Danny Jones Podcast - #7 - Dylan Hubbard

Episode Date: November 27, 2018

The Hubbard family has been known for its roots in Gulf Coast fishing since the 1940's. Dylan Hubbard is the grandson of Wilson Hubbard, who purchased a dock in the early 1930's which is now one of the biggest fishing ports in Florida and also known as the "Grouper Capital of the World". Dylan is the vice-president and co-owner of the operation today known as 'Hubbard's Marina'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's going on, man? How you doing? Good, good. Another day in paradise. That's cool, man. Thanks for coming on this. Man, no worries. So you and your family have a long history in Pinellas County,

especially in the fishing community. Give us a little background on that real quick. Yeah, Hubbard's Marina is our family business. We've been fishing local waters for over 90 years and four generations. My grandfather started our company with seven, seven rowboats and 14 cane pulls. And over 90 years later, we're doing anything from two inches of water out past 1,000 foot. We have 12 different vessels operating in our fleet.

Six of those being federally permitted offshore fishing vessels. Four of those six are private charter vessels and then two are party boat trips or party boat vessels. And we've been very blessed to be able to grow as a family business. sustain success by just doing our best to stay ahead of the curve and really trying to give back to the community while also trying to stay active in the fisheries management arena. Because nowadays it's becoming more and more important to be active and up to date with what's going on and the federal fisheries management level. As fisheries become more and more accountable, it's very important to try to

stay ahead of the curve and know what's coming, as is evident in the commercial fishery. So you guys started in John's Pass, right, which is one of the main ports in Pinellas County? We started from what was then called Hubbard's Pier and it was 8th Avenue in Passa Grill. And back in those days, John's Pass wasn't really a thing too much because most people lived in Gulfport and then they would take a ferry over to Passa Grove. So Paso Grill and Terra Verdi as well. So Paso Girl is kind of the hub and everybody went to Paso Grill. So that's where we actually started.

And when my grandfather first started, it was just him. But over time, he had six or seven charter boat vessels operating out of there. Behind World War I is when we got our first motor driven charter boat. And that World War I really enabled a lot of the charter. harder fleet and fishing fleet in our area to become motor powered because it made the combustion engine so much widely accessible and affordable. And that's kind of when things blew up in our area and fishing really became what people traveled to our area for. And in the early 60s, is when we started running our party boats. In 1967, we were actually the first on the entire

west coast of Florida to offer overnight long range party boat fishing trips. We were the first to operate a private charter vessel here in the central west Florida area. We invented the half-day fishing trip back in the early 60s. And over time, it's just, again, just blessed to stay out of the curve. Nowadays, we operate the first and one-of-a-kind hydrofoil-assisted U.S. Coast Guard inspected catamaran. So it's actually a go-go-e. fast charter boat that rides on a wing above the water. It's pretty unique. What? When did you get that? We just got that a few years ago. It's been about two and a half years we've been operating that vessel. We had it built custom out of Louisiana area, and we got

the plans from someone in South Africa. The scientists had devised it, and a lot of people use that same technology on six-pack boats or what's called an uninspected vessel because when you carry six passengers or less you don't have to be Coast Guard inspected whereas if you carry that seventh or more passengers you have to be Coast Guard inspected which basically means you have to draw plans of the naval engineer you have to send it off to MSO in Washington DC which is like the head of the Coast Guard takes them a few months to sign off on the plans yeah and And the Flying Hub 2, you can find it on our website. Flying Hub 2.

Yeah. That's insane. And basically... I don't know why I've never heard of this. Oh, it's a wild boat. It's beautiful. It sounds super expensive. It was very expensive.

How much is it? Can you tell us? It was just shy of a million dollars. What? Yeah. If you close that and then go to private charters. Okay. And then Flying Hub 2, you'll see the photos of her.

Got a little photo. gallery as it loves you. 40 by 14. Yeah it's a very fast boat and it can actually take up to 20 passengers out fishing at about 33 knots which equates to about 40 miles an hour. So it's just a wild boat. And when it gets back, this slideshow and it gets back to the front, you'll see the boat cruising at speed and it actually comes up on the wings so it rides above the water. Here is how a boat normally rides, which the water line you can see is just at a normal distance from the water,

and it's just cruising in the water. But when it gets up to a certain speed, those hydrofoils actually lift the boat. So right there, that's not the boat hitting a wave. That's the boat riding on the wing. And what's the benefit of it being like that? Is it faster, smoother? Yeah, there's less hydrodynamic drag.

So only the back quarter of the boat is actually touching the surface of the water. So without all that water dragging on the hall, you have a lot more efficiency, the boat's a lot more quiet, and you have a lot more speed, and you can carry more weight more efficiently. Normally a boat like that with 20 passengers on it, you wouldn't be able to go 40 miles an hour. And that boat only has 350 horsepower engines.

It's got two of them. Two of them, right? Yeah. How it looks like? Yeah, so it's actually got two mercuries on it now. Oh, really? Yeah, but with 700 horsepower to push 20 people at 40 miles an hour, it's pretty. I mean, no one does that.

So people just go on that for what? I mean, do you fish on that boat? Yeah, we do a lot of offshore fishing on it. We do private charters on it. It's mainly a private charter fishing vessel. Right. But we do have a public split charter style trip on Wednesday and Sundays. We do a 12-hour extreme where you're fishing 70 to 100 miles from shore.

You get about seven to eight hours fishing time, and you get a serious chance for some really big fish. Oh, yeah. It's only 300 bucks. So to get 70 to 100 miles out and fish that long, it's a pretty unique option. That's awesome. So do you actually run these boats yourself? Yeah, yeah. I operate all the vessels in our fleet.

I'm the vice president and co-owner of Hubbard's Marina, and I'm really involved in the day-to-day operations. So unfortunately, I don't get to go out and play on the water as much as I would like. But running the boat to me is a lot like having a day off work because it's a lot of fun. But unfortunately, a lot of times I'm stuck in the office, especially this time of year when we have a lot of admin stuff to do for the following year. But when we get busy and we need a captain or when something unique is going on, I typically am called up for it. So I run a lot of our shark fishing trips. And then I run a lot of private charters where clients request me. Wow.

That's awesome. What kind of people, what's the majority of the customers that come to you guys? Are they fishing people or are they people just looking to go on a business? party boat or it really depends on the trip i mean we run anything from sunset cruises to dolphin watches to island trips to snorkeling to fishing in our fishing trips we do a five 10 12 39 44 and 663 hour trip so it really depends on the trip and also the client because we also have private charters that we could do anywhere from three to 72 hours so like on a 63 hour trip we have people flying in from California, New York, Chicago.

Really? Yeah. Even we had a guy the other day that traveled from the UK to do our 39-hour trip. So on those longer trips, it's more advanced anglers who are looking to go catch some big fish or have the opportunity to go catch some big fish. Whereas on our five-hour trip, there's a lot more families and just people looking to go out for the day and stuff. Yeah.

What a line. So it's very interesting to me to see the evolution. of the angler you have the guy that just wants to learn how to catch a fish and he's ecstatic to just hook one right and then you have yeah and then you have the guy that's learned how to do it and really thinks he's got it figured out but he's still struggling a little bit and he's happy if he catches a few then you got the guy who he's he's got it all down pat you can't teach him nothing and all he wants to do is kill him all yeah and then you got the guy that's done that for a long time and is realizing that, hey, we got to put some of these back

and he's more catch and release oriented. It's just out there to have a good time and enjoy the water. And then you get to a certain point where fishing yourself is kind of overrated. I would rather sit out there and show you how to catch a fish and watch you catch a fish. And I really enjoy getting kids hooked on fishing and people who don't know how to fish trying to get them hooked on fishing and become more effective offshore because it can get

frustrating. I mean, especially offshore fishing. If you got your own boat, you spent 20, 30, 40, even $100,000 on this boat. You got to put 200, 300 gallons of fuel in it. So, I mean, you have to invest a thousand dollars a lot of times to get offshore and go fishing. And if you spend $1,000 and you go out there and you don't catch any fish and you had a terrible time, you can't anchor on your spot, you're not going to have. I don't want to keep doing it.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I really enjoy is kind of teaching people how to be more effective. And that's really what we kind of put an emphasis on is just furthering our industry, conserving our fishery, and teaching people how to get hooked on fishing. When you say conserving your fishery, what do you mean by fishery? I guess what is a fishery? Our fishery in the Gulf of Mexico, what that means is just the whole industry as a whole.

our fishery supports not only our waterfront coastal economies and working waterfronts, but it also supports a lot of families and a lot of businesses and a lot of people's access to the Gulf of Mexico and the fish we catch. The fishery is kind of an overarching umbrella term to refer to any type of fishing activities or fishing-related businesses. because a recreational angler like yourself, someone who's not commercial fishing, someone who doesn't own a party boat,

you have a few different ways to access the fishery. You can go stand on a seawall, go down to a fishing pier. You could go buy your own boat or go with a buddy, or you can have an opportunity to go on a party boat or a charter boat. And it really doesn't matter how you access the fishery. You're a recreational angler that looks for an opportunity to wet a line. And each sector of our fishery, we have commercial fishermen and then we have recreational fishermen.

