Jason DeLaCruz
Wild Seafood Co.
Madeira Beach, FL
Jason Delacruz is a commercial fisherman and CEO of Wild Seafood Co. in Madeira Beach, FL. Jason has been fishing since he was 5 years old. He is a professional commercial spear fisherman and owns the commercial fishing boats F/V Miss Ruby, F/V Brickyard, F/V Relentless and F/V Nuthing Purfect. He became actively involved in the fishery management process when he became a member of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders' Alliance and helped develop and implement the Gulf Wild brand. Knowing that actions speak louder than words, Wild Seafood Co. adopted the principles and guidelines of Gulf Wild so that it could provide the highest quality, responsibly harvested, fully traceable seafood to American consumers.
My name is Jason DelaCruz, and I was born and raised right here in Madeira Beach, Florida. I've been commercial fishing going on for 20 years.
Fishing is in my blood. There’s something so primal and rewarding about catching fish. When I was younger, I really liked to spearfish. It’s what I lived to do and I was able to get to a level where I could spearfish at a commercial level. From there, it has evolved into one thing into another and another, and next thing I knew, I was standing there with four boats and a fish house and everything else.
We harvest what I consider to be the best quality domestic grouper and snapper that people all over the United States get to enjoy. We're doing something good with Gulf Wild. We're fishing in a sustainable way and providing our customers with a way to trace their seafood back to the vessel, fisherman, and area where it was caught. We are proud of that work and supplying consumers with seafood they can be confident about eating.
What is your message to the public about the commercial fishing industry?
The public needs to know and understand how we built a sustainable, successful Gulf fishery. We got here with commercial fishermen leading the way. We have worked hard to get to a point where our fisheries are in such great shape compared to most other countries in the world.
We need to keep moving in that direction. Let’s keep bolstering the Magnuson Stevens Act and other essential fishing laws and policies. Let’s make sure that we are setting regulations to protect our fisheries and to give us the ability to continue to harvest this sustainable protein and supply it to the American people. We love what we do and we are proud to provide the best seafood in the world to our fellow Americans.
Can you tell us about what it means to provide food security for the American people?
I would argue that I probably sent less than three percent of my fish over the entire course of my career to foreign markets. Ninety seven percent of what we've landed, which is between about seven hundred thousand to one million pounds a year, have gone directly into domestic consumers and into domestic restaurants. Whether it's Texas, or Chicago, or Maryland, my employees, hard working Americans, are catching fish and feeding the American public.
That's always been something I take immense pride in. I like the fact that we sell our fish to the American people. Look, I'm a little fish house, but we're also a little ecosystem with a lot of good people. When we get to send fish out to our customers, we supply other little ecosystems with fresh, sustainable, American seafood.
Why is accountability important in our fisheries?
Accountability means that we know exactly what we’re harvesting and we report that to NMFS - our catch is the only thing we have true control over. We can't tell fish when to breed. We can't tell fish what to do. We can't control them moving with temperature change. The one thing we can control is knowing what our removals are. If we don't know what our removals are, we can't manage our fisheries sustainably. Not understanding the real, true removal rate has got to be one of the most pervasive problems in fisheries management today. And the problem that I see is that there's no excuse for it anymore.
How can fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico continue to improve?
We need greater accountability across all of our sectors, including the recreational sector. It could be as simple as a mandatory reporting program using a cell phone app for recording and submitting their catches.
Improving the recreational fishing sector’s accountability would be the number one thing we could do to bring our fishery to the next level. We know the commercial fishing industry’s impact on our fisheries because we have to report our catch. Because of our accountability, we’re able to keep our sector to strict catch limits and support sustainable fisheries. We’ve got our stuff really tight these days. We’ve fixed half the problem, now let’s fix the rest of the other impacts, including recreational fishing, because we just don't have a clue.
Can you talk about your participation in the fisheries management process?
I’ve participated in the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council process since I began fishing commercially. I’ve been on a wide range of ad hoc Council committees, Council study groups; I don’t think I’ve missed a Council meeting since 2009.
Participating in the Council process is smart for business. You know, we see what’s happening in our own industry and oftentimes, we know what’s happening on the water before NMFS does. For example, there have been commercial fishermen going to Council meetings in the last few years saying the red grouper fishery is back and thriving, that they’re starting to see little fish. My own guys are telling me that they’re throwing back a lot of fish under 18 inches. That means we’ll start to see the larger, adult fish start coming through. The fishermen are ahead of the curve, ahead of NMFS, in understanding the changes in this fishery.
