he bought a 34-foot Crusader and named the boat “Miss Nikki” after his wife. He is now in his second season fishing for stone crab in Cortez, where he brings his haul to AP Bell.
Lacey figures he has $300,000 invested in the venture, $15,000 on ropes alone. Stone crab fishing is an expensive business. According to state law each trap must have a tag, and Lacey paid $35 per tag on 2,500 traps.
He buys the bait too — pig’s feet and mullet. Pig’s feet are used when the weather is warmer because it holds up better. He loads 1,800 pounds of bait some days.
Lacey and his partner fish from Venice to Clearwater and usually go two to nine miles out in the Gulf. Lacey says the physical demands are challenging, and this comes from a former offensive lineman in college. If football players get tired in the fourth quarter, he says his fourth quarter starts about 10 a.m. each day.
Living the dream
The traps have cement on the bottom and weigh 50 pounds each.
At the end of the season, when the physical properties change with the weather, the traps can weigh as much as 80 pounds. Lacey and his partner haul in an average of 800 traps per day and have done as many as 1,080. When the catch is bad they will haul more traps because they don’t have to stop and remove the stone crabs.
Danger lurks everywhere for a stone crab fisherman. The traps have razor-sharp barnacles, the stone crabs have vise grips for claws and getting caught in a rope can send a fisherman to the bottom in a flash. The Gulf can also flare up in a minute’s notice with squally weather, and the boats are not as large as the vessels seen on television’s “Deadliest Catch.”
In addition to Nikki and Hunter, Lacey has a new 4-month-old son, Bryson, at home in Cortez. The pressure to provide for his family is omnipresent, but that same pressure makes him work harder. Lacey takes pride in working hard.
“I come home and I feel like I accomplished something,” he says. “I love this work.”
If it all sounds like a tough way to make a living, well, it is, but there are perks. Up at 5 a.m., he grabs the six sandwiches Nikki makes for him and he’s down on the dock loading up. He sets out with a cup of coffee, the water serene, fish jumping all around him, and he watches the sunrise aboard a boat gliding to the Gulf. No phone, no texts, hardly any other vessels. This is when he realizes he would have it no other way.
And there is nothing better in the world than on the days he and his partner are pulling up bountiful lines of stone crab, their smiles as wide as the horizon in the backdrop.
Two years ago, Brian Lacey quit his job, sold his house and took a major risk by buying a business he named “Lacey’s Dream Fisheries.”
There was a reason he chose that name.
“It’s my dream,” he says. “I’m living my dream every day.”
— Chris Anderson can be reached at chris.anderson@heraldtribune.com