And when it comes to Red Snapper, we also have four-hire recreational, which is charter boats and party boats. So to me, it doesn't matter how you access the fishery. You're still a recreational angler. And it's very interesting the differences in how we prosecute our fisheries when you're talking about a commercial guy, a four-hire wreck guy or a private wreck guy. because a private wreck guy, he's going out there for an opportunity to fill that cooler. He doesn't necessarily have to fill that cooler. His benefit or the intrinsic value that he places on that fishing trip

isn't based on how full his cooler is. Whereas a commercial guy, he's out there to fill the cooler. That's what he does. And the only way he gets paid is if he does fill that cooler. Right. So they totally view their trip a totally. totally different way and we all prosecute our fisheries in different ways from the depth fish, the area fish, the length of the trip. And then you have the party boat and charter boat guys,

which we're giving those private wreck guys a chance to access the fishery by providing the mode of transportation. But it's still the same idea. We're giving them that opportunity to fill the cooler. So the commercial guys need to be able to land a certain amount of fish and they need to be able to have that flexibility to do so. So whereas the recreational guys, we just need access. We need days at sea. And it doesn't necessarily mean if you, if I give you, if you have 200 pounds of fish to catch, a commercial guy is going to go out there and catch it in one day.

He's going to stay out, or one trip, he's going to stay out there for a week if it takes him and he's going to catch those fish. Whereas a recreational guy, he might go fishing 10, 15, 20 times before he gets that 200 pounds because he's got to make it home for dinner or he's got to work time. or whatever. Yeah, they don't stay out for weeks at a time like the commercial fishery. So it's very interesting when the federal fisheries management and a lot of people approach our fishery and try to manage it as a whole when you really have to evaluate the modes

and evaluate the way in which we prosecute our fishery and the way we go about it because it's all so different. So to me, conserving the fishery just means providing access to recreational anglers, giving the commercial anglers an opportunity to prosecute the fishery in which will most benefit their businesses and allow the seafood industry to continue here in the nation because we have a huge seafood industry. Do you guys do anything with seafood? We do not. We're strictly recreational. And that's a little bit frustrating for me sometimes as a lot of people look at us and say, oh, you're a commercial fisherman. Well, we're not. The commercial fishermen have these boats. They do

extended trips and they sell their fish. Yeah. A recreational angler cannot sell their fish. Any fish caught on our boats. Doesn't matter how, when, what, they cannot be sold in any way legally. So we're not out there to catch fish and sell fish and make money on fish. We make money on the opportunity to catch that fish. So a guy comes out fishing with us or a girl comes out fishing with us for a chance to catch that fish.

Right. And that's the way we make a living. So we're not commercial fishermen. We're recreational fishermen. but we do it for hire. So that's why there's for hire recreational, private recreational, and commercial. And those are the three sectors

in our fishery currently. There doesn't seem like there's much competition. I mean, I don't know of anyone else doing what you guys are doing on the scale that you guys are doing it around this area. There's 1,237 federally permitted charter boat and party boat vessels

in the Gulf of Mexico right now. When you say charter boat, I mean, you mean strictly bringing people out to go fish and just catch fish, not for the purpose of selling it? Just charter boats and party boats, yes. They're four-hire recreational. They do not sell their fish. Did you say in the whole state?

In the Gulf of Mexico. In the Gulf of Mexico. Okay. But Florida has 40%. I don't recall the exact breakdown, but it's around 40% of those 1,237. And in our area alone, we have about seven to eight party boat vessels that fish out of Pinellas County. So there's some pretty decent competition.

Now, as far as the scale of our business, a lot of other people have two party boats and a few charter boats. There's two operations in Clearwater that have the same kind of setup. Oh, yeah, yeah. And there's another place up in Panama City Beach, Florida, that had the exact same operation we do. Multiple charter boats, multiple party boats, and dolphin watching, shell, shilling, all that. So there's other people doing what we do, but we try to set ourselves apart by that customer service and that a willingness to educate. If you go up to fishing trips on our website here, when you scroll down to the bottom there, from fishing tips and tricks to our fishing seminars, to our live stream shows, to the weather links, to the fishing rules, to the fishing reports. All that information is for people, whether they're fishing with us, they're fishing on their own boat, or they're fishing on someone else's boat.

And that's how we try to set ourselves apart. It's being that source for people to try to learn more about fishing, get hooked on fishing. And then also we guarantee an excellent client experience with superior guest service. And we really try to go above and beyond. And I try to personally take that to heart and really try to be there for a guest when they leave. be there for i guess when they come back yeah we do confirmation emails reminder emails thank you emails we do a pre-boarding seminar we do a fishing seminar on the way out our crew and captains a lot of these guys we have one captain that's been there 25 years we have uh two crew members that have been working

together as a team for 15 years we've got one guy that's been there 14 years and we try to foster that family oriented family friendly uh environment and it really seems to carry out to our captains and crew. We've been really blessed to have just an outstanding team, and we've been able to keep them around, and that's how we set ourselves apart, because in my biased opinion... Shout out to Shane Lee.

Yeah. No, he doesn't work for you, just to clear it up. No, he's a friend, and he lives in the area, but no, the commercial fishery, that goes back to what I was saying earlier. It's just so different. Because a guy like Shane Lee can catch fish and kill a ton of fish, and he's probably amazing at being out there and catching fish. Right.

Can that same individual go teach how to fish? Can that same individual offer that excellent client experience? He can teach you how to do a few things. I don't know if fishing is better. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing is that professional appearance, that client experience and client service,

and then the ability to not only catch fish yourself, but teach how to fish. And that kind of separates the commercial fleet from the recreational or for hire recreational. Because on a commercial boat, there's no client on board. There's no guest service. And it's a very different industry.

What is your perspective on, I know you've seen deck hands, the series that we did. What is your perspective on all those guys and that whole community as a whole as far as the commercial guys who go out for seven to ten days on a boat and just recklessly, you know, do whatever they do, get fucked up and then come back and, you know, what is your perspective on that, that whole thing? Well, I mean, I grew up in Madeira Beach.

I've lived on Madeira Beach my whole life and I know a lot of these guys. and some of the commercial fleet is some very good role models. And guys like Bobby Spath, Martin Fisher, Jason Delacruz, the shareholders, the people that have the allocation that are business-oriented, professional, and they've done things right. They've stayed ahead of the curve. And the captains, Captain John Hood, there's a ton of commercial captains. that are completely clean-cut, respectable, hard-working individuals.