Well, my job at the Council, along with other commercial fishermen, is to help the scientists and fishery management staff understand what we’re seeing on the water. The Council is the space for fishermen to talk directly to scientists and managers.
How do commercial fishermen help keep Gulf fish stocks healthy?
As a general rule, most of us are really stewards of the resource. For instance, if we catch a small fish, we do everything we can do to get it back into water alive. I think that speaks to the type of guys that really do care about the fishery and that want to maintain their livelihoods. We are not just fishing for today. We want to continue to do this time and time again.
How do you contribute to your local coastal economy?
We have eight full-time longline boats and another two or three full-time rod and reel boats, then another five or six charter boats. Between my eight employees and the people we employ to fish and handle our vessels’ catch, about a hundred people rely on what we do here for their living.
Can you tell us about how the Gulf Wild brand originated and what it means?
Right after the oil spill in 2010, there were a lot of people saying, “Oh, don’t buy anything from the Gulf because it’s tainted by the oil spill.” So, we spent a lot of time thinking about how we resolve this problem and provide confidence to seafood consumers. We knew that people would likely pay a bit more if they could identify a fish that was harvested sustainably in U.S. waters. The challenge the oil spill presented was using technology to not only catch fish sustainably, but to assure customers that it was safe and healthy.
We set out to use different technologies that would allow us to identify our fish down to the single fish level. We set up a system where every single fish gets its own unique number, their “social security number” if you will. We tag each fish with the boat it came off, where it was roughly caught, how it was caught, the species, and other key pieces of information. The tags we put in the fish have a QR code on them so that when we ship our products, consumers and seafood dealers can go to a webpage that tells them about their fish - how, when, and where that fish was caught. We’ve been doing this now for about nine years.
This system adds value to Gulf seafood, provides transparency about our fishing practices, and gives our customers confidence in the seafood they’re consuming. The same fish species are harvested in other countries, but they have very few fishing regulations in those countries. With Gulf Wild, if somebody wants to know what they’re eating and be sure it was sustainably harvested, if they see the tag, they know it’s a safe, sustainable, seafood product.
One of the best outcomes of this program has been the conservation benefits. From the beginning, we made our fishing partners and captains agree to conservation covenants that detailed our emphasis on sustainable fishing practices. It is part of good business and good stewardship of our fisheries resources. We learned through this work that education really happened from the fish house to the boat and fisherman level.
What have been the biggest changes to the fishing industry that have impacted how you fish or how you manage your business operations?
The recovery of the red snapper stock has been the biggest change for me, for sure. I remember specifically in the second year I was in business, we landed 17,000 pounds of red grouper, and hardly any red snapper.
Thanks to the hard work of the Gulf Council and sacrifices by the commercial fishing industry, we are starting to see really great red snapper numbers again. Now, high numbers are 5,000 and 8,000 pounds of red grouper, with 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of snapper. That's probably the biggest difference: the red snapper is coming back in our region. It’s a great success story.
How have you helped in fisheries technology development?
We have, and continue to work collaboratively with managers, scientists, and researchers on a wide-range of technologies since almost the start of my fishing business. We have tested video camera systems on my boats and are trying multiple methods of fish counting and quality inspection almost constantly.
Another big technology advancement has been deploying Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS). VMS is required by NMFS as a way to enforce fishing regulations and ensure we are not fishing in protected areas and other off-limit areas. VMS sends a location data point to NMFS every hour while we are at sea so they can track our fishing activity and location. From the standpoint of a fleet owner, I love VMS. I like the fact that I can tell if a boat is moving, even if I can’t communicate with them. I wouldn’t be in this business without VMS.
I have been the guy willing to participate in these projects and efforts because we always want to be a part of developing and using technology to make our catches smarter and more sustainable.
Can you tell us about the collaborative research efforts you've been involved in?
My boats have participated in fishery independent surveys over the years. One year, we worked with NMFS to design a project that compared different methodologies. We went out and fished their methodology for three or four days, and then we fished how we normally fish. For this project, both the scientists and fishermen wanted to see how different fishing techniques would change the results, what we caught.
After the oil spill in 2010, we used some of the money allocated for the commercial fishing industry to try to better understand the baseline status of different fish stocks in the region.
