We modeled this one after our 100th find. The cache is not
difficult to find once you get to the location, but figuring out
how to get there is the trick. A round trip hike or bike of 4 miles
may be required. If you are adventurous and like to bushwhack, the
trip to the cache will be much shorter. The cache is located at an
abandoned boat landing that we have been told was part of a shrimp
farm. Shrimp farming was tried in Panama City, in the early 70's.
The view from the cache location is just outstanding. This would be
a great place to bring a picnic lunch. A little history is
below.
In 1972, the Marifarms Group, working with Japanese technology
and under the management of John Cheshire, started a shrimp farm in
Panama City, Florida.It built a hatchery, fenced off an entire bay
and began farming Penaeus setiferus, an indigenous white shrimp.
Marifarms had a Japanese biologist named Y. Akamena, who trained
Chris Howell, who has had a long career in shrimp farming and
currently runs a hatchery in Malaysia. Marifarms was actually
ranching shrimp. It stocked postlarvae in its huge bay and
attempted to harvest them several months later. The Japanese had
always worked with P. japonicus; they had never worked with white
shrimp and, consequently, did not have much luck with
them.
They didn’t understand setiferus’s breeding cycle. They didn’t
know that they needed wild females with spermatophores attached.
Harvey Persyn, currently a shrimp farming consultant, and David
Drennan, currently a hatchery manager in the Dominica Republic,
went up to Panama City to help Marifarms. They took them out on a
boat and showed them how to catch gravid females in Apalachicola
Bay. We helped them off and on during their run at shrimp farming,
but then the environmentalists got after them and they abandoned
the project because of sustained losses. Shrimp fishermen also
protested the fencing off of a bay that had previously been open
for fishing.
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