Not that Shane Lee and Space Lee aren't hard-working individuals, but the clean-cut stuff, maybe not so much. But it's, in my view on the whole thing, is it really depends on what you're doing and how you approach it. I mean, there's a lot of boats in Madeira Beach that have zero tolerance for drugs and alcohol. Then there's other boats in Madeira Beach where each decan brings a, a little baggy of drugs in a case of beer and you kill it on the way out and then it's sea have the rest of the trip you're withdrawing and going through rehab basically and you're totally dry and

there's other boats that they set out there and do heroin the whole time you know and uh everybody has their own approach to things and i think the guys who are doing it right uh i mean you can tell just standing on the end of my dock in john's pass i can see a boat and i can tell that the captain cares and he gives a shit and the owner cares because you'll have a commercial boat that's beautiful painted just perfect right nice clean they take a dry dock every year and they they scrub it and uh there's no rust on it and then you have a commercial boat go by that's looks like it doesn't belong on the water and shouldn't float and it's just covered in rust and dingy and it looks like it hasn't been scrubbed in a year so uh my view on it is just like anything else you have your good apples

you have your bad apples and unfortunately there's a few bad apples in every bunch and it's really changed and since the i'm only 27 years old and in my lifetime the commercial fishery has completely evolved and changed uh some might say for the worst some might say for the better but i mean when i was a kid uh madeira beach john's pass was a grouper capital of the world we had uh we had had hundreds, 500 plus grouper boats fishing out of Madeira Beach and going out there and catching a ton of fish and coming back. Nowadays, there's 50. So there has been regulation, regulation, tightening up the industry and consolidation. The IFQ system did exactly what it was set out to do, which was consolidate and make the fishery accountable. In the commercial,

fleet it is ridiculous the amount of red tape they have to do a commercial boat what is red tape when you said yeah red tape because i don't know this fish in terms yeah so i don't know what that means just bureaucracy i mean a commercial fishing boat has to have a vessel monitoring system what's called a vms for short uh so when that boat moves it's got a hail out so if you're taking your boat to go fuel up you got to call in and say hey i'm going to the fuel dock if you're going to fishing. You got to say, hey, I'm going fishing. I'm going to target this species, this species, and this species, and I plan to land this IFQ species. Then when you come back in, you have to hail in and give a three-hour notice. So if your phone's not working or whatever, you cannot take that boat to the dock

or you have a fishery violation. You have to call in and give three hours notice. So there's a lot of times there'll be a commercial boat sitting at the bell buoy or sitting offshore waiting because they made a little bit better speed than they thought, et cetera, and they cannot hit that dock until that three hours is up. And they have to be at an approved landing site. So you have to call in and get your landing site or your dock that you depart and embark from approved. So you have to tell the federal government when you're leaving, when you're coming back, and you have to give them three hours notice that when you're coming back so they can come and inspect and you have to go to an approve site that's accessible for the federal government to be able to come inspect and approve your

catch then every single fish that comes off that boat is counted weighed and then 98% of the time there's an fwc or noa officer there doing data collection the fw or the commercial fisheries the gold standard of data collection when you approach fishery dependent data because every fish is weighed, measured, and accounted for, and they have a vessel monitoring system, so their effort is 100% tracked. That boat anywhere it goes at any time, Noah's OLE or Office of Law Enforcement is able to pull up that vessel and see its heading, its direction, its speed, and whether or not it's stopped moving and they can evaluate when they fish where they fish and then they know exactly what they caught and then the fisheries research that comes out of that we have a commercial boat that lands at

our dock and they do odalists on each one of the fish they take stomach samples they take a ton of information did this start like with the iFQs or was it like this before that the vMS started a little bit before the ifq but it was a setup to make the iFQ system possible. And as far as the checks and balances, weighing each fish and all that had a lot to do with the IFQ system. And they have trip tickets. Literally, John's pass, Jason Dela Cruz and the shareholders alliance in the Gulf of Mexico

and a few other key players in the commercial industry created this thing called Golf Wild. And it's basically a QR code. So if you go to a place like Salt Rock Grill or you go to a high-end seafood restaurant around here, on the menu, it was. will tell you the boat and the captain's name of the fish that you're about to eat. Really? And they'll bring you the QR code and you can scan it and you can see the general area it was caught, when it was caught, how it was caught, the gear used. It is insane.

That's crazy. That's crazy. I've never heard of something like that. Yeah, that's crazy. Because the fish is accounted for every single one is accounted for as it come off the boat. And then when it's taken to the seafood house and sold, it's. it's accounted for again. Then when it comes to the restaurant, it's accounted for again.

That trip ticket tracks that fish from the time it left the fish box to the time it made it to the seafood house to the time it made it to the restaurant. And that... And then to your plate. Yeah, that amount of red tape and... It's like UPS. They got to jump through. And a lot of people that aren't as educated or up to speed on our fishery, blame commercial

fisherman for the death of our fishery or short seasons or they're in a bit of, to access the fishery when in part the commercial fishing and the commercial fishermen and the commercial fishery does a lot to provide data and better fisheries management and now the commercial or that same model is being moved into the four higher recreational fleet as of october 2019 every vessel in the gulf of mexico that operates a charter boat or party boat will have a vessel monitoring system and we'll have to hail out and give notice when we're leaving and when we're coming back. And we have to report every fish that is caught and harvested

and every fish that is caught and released. So we are hoping that that accountability and that ability for fisheries managers to evaluate our cat should hopefully increase our access because accountability is everything. Right now in the fishery management spectrum, they have things like the MRIP survey, which is basically a fancy way of guessing

what is landed, what is caught, and how many fishermen are out there. Right now, they randomly sample a set of recreational anglers, and then they send out a mailing list, or a mailer, to coastal households that are signed up for a fishing license, a special fishing license, and they take the responses from those surveys, and then the random samples, and they extrapolate it over a geographic region. So if they talk to Sally Sue and Clearwater and John and Pinellas Park and someone else down in the Skyway area, and then they sit at a boat ramp and see that this boat caught X, Y, Z, this boat caught X and this boat caught Z, then they take that information and extrapolate it as a fisheries landing information and effort data for Pinellas County.

And that information can be skewed sometimes by people, uh, biasing, the data whereas if I'm standing on a ramp and I'm just picking off shore boats, it's going to look like we have this huge catch. Fisheries are going to close and it's going to lead to over fishing and then extremely short in seasons. It's just the unfortunate part is it takes a lot of money to manage our fishery and a lot of people and boots on the grounds and it costs a lot of money to pay someone to do these surveys. And the recreational industry as a whole in Florida is enormous. There is a million, a million registered voters in Pinellas County. And every each one of those boats.

In Pinellas County. Yeah. And each one of those boats will go out there and kill a bunch of fish and come back to a private dock. And it doesn't give anybody a chance to survey that boat. The only surveys that are being done are at public areas, like a public boat ramp. So how many boats go out and go fill a cooler and come back to a private dock and never get surveyed or checked? and that's the problem in the recreational industry is there's so many of them they don't know how many people are fishing and they don't know what they're catching

wouldn't that happen with commercial too are there any commercial boats they go to docks that aren't public absolutely not you have to land at what about salt rock you have to be an improved landing site yeah and they have to give three hours notice when they're coming back to that dock wow yeah so there's no way for a commercial fisherman to cheat the system because their vessels are monitored. Every action or movement of that vessel is monitored, they have to tell them when they're coming back, where they're coming back to,

and it has to be an approved accessible site for a fisheries enforcement officer to come inspect the catch. And now in the for-hire recreational industry, the 1,237 charter boats and party boats in the Gulf are going to have to do the same thing. Hail out, hail in, and record every fish that's caught, every fish that's released. So that accountability is now moving into the recreational sector.

And it's going in line with what they did in the commercial sector. IFQs or individual fishing quota is what's called an allocation-based management. So they take the entire Gulf of Mexico's fish and the quota that you're allowed to catch and they split it up and award it to different individuals. Like say, Danny, you've been fishing for 10 years, you've been catching 5,000 pounds of fish a year. They're going to give you 5,000 pounds of fish. And those are your fish that you can land at any point. Even if he doesn't go out and catch them?

No, that those, and that's how the IFQ system started, as they looked at landing history. How do they determine what if I caught 10,000 pounds of fish? Like, what is that based on? Trip tickets. Trip tickets. From a certain amount of time? Yeah, what you came in. I'm not 100% sure how much time.

they used for the IFQ sector, but they basically took the commercial quota and split it up based on landing's history and awarded it to different individuals. Because that's the one thing that was the most confusing to me when we were making deck hands, was trying to explain that. And I had a lot of different people explain it to me pretty well.

I think the best was Ozzy, the guy that runs Savon Seafood. Yeah. And that's what it came down to in the commercial fleet. You had these derby seasons because there was only a certain amount of quota, and these guys were running out there and trying to fish hard and catch that quota before it closed.

And it was unsafe. There was a lot of problems with safety at sea. There was a lot of problems with managing that fishery. Pull up like their Facebook or Instagram or something. Sorry, go ahead. No worries. It's at the bottom of their website, all the different links. You got some videos or something.

Yeah, there you go. bottom left Facebook yeah we got a bunch of videos but yeah I mean like Shane like the first like the first thing that we we first time we ever met up when interviewed Shane he was

the one thing that him and a lot of the other guys were extremely angry about was IFQs and it seemed like they didn't really understand it either it's kind of just like they felt like people were taking their money they're getting fucked over because they're the ones that are

busting their asses breaking their hands and there's people somewhere sitting on a couch somewhere in New Jersey or Montana that is taking a cut of their checks. Yeah, and that's ultimately what happened. I mean, again, you can love it or hate it. The IFQ system has consolidated the fishery, made it more accountable, and has allowed for more safety at sea. So it's done some really good things, but at the same time, it's put a lot of people out of business. because when they did that initial distribution of quota, there was a lot of guys that didn't get enough quota to survive.

