@myjob 26 October 2022

I am new to Noise and would like to tell you about myself. My husband and I are commercial fishermen, we have been married for going on 37 years, and we have been together for 41. This is when I started fishing with him. Even though I am a 3rd generation commercial fisherman I had never fished commercially until I met my husband. I had fished with him for 5 years when he had to go to the west coast for a fisheries meeting, he told me to take the boat and catch jacks. I did not want to do it because he had always driven the boat and set the net around the fish. I was scared, but I did it. My first catch was 1,500 pounds of jacks. I was hooked, and it did not take long for me to have my own boat. We raised 5 kids by fishing the river and when the state of Florida passed the net ban, we had to do something else to stay self-employed so we started growing clams then in 2004 the entire eco-system in the river crashed killing fish clams, oysters, birds, manatees, and dolphins. We lost 50 thousand dollars worth of clams. We had to go back to fishing but found that we could not make a living by just fishing. So we started a plant nursery and grew all types of plants. I would post signs saying plant and yard sales. My husband said the yard sale was "chum" to get the people to stop and look, in turn, they would buy plants. We did this for 5 or 6 years until it got to be too much on us so we stopped the yard sale and only sold plants. Now the river has somewhat came back and our kids are all grown and out of the house so we only grow areca palms and fish. The one thing that has saved us is neither of us buys on credit. We only have basic bills, lights, internet, car insurance, and property taxes. Our home is paid for our trucks are paid for, even though they are old, they still get us to where we need to go and back home. I am proud that we are not swimming in debt. We did it by being determined not to live that way and it worked.