And a lot of the commercial fishermen took a 60% hit, 70% hit. Because if you were catching 20,000 pounds of fish, you didn't get 20,000 pounds in the initial distribution. You got like 60% of that, 40,000 pounds. And what happens is you're able to spread that out through the whole year. And a lot of people didn't get enough to survive. so intelligent guys that were prepared were able to go out there and purchase up other quota. So say you only got a thousand pounds of fish, you can't make a living on that,

so you sell your quota to someone else. And guys went out and bought up all this allocation. Like that guy, buddy Gwinden in Texas with that show that Big Fish, Texas, he owns all that red snapper. That's what he did. He went out and bought a whole bunch of allocation. Jason Delacruz here in Madeira Beach, he mortgaged his house, sold that, everything and went out and bought as much allocation as he could.

Really? Yeah, these guys. Right when it happened? Yeah, these guys literally bet their lives and bet their livelihoods and bet their families on the fact that they need to try to grab as much as they can. So those are the guys that are at home sitting on the couch. And a lot of them don't. Most of them fish.

Jason fishes every day almost. But he's out there all the time fishing. These are not bad guys. But they do own a lot of allocation. And they do have the ability to say, well, you want to go out and catch right grouper, I'll lease you some of my quota. But they get a cut of that because they get the lease price. So, for example. Because this guy's going to sell it anyways.

That guy should, he should get his cut if he's going to lease some of his shares. So basically you have an allocation and then you have shares. So based on the total allowable catch or the ultimate quota for the year, you have an allocation. Your allocation is a percentage of the fishery. So say you have five, let's make it easy on my money. myself. Say you have a 10%... Maybe it is I'm too.

My brain's running slow. Say you have a 10% allocation. So that's the percentage of the fishery. They come out and they say, all right, next year the total allowable catch is 100 pounds.

And that means you get... The whole Gulf of Mexico? Yeah. Okay. So that means you get 10 pounds to catch through the year. So your shares are then those pounds.

So you can go out and lease a pound of fish. Now, granted, that was a small example to keep it easy, but they can have a lot of pounds. to lease out and catch themselves.

So some guys will keep all their allocation for their own fish house. Like Jason has a big fish house. So he has a couple boats of his own that go out there and fish. And he puts captains and crew together and they go out there and prosecute the fishery and binging in. He himself has a commercial fishing boat where he goes out there and goes diving. And they do well for themselves. It's a business. But it's just like anything else.

You have a, it's like leasing a car. Hey, you can go out and use. this car to drive over but you're going to have to pay me for each mile you drive it's the same idea um like red snapper i think i want to say is like 450 a pound is what they can sell it to a seafood house for and the lease price is like two 225 a pound so it's almost 50% yeah and that's the problem right now with reg grouper is and that's why Shane lee and in space are so upset it's not the it's not the least price that's killing them what's killing them is the different fishery aspects right Right now, Bobby Spath, for example, he told me he would give me red grouper quota, give it to me because he can't sell it because it's too hard for them to catch.

A commercial fisherman has to be able to go out there and catch enough fish on that trip to cover expenses. Pay their deck hands, pay the fuel bill, pay the grocery bill, cover the cost and wear and tear on the boat. And then anything extra of that is split between the captain crew and the boat. When Red Gruper is selling for $2 a pound and you have to go out there and lease it for $25, 30, why would you go catch a fish for $2 a pound? You're going to go after that Red Snapper. That's worth $4 a pound. Are you going to go fish another fishery that you can get more money for at the fish house?

And here in our area, we're mainly known for our Red Gruper and Gag Gruper fishery. And that's what our commercial fishermen live off of. So Shane Lee and Space Lee being on a Grupper boat, they're not able to cash Gruber and make money with Gruper because the price is so low at the fish house. So it's not so much the IFQ system that's hurting them as it is just the price at the fish house of certain species that are popular in our area. There's not a lot of Red Grouper or Red Snapper allocation out there to be leased. And because of its popularity, the price of the lease is higher. Whereas Red Gruper, the price of the lease is super low because you can't make no money off. them because the price of the fish house is so low.

So it's a model to stock market because it's hard to catch right now. The commercial fishermen are the ones standing at the council begging them to shut it down and cut quotas. The commercial fishermen are the ones doing it. And there's a problem in our red grouper fishery right now. And we're not seen as many as we should, whether that's a red tide issue or an expansion of the red grouper fishery right now. snapper biomass or one of the many other issues in our fishery accounting for it or a little bit

of everything but we're not seeing the red grouper that we saw in 2009 and is that recent with grouper with red grouper yes i mean every fish every uh fishery is cyclical you'll you'll have these up and downs where you see a huge abundance of the biomass and then all of a sudden you have a uh a red tide event and heavy fishing and all of a sudden there's not as many fish i'll out there and the stock assessments really try to keep a handle on that, whereas what we see on the water isn't always what we see at the council. For example, with Red Snapper, they're deemed overfished, but there's millions of Red Snapper out there everywhere. That overfish designation is because of MSA or Magnus and Stevens, and that's what manages our fishery, this law that the

Congress made up and or that the Senate made up and it's it's unfortunate but through the years it's been reauthorized or changed twice in 1996 and again in 2007 and that 2007 authorization had a lot of driving force from the environmental groups and they made it mandatory to rebuild fisheries and any fishery deemed overfish has to go under a mandatory rebuilding plan and it created these buffers like ACLs. So you have an overfishing limit. A stock assessment is done and they have an overfishing limit. That overfishing limit is called an OFL. And let's say they determine through the stock assessment that you can fish to this limit, anything higher than that, you're going to be overfishing. Anything under that, your goal and the fishery can sustain itself. So that overfishing limit

is set at like, say, 100 pounds. Again, easy example. Well, then the science and statistical committee will evaluate that and look at the scientific uncertainty in the stock assessment and then they'll set a buffer to the ABC or allowable biological catch limit. And that buffer is typically anywhere from 5 to 20%. So now you went down from 100 pounds due to this buffer for the ABC. You're at 75 pounds. Well, then the council will look at that ABC and then they have to set an ACL, which was mandatory in the 2007 reauthorization. That an ACL or allowable catch limit is buffered down from the ABC to account for management uncertainty. How fast are they going to be able to account for those landings? And then in things like the Red Snapper fishery where we have this huge catch and this derby fishery,

there's an allowable catch target, which is another buffer that is set for management uncertainty again. So you can have 100 pounds of fish in the OFL. That's what you can catch but all these buffers once it's said and done you could be down to 50 pounds so that's the problem and then when you exceed that 50 pounds and you land more than that you're considered overfishing and when you overfish a bunch of times then you can be considered overfished mandatory rebuilding plan and that 100 pounds that got turned to 50 pounds under a rebuilding plan gets turned to 20 pounds and you're required by federal law to stay in that rebuilding plan until the stock is rebuilt, which takes 20, 30 years. So right now, Red Snapper is in a rebuilding plan, and there's Red Snapper

everywhere. And everybody agrees that Red Snapper fishing, the fishery is healthy, and there's tons of Red Snapper out there. But their hands are tied because of that rebuilding plan. And luckily, they just remove that overfish designation. But that's the problem, is all these buffers and the inability for fisheries managers to react quickly to trends that fishermen see on the water because they're bound by science-based management. They have to do the science and they have to believe the science. And we have one science center for three councils. So there's eight fishery management councils across the United States.

You have one up in New England. You have the Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico. South Pacific, mid-Pacific, North Pacific, and then Hawaiian Islands and Guam and all that shit. So you have all these different councils, and I think I was right. I know the Gulf, South Atlantic, and Caribbean well.

The other ones, I don't know. But you have these eight councils. And like, for example, in the Pacific, they'll have three science centers for one council, whereas in our area, the Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Miami provides stock assessment analysis for the South Atlantic Council,

Caribbean Council and the Gulf of Mexico. And they handle highly migratory sharks and coastal pelagics. So you have five different people saying, we need stock assessments on X, Y, and Z to one place. And the huge stress that it puts on that science center, we have stock assessments. For example, right now we're using a Reg Gruper stock assessment, and they're trying to assess the stock of Red Gruper.

And they're using data, the terminal year of the assessment. assessment is 2017. We're about to go into 2019 and they're trying to assess the fishery based on 2017 and earlier data. And then once the stock assessment is done in mid-2019, it's going to take another year, a year and a half for the council to agree on management decisions. So a lot of times when you have a management decision made, it's based on data that's already three years old. Yeah. And that slow reaction to our trends is a big problem that they're trying to adjust through ecosystem-based management and adjusting the stock assessment process to try to make it a little bit more streamlined. The fishing industry seems extremely complicated to me.

Yeah. It does. I mean, what do you think it was like before it got so complicated? Well, do you think it's better or, I mean, you know, a lot of people say the good old days and stuff. Yeah. And the good old days were great. It seems extremely crazy now to just catch fish. The good old days were great.

I mean, we were part of the problem. We helped over, we kill a lot of fish, a lot of fish. Shane's wanted in four different states for killing fish. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my grandfather has killed more fish than probably most people in the U.S. And, I mean, we had trips where you go out there and limit out, bring the boat home, unload the fish, go out there and limit out again, come bring the boat home. One 30 or it was a 32 hour trip when my grandfather was alive went out limited out came back and offloaded twice and went back out So literally did three trips and one just because the fishing was so hot right and we had trips where we loaded the

The four fish boxes on the boat loaded the bathrooms packed the shower and then started packing galley Coolers full of fish because there were we were running out of room and back in the day we had four fish boxes on that boat nowadays we have two fish boxes because the fishing isn't the same, and there's so many regulations, a lot of fish you have to toss back. So back in the day, you had commercial fishing. Before the late 80s, you were allowed to sell recreationally caught fish. So we had, back in the 60s and 70s when we ran this trip,

those trips, you'd have 20 or 30 or 40 guys that would go every trip, every week, 365 days a year. They'd come in and sell their fish. and they subsidize their habit and subsidize their hobby. And they also made a little bit of money. So you can retire and fish every day for the rest of your life and you'd make money doing it. And that was if you were good. And they made that illegal in the 80s, mid to late 80s.

And they really worked hard to root it out. We really work hard to try to uphold that because we can lose our boat. We can lose our federal fishing permit, which allows us access to do what we do. and they'll buy you a lot of money. And they did sting operations, and they really worked hard to root all that stuff out. So it's definitely been interesting to watch evolution, even in my business, because, again, when I wasn't alive,

my grandfather was starting the company, they would kill everything indiscriminately. They killed tarpun. They killed manatees. We had dolphins. Jesus. We had dolphins caged up. We did dolphin shows.

We taught them out to do tricks. Purpose pub used to have a dolphin in there. Oh, yeah. A long time ago. A dolphin and a fish tank in a bar. Yeah. In the bar. And then we got to the point where we started realizing, all right, we can't kill these things.

We can't kill this as much. But it was still rampant. I mean, we overfished Red Snapper to the point of almost extinction in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, they have come back exponentially, but we have to adjust to that. And we have to conserve our fishery. And I want my grandson to be able to say, well, my father, had the sustainable fishery it didn't go from killing everything to all right now we have nothing to kill uh and in my grandfather's lifetime it it came like that i mean black sea bass red snapper

gag grouper at one point a lot of these goliath grouper there was trips where we'd come back with boatloads of jewfish or glyop grouper and uh nowadays you can't even take him out of the water but they're going to change that right because they're really overpopulated i heard that that's a A whole nother podcast, but it's the unfortunate part about Glythe grouper is, relates to stock assessments because they can't do an accurate stock assessment without fisheries independent data without a life cycle, without age data. And you can't get age data from a fish without killing it. They have to take the odor lift, which is the earbone out. So they cut the head open, dig in between the eyes, get this little tiny on a Goliath grouper. these 800 pound fish, this thing is smaller than the head of a pencil.

And then they take it and they saw it in cross sections and put it under a microscope. And it's like the rings of a tree. And you can count the rings and you get the age of the fish. Wow. Like down within a year plus or minus, like very accurately. How long do those fish live normally? Off the top of my head, I don't know. But I would estimate about, excuse me, about 15 to 20 years.

I mean, they're pretty old fish, a big 800, 900-900-pound. They're everywhere. Every time I've ever dove in the past five years, there's been literally hundreds of Jewfish. Yeah. There's Goliath Grupper everywhere, and it's becoming a huge problem because they eat everything. And I mean, an 800, 900 pound fish has to eat a lot of food to stay. That's how big they are?

Yeah. I've personally caught them in the 600, 700, 800 pound range. They get to the size of like a Volkswagen. Bigger. Bigger. Yeah. I had a Goliath grouper. nearly try to swallow me.

I was spearfishing and I had a fish on my belt. And this Goliath grouper came up and swallowed the fish. And as he did it, swallowed my flipper and was coming up my leg. And I can't say that on a podcast, but I had to take emergency action to make sure that I wasn't drowned because I wasn't on scuba. I was free diving. Of course, you have to kill the fish. You were the fish, right?

Yeah. And it wasn't going to be me. It wasn't going to be me. And I mean, these things, there's so many. countless videos on YouTube of spearfishmen down there fishing and these huge fish come out of nowhere and just attack them to steal that fish. And the problem is with this fish, they were deemed almost near extinction. And it's even above and beyond overfished.

And you have a bunch of environmental groups that don't want to see them open for harvest. And then also, if it was just environmental groups, diving, divers, sport, fishermen, recreational, commercial, we could all work together and get that fishery open, most likely. But the problem is the diving industry loves Glyde Grupper. Because like you said before, every dive you go on, there's a bunch of the Glyde grouper. So if I'm a diving boat and I want to sell dive trips to go look at 2030, 800 pound fish is an easy dive for me. Yeah. And it's a great dive for you.

So the diving industry is hugely in opposition of opening Glyve Gruber. Right. And then you don't have a stock assessment because. you have to have dead fish to do accurate science. So the first step that we need to do, and hopefully the FWC will do in the near future, is they need to open a scientific quota or scientific allowable catch. So the scientists can go out there, kill these fish,

bring them home, take them to the Florida Wildlife Research Institute, and do the information and data collection that they need to create a fisheries independent stock assessment. And then we open a... a lottery system like alligators say all right there's going to be 400 goliath grouper across the state of florida allowed to be killed yeah here's the tags enter your name here if you win the lottery you get a tag and then that based with mandatory reporting so you catch that goliath grouper you have to call the fwc and report your catch tell them where you're going to be so they can send a

scientist out so now you have fisheries independent and fisheries dependent data and after a year or two of that they'd be able to do an accurate stock assessment, tell us how many fish there are, and I would guarantee you there would be seriously relaxed regulation on them after they accomplish that. But the only way to do that is with FWC and everybody working together. That's the biggest problem in our fishery is it really upsets me when a commercial guy is saying, well, the recreational guys are going over their quota. That's the problem. And the recreational guys sitting over here saying, well, that commercial guy is catching all those fish and killing everything. and that's the problem for the season. And you have all this finger pointing and blame.

And the only way that we're going to succeed at bettering our fisheries management is by working together and unining. A commercial fisherman, a four-hire recreational and a private recreational fishermen have to sit at a table like this and try to reach agreements and then approach the fisheries management council and say, this is what we want. And as a unified voice, it would pass with flying color. but the problem is there's no unified voice. And that is my goal is to provide an open access public fishery

where fishing sectors can unite and agree upon issues and hopefully all be able to prosecute our fisheries in the best way that each sector needs to while having the access to do so. And at first and most importantly, preserving that fishery. That's fine. I just remembered who was it? from Savon

was telling me he had a website He was bragging He's like, I have this really badass website Everyone goes to it every day It has all the data About the IFQs on there And he's like, I got some hot chicks You can look at on bikinis

They're hanging out in the corner of the website What? Is that similar to kind of what you're talking? Is he trying to do the same thing? I mean, what is his website? What's his website called? I know there's boats and quota That's a real

That's what it was called boats and quota yeah and that's because my friend Kyle was telling me about that too he goes on there all the time yeah and Kyle Chevis yeah and Kyle Chevis and Cody Chevis go there to get quota because that's a place that these quota there yeah that's the idea is okay you buy and sell boats oh hell yeah but this is purely for uh see if you scroll the bottom you can see the association the golf fishermen's association okay this is strictly commercial based because that yes this is all about allocation and quota. This is how you can lease quota, like see there the prices. So this is all about leasing quota. So this is not what I was just talking about, but this is great for the commercial

fishery because it allows them to prosecute their fishery more. Because if you own a commercial boat and you want to go out fishing and you don't have someone to lease you quota, you can go on this website and find a place to lease you quota. It's like a marketplace. It's a Walmart of quota. So they own the quota. They do not own the quota. They allow a place. It's like middlemen. It's like a trade list or an eBay for quota.

I got you. Okay. Yeah. What I have is I have a... Interesting. A Facebook group called Fisherman United, and that's where I try to relay some information. But it's really, really frustrating because anything I post turns into a he said, she said,

or the commercial fisherman's fault. And then the commercial guys start arguing with the recreational guys. Yeah. It seems so divided. Everyone like this. And everyone points their fingers at the other person. Completely opposite side of the conversation. And it seems like there's no one in the middle that, you know what I mean?

Yeah. And a lot of people are in it for very selfish reasons. And a lot of people are there to better their business, better their access, and they don't give a fuck about anybody else. And that's not how we reach an agreement. That's not how we work together. That's not how we better our fishery. So that is my goal.

But I'm still new to this. I started going to the Gulf. council meetings two years ago i'm still a young guy and uh you seem like you know everything about the fishing industry you've rattled off more than i've ever heard about fishing in my life i haven't even started i can tell so what was it like growing up a little bit then to slow it down and like being a part of the hubbard's marina or like as a kid and when did you get into the business and all that yeah i mean uh i bought my first boat when i uh just about after i turned nine years old and you bought your first boat. Yeah. It took me two years. I asked, I'm, I have three sisters. I'm the only boy in the

family and my sisters and myself were kind of raised differently in my opinion. But I asked my dad when I said, hey, can I get a boat? I want to get a boat. And he's like, well, you can get a fucking job. Then you can get a boat. And I started working. Started what? Fishing? No, I started first doing lawn mowing. Okay. And then I would prairie dog, my sister's babysitting gigs when they were busy. I would jump in there. And I did whatever I could to make a buck.

Yeah. I caught and sold bait on the dock. I did laundry from my mom. I did babysitting. I mowed lawns, whatever it took to make a dollar. And I bought my first boat when I turned nine for $980. And how big was it? It was a 17-foot Carolina skiff with a Nissan to hot to 40-horse motor that broke down every time I went.

Every time. Every time. You could count on it for one thing, and that was getting you stranded. And it was a cool way to... First, it taught me the value of a dollar and the work ethic. And you don't appreciate something as much, in my opinion, if someone just buys it for you. If you go out there and work your ass off and earn it, it's very different. Yeah.

It was really cool for me looking back. When I was there, I hated my dad for making me go out and work and do all this stuff. But, I mean, looking back, it taught me a lot about life. And it was cool. And I used that boat for a lot of crazy shenanigans. You still have it? I just sold it about two years ago. Okay.

But, yeah, I didn't want to sell it. But I used it mostly to keep making money. I used it to catch bait and sell bait. I got a commercial fishing license for saltwater products, which was the ability to catch pinfish and sell them. At what age? At nine years old you did that. Yeah.

That's awesome. So it was really cool to be able to go out there after school and make a buck on my boat. And I really was kind of introverted in that aspect because I was just only interested in going out in the boat. And then I got a little older and kind of got a little bit out of the industry, out of the business, and started doing things kids do and playing video games and acting crazy. And through high school, wasn't as involved, but then towards the end of high school, started getting back into it and working on the boats in summer and just addicted to fishing.

I have been since I was a kid. and in college or I guess back up to mid high school I started getting back into the fishery I said that wrong I started getting back into the fishery in like ninth grade like uh end of middle school and I I worked full time nearly at the marina after school and on the weekends and on the summer and then when I turned 16 my dad fired me and it was for nothing nothing other than he wanted me to go work for someone else and see what it was like to work for someone else because when he was growing up him and his family they just expected to work in the family business and they that was their thing and they they did so a lot of he watched a lot of

people like that yeah he watched his family's his brother and sister's mistakes and he felt that some of his family members worked in the family business just for the validation from their father and he didn't want to do that he wanted to make sure that I knew what it was like to work for someone else learn what a good manager looks like and a bad manager looks like and and learn my own life experiences and it was really cool again hated him at the time for it but looking back it was a very intelligent wise thing to do and it enabled me to go different places and do a different thing and see if that's what I wanted to do because I went to school in Orlando purely for the fact that I wanted to get away from the water and see what it was like.

Somewhere else right. Yeah, like two weeks into school, I started bass fishing for the first time because I couldn't sit in Orlando and not fish. Yeah. So after three years of school, I was majoring in business management with a minor in hospitality management with the mindset of I'm going to go to school for four years and I'm going to come back and tackle this business stuff. And my plan was to come back from school, be a deckhand,

become a workup to be in a coming a captain and then step into the office role and learn the office part of the business but uh things take turns you know yeah in life you can't make plans and uh i ended up getting in my senior year of college i was a bouncer in college uh so i spent a lot of time at the bar and uh chasing girls and stuff ended up to meet my wife uh at a bar she was drinking underage and caught her drinking underage and told her i wouldn't kick her out she gave me her number and there you go seven years later we're married oh that's awesome and uh it just it got to a point where i i wasn't focused on school and i wanted to get home and uh ended up finishing with an aa and a minor in hospitality management but didn't finish my b a was like

eight credit shy yeah and uh came home did what i wanted to do like i said i wanted to become a deck can then a captain then learn the office side of things but I was super into weightlifting and being a crazy kid and I ended up hurt my back really bad doing something stupid on the boat so after like three years of work or two years of working full time as a deck hand after college this injury occurred and it pretty much sideline me so it took me off the boat had to go through serious back surgery once recovering from that I couldn't go do what I wanted to do and be a deckhand and I couldn't be on a boat. So I started working in the office as a reservationist, just answering phones and doing grunt work. And then I became a manager, and then I slowly became the general

manager, and then I slowly became the vice president. And now I'm the vice president, co-owner of the company, and pretty much handle operations completely, kicked my dad out of the office. And I enjoy it. And I ended up being pretty good at it. And, um... Yeah, you seem like you're very good at it from what I could see so far. And it's, I really enjoy my grandfather everybody always says how cool the guy he was and how he was so nice and outgoing and talkative and uh i really enjoy talking to people you you get someone new from out of town talk to them get them hooked up what to do for their vacation and and see that progression of them coming into town knowing nothing now they know how to fish they're hooked on fishing and

they want to come back next year and fish with us at hubbard's marina and then i get a lot of enjoyment out of that. And so now, after moving into the office, originally when my back injury occurred, I was slow to get back on the boats. But after two and a half years or so, I was finally back to being healthy. And I started working on the boats again and ended up getting my captain's license when I was 22. You have to be 21 to get that license. And I waited until I was 22 and went out and got the license and started running boats when I was about 23. So it's a very. So it's a lot of my way. been about five years or so and uh it's it's been fun it's a lot of fun to work in the office and talk to people and get people on the boat and that's a lot of fun to take them out in the boat too and

uh watch that full range uh full progression but nowadays i struggle just to be able to uh have time to breathe uh yeah but it's a very in my opinion a great blessing to be as busy as i am and uh balancing my home life with my wife and uh hopefully kids in the future and balancing my life at work, balancing operations, and then trying to get out in the boat. And then also now I travel with the Gulf Council. I go to all council meetings. So that's five week-long meetings every year at five different Gulf states. So every two to three months, I'm gone for a whole week in another state at these meetings.

And then a lot of times they'll have other meetings like stock assessment meetings, AP meetings and all these other meetings. and all these other meetings that I have to attend. So I'm at these meetings 30, 40, 50 days a year while trying to manage my office and business. It's been a challenge, but it's something I love to do, and I'm passionate about fishing. I'm passionate about fisheries management and fishery preservation and also getting people hooked on fishing.

That's cool. I'm blessed to do what I love. You do what you love, and you'll never going to work a day in your life. And sometimes it feels like work, occasionally, but most of the time it's what I love. Are your siblings as involved as you are, your sisters in the business and everything? I mean, up until two years ago, no, not at all. But they all have their own thing, you know.

One sister started their own business and was an entrepreneur while traveling the world. One sister was in Washington, D.C., making waves, rubbing shoulders with congressmen and everybody, you know. and was in a really powerful position as a fundraiser. And now she came back and she's working with us. She helped my dad work with city management to get waterborne transportation in our area, a reality. And that was pretty cool to see that. And it's great to work with family. Yeah.

Besides my family, my direct family, my cousin is the captain on one of the boats. my other cousin works at our boat building operation and helps us build boats. And then I have other cousins that work in our family's restaurant. And it's nice to be able to work with family. It's really, really tough sometimes. Yeah, it's rewarding. You were saying that you go to multiple different states in the Gulf, surrounding the Gulf to deal with, like, conserving the fisheries

and maintaining the fisheries and stuff. Dean was telling me he was when I years ago when I filmed that a couple years ago when I filmed that he was showing me pictures and showing me an article about how he had traveled to Washington DC multiple times I don't know if that was it had anything to do with the fisheries or if that was specifically about quotas and like the I was probably for the IFQ system because the IQ system was driven and funded by the environmental defense fund an NGO environmental NGO and they're idea behind it was consolidation and more accountability. So anything like that, the environmental groups are going to get behind. So that EDF, Pew, a bunch of these environmental groups, helped fund these fishermen and create this idea of this program. And then they funded those fishermen to go lobby for this program.

So a lot of guys spent a lot of time lobbying congressmen, senators, and everybody to try to accept the system. And most people involved in the process were on board for IFQs. Some had different ways of going about it. I'm not a commercial fisherman, and I'm speaking on this based on things that I've talked to other commercial fishermen about. But you can't argue with the result of accountability, safety at sea, and consolidation. It did what it's supposed to do. Now that consolidation is terrible for the people that got consolidated.

because again we went from 500 boats in Madeira Beach to 50 boats yeah and that is a lot of lost livelihoods a lot of lost businesses a lot of lost people right and uh you take a guy like Shane lee and take away his job what's going to happen to him nothing good yeah because they i mean they they themselves say that you can't do anything else you can't get in a job anywhere else you can be a deckhand yeah i mean look look at that i mean you can't go get a job at kinkos i mean you know You can't go get a job at McDonald's. Right. Go be a deckhand.

Yeah. So, I mean, it really has unfortunately caught a lot of people up in that system. Because even both of them aren't even fishing now. Deck hands like that weren't at these council meetings. They didn't know where it was coming. It was one day a light switch got turned on and their whole life got turned upside down. So it... Do you think that's fair for them?

Or is it just kind of... It is what it is. I can't speak to that, you know? I mean, I don't think it was fair. Fairness is all in your perception. Right. That question really has to do with your viewpoint and what your point of view is. I mean, was it fair to the environmental groups?

Yeah, I mean, they got their consolidation, accountability, and everything worked out. Was it fair to the people who were at that meeting that knew? Oh, shit. I gotta go save a bunch of money and sell my house and leverage everything and gamble my whole life on getting a bunch of allocation, worked out for them. But it could have gone the other way, too. And it's just all in your perception. I mean, if you're motivated involved,

you can use it selfishly, unfortunately. But I try to really share what happens. Like, for example, we have this electronic reporting thing that I'm telling you about earlier and how next year I have to have a vessel monitoring system. And I worked with an environmental group to hold a meeting here to educate my fellow charter boat and party boat guys. Because right now there's a program where you can sign up and become a volunteer and get a free $3,000 unit. You have to get off your ass, show up to a meeting, learn what it's about, and get that $3,000 unit.

Or you can wait until next year. Don't want to do that. They'll complain. Oh, I didn't get a fucking free unit. They'll wait until next year and then they'll bitch that they have to spend. Yeah. Smoke too much weed, Shane. You didn't show up.

Yeah. I got to pay three grand. Stop pitching. I'm scared to even go out and fish in the backyard now. After I'll just talk about all that, I'm not even catching nothing no more. This is state management. So state waters, and that's another confusing thing, is everything we're talking about applies to federal fishing. So federal fishing starts at nine miles.

If you're fishing inside of the miles, you're fishing inside. Oh, yeah, I don't even make it past the sandbar. Yeah. I've never even been out on a boat like that at all. Oh, we can change. Or diving or anything. I don't know. Sounds crazy.

You told me almost got eaten by a six. hundred pound fish. I'm pretty good, bro. Well, that's spear fishing. It's a little different. It is crazy that both Shane and space aren't fishing anymore. Yeah. And Shane is doing some crazy thing where he was showing his pictures.

He's doing red tide clean up. He drives on these, like, these boats that have ATVs on them, and these boats pull up on the beach, and they drive the ATVs off the boat, docked onto the sand, and they drive up and down, like, mile long strips of the beach and pick up dead fish. He said, that's all he does. He says he makes a ton of money doing it. Yeah. Right now. Let us talk about that on the podcast, by the way. I don't know why.

He didn't want, I don't know. Well, they don't want people to know about it because right now you can, the red tide clean up, they're just pouring money into cleaning up red tide, which is interesting and it's really cool because they haven't done that in the past. There's a lot of money going into it. You can make $17 a day as a complete, you can be a triple felon, three-time loser, and you can go out and get a job making $17 an hour, not a day, I apologize. Yeah, I was going to say that was cheap.

$17 an hour. And then if you're a deckhand on a. boat you can get $20 an hour and then if you're a captain on the boat you can get $30 an hour plus $250 a day for your boat to clean up to clean up so there's a lot of guys that using their charter boats quit charter fishing to do red time and if you do 20 250 an hour if you make $30 an hour work at the 12 hour day and you get $250 that's a big paycheck yeah yeah and uh I mean if you're uh a felon that's flipping burgers at McDonald's or you can't get a job anywhere else like space and Shane

going and make $17 an hour to walk the beach and pick up dead fish is a killing. And you do that for 12 hours a day and they've been doing it for almost two months. So, I mean, they're just bank rolling. And the red tide cleanup has been very lucrative for the people involved in it, but there's only a very small minority involved.

And it was very hush, hush. Yeah, he was like they wouldn't let him talk about the names of the companies. And like they don't want to be advertised who they're working for. Because it's so much money involved. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you don't show up for work and there's a line out the door of people waiting for work, you're going to lose your job if you don't show up. Yeah.

But if no one knows about it, no one knows how to get involved in it, then you have a little bit of job security. And right now they are, when it first happened, they hired a bunch of people. and then they were firing people who weren't working as hard and hiring new people because there were so many people waiting in line. But nowadays, there's not as many people waiting in line so you can relax and buck off. You don't have to work as hard, and you're not going to get fired.

So they don't want to advertise it for that reason, in my opinion. And it seems like they're dumping a ton of money into a band-aid, right? I mean, they're dumping a ton of money into picking up fish and throwing them in a dumpster. I mean, you think that they could put their money somewhere else to try to stop it at the source, maybe. Yeah, red tide has been around since forever. The 1500s.

There's actually documented from back in the Spanish days where the Gulf was red and the Gulf was dead. There's nothing in the Gulf. That was like legit thing from like Columbus era. And the 60s, the 70s, we had huge red tides. But long story short, it's always around. I was talking to a Pinellas County red tide expert who's been doing red tide sampling in Pinellas County three times a week, 365 days a year for the last 15 years and he's never taken a sample that didn't have a red tide organism count to it right so it's always here but when you have nutrients present and you have a mature

concentrated bloom you have fish kills and so right now we have a lot of nutrients in the water from all the municipalities growing out of control and all this new concrete and all these toilets that our sewer systems can't overflow like st p. p. has a sewage overflow like every month. And so all that sewage with all this red tide and all this hot water that's blooming these concentrated blooms of mature cells, it's like throwing lighter fluid on a fire and it just explodes. So as far as what your question was or your statement is putting a band-aid on it, well,

if you kill a million pounds of fish and you have that million pounds of fish sitting along the seashore in shallow hot water, that decomposing fish is a lot of nutrients. So the idea is you pick up all the dead fish in the water and take them out of the water. You're not only fixing the smell and helping to stem the hurt to the tourism industry, but you're also taking those nutrients out of the water and taking that decomposition and rotting fish out of the water. So that's the idea behind it, not so much a Band-Aid, but it's preventative. in a way if you look at it and kind of squint and turn your head but it's also a in my opinion a tourism thing

in Pinellas County where 100% tourism driven and right if you if you're surrounded on all three sides by rotting dead fish cartons you're not going to get tourists into the area so it's it's to help get the dead fish out of the water but it's also to help keep people on the beach I heard that it was the runoff from the pesticide like in the middle of Florida near like Okachobi and yeah I mean it didn't help I mean the this red tide started back in October 2017 behind Irma Irma had all that heavy rain and craziness down there

and this red tide occurred around south of Fort Myers north of Everglades City and it started in October 2017 and then we moved into spring water got hotter and then these discharges started happening, and as the water got hard, you could argue that the water just got warmer and it allowed the bloom to grow. But, I mean, if you have a smoldering,

you have a smoldering fire over here and you take a can of lighter fluid and dump it on it, it's going to explode. And that was the, in my opinion, uneducated fishermen, if you have this discharge of all this fresh water, because when you lower the salinity, algae can grow much better.

So just allowing fresh water into the Gulf is going to create more red tide and help a red tide that's already there grow bigger. Adding fresh water? Yes. When you lower the salinity plants can grow better. Algae can grow better. Red tines and algae. Okay. Then you take that fresh water that you're dumping into the Gulf of Mexico and you add a bunch of nutrients to it, whether that's phosphate or whatever other chemicals and runoff.

Sewage. All those septic lines along the water. McLoo, Sahatchee, and St. Lucchobe River and Okachobe Lake. All those sewage pipes, all the runoff from the sugar industry, there's multiple different causes. And then you take this blue-green algae that we cause, that's man-made, it's not naturally occurring like red tide. And that blue-green algae is a freshwater algae.

It does not occur in fresh salt water, and any salt water kills it. So it's just like the dead fish. You take all this algae, all these nutrients, all this fresh water, and you dump it. in a salt water. Well, the algae dies and rots, which causes more nutrients. Fresh water allows it to grow better. And then all the nutrients is just like lighter fluid. So this whole thing started in the springs, and it hit that mature, because again, remember, you need nutrient-rich water and you need mature cells. So you had these mature cells that had been around for four or five months and are old and badass. and then you pour a bunch of nutrients into the water and boom,

we have a huge, nasty red tide event that slowly moved north and got worse and worse and worse. Is this the worst you've seen it? No, 2005 was a much worse red tide. Yeah, I've seen it way worse too, just surfing around here, like being in the water. Like I remember in past years, like literally having my eyes burning so bad. And this year, I mean, I've been out in the water in the past three or four months and it has, at least in Pinellas County. It hasn't been that bad. And now you have to also take into account that this is the first time they've ever picked up dead fish.

In 2005, there was no red tide cleanup. So those fish died and just sat there and rotted. Now this year, they're picking them up. And what you said, as far as your eyes watering and stuff like that, that's a red tide symptom. That's the brevetoxin that's released when red tide gets really bad and passes away. And so that symptom is cured because we've had a lot of east wind. that east wind pushes all those brevetoxin off the coast and you don't have any effect. Okay.

So you could be surfing and you're not going to cough and gag and have itchy, watery eyes, you know. And then a lot of people equate dead fish with red tide. If I see a dead fish floating, oh, there's red tide there. Yeah. No. Not always. A dead fish, when a fish dies, it sinks. Yeah.

And then it rots, decomposes the gaseous build up and that fish makes it float. So when you see a fish floating, it was dead two days ago, three days ago. And most of the fish you see are rotten. So they've been dead for a week. So you see this huge bloom of dead fish and the news crews are out there saying, oh, red tide so bad.

Yeah. That's not fucking red tide. That's a symptom of red tide. Good news. They go scoop up every thing. They can find, bury themselves. I fucking watched them do it. In my concho's backyard?

I was... Yeah, in my concho. I was doing a red tide interview two or three times a day for like three weeks straight when this whole thing starts on the news and i watched the news crews zoom in on these on these four dead fish and i mean fox 13 when this thing first started there was just a few dead bait fish but we had a really strong new moon tide and that new moon tide was flushing all this water out of the pass so whenever you have these heavy tides yeah natural when there's no red tide around you have a big defined line the bay

water will be dark brown and black sometimes. Right. If we have heavy rains, the golf water will be greenish, blue, or sometimes just blue. So Fox 13 was flying over this brownish black water meeting this blue water. And on the edge of that, when there's no red tide, there's a bunch of debris and foam and sea life. And they were flying over this with a few dead fish gathered in. Obviously, there was some red tide fish kill, but it was very minor. And they're flying over it saying, look at the water that's pouring the toxic water, pouring into the

when in reality was completely natural with a very minor fish kill. That's ridiculous. And that unfortunate, sensational journalism really hurt us. And then it made national news. In national news, all they said is the coast of Florida. The West Coast of Florida is engulfed with toxic tide. And toxic tide this, toxic tide that.

And all they would ever say is the West Coast of Florida or the southwest coast of Florida. They never said, I mean, from March, until July. It was all south of Sarasota County. There was nothing in Anna Maria John's Pass in the Tri-County area. But we were ostracized and politicized into it, that we were wrapped into it. And then we started feeling the effects with lower head counts

and less people in the area. And then when it actually hit here, I mean, it was just like it was like heyday. I mean, people came from all over to take video and say how bad Pinellas County. was and then it just went to shit i mean september's a slow month but this past september was terrible yeah how much did it affect your business our business i mean our red tide has zero effect on our offshore fishing business even in 2005 when red tide was at the worst when it was 15 20 miles out

you've just fish beyond it and the fish are healthy you can still eat them even that even that though like a couple of my friends that um run commercially they commercially pull like pull and sell stone crabs my friend RJ. He's been getting more crabs than he's gotten in the past couple years. Red tide does a few. Bigger. Red tide does a few things.

And one thing that it does do is it increases the shrimp and crab harvest the following year. It actually increases the catchability. Because red tide is like a wall. And that wall was traveling Norse, pushing all these crabs in front of it. So now all these guys are fishing ahead of that wall of red tide and they're catching more crabs more quickly, more easily.

And the same thing in 2014, we had some of the best red grouper catches we've ever had because this epicenter of red grouper population was hit with red tide, and it pushed all those grouper into this structure. We were out there, I mean, some commercial guys were having nine, 10,000-pound trips where a normal trip is 2,000, 3,000 pounds.

So it was literally tripling the catch rate and catchability of these fish. So red tide, I mean, we saw in early September as the red tie kind of pushed into our area, we got a huge push of gag group where we're catching monster gags at a time of year where you don't see gags that big, that close to shore. It really makes fish move because most fish can move out of the way of it. I mean, I see it in John's Pass all the time.

Depending on the wind and the current, we'd have beautiful, clear, crystal clear water filled with fish. The next day would be blood red, everything's dead. Yeah. But towards the end of the red tide, once it had been around for one or two weeks, you didn't see fish kills. It's not because all the fish were dead because one day it'd be crystal clear fish are everywhere. The next day it's red and there's no dead fish because these fish are learning. And they adapt to their surroundings and they can go up into long bayou or cross bayou and way up there in the mouth of the rivers and these estuaries where red tide hasn't affected and can't affect because red tide is saltwater. estuaries are mainly fresh water the salinity is too low for red tide to affect it

well i've been eating a ton of fish and a ton of stone crabs locally lately does it taint the fish i'm still alive so yeah it does not attain the crabs or anything uh shellfish in red tide affected areas can cause uh serious injury or death to a human but you have to eat a lot of it and you have to have a bioaccumulation of brevetoxin a fish the muscle of the fish or the filet that we eat is 120,000% safe from the worst red tide affected areas. And that's straight from Florida Wildlife Research Institute. I mean, fish are safe and healthy to eat. But you're saying it's safe to go in the water.

Shellfish. Oysters, right? No. No? That's a crustacean. Okay. Shellfish, like oysters, clams, that kind of stuff. Yeah, if you went and ate an oyster out of the red tide affected area, well,

one probably wouldn't make you too sick, but you might throw up. But if you ate a couple dozen of them, you'd fucking die. Jeez. Because they're filter feeders, and they filter all that stuff out. And that's what they just suck in all that toxin. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

So, but after a few months, that bioaccumulation level has worked through their body, and they're safe to eat again. So it's not like it ruins the area and just make some unhealthy to eat in red tide-affected areas. Right. But the fish are healthy, the crabs are healthy. and we're catching plenty of fish. You just got to get out on the boat and try it and get past it. Because even our shortest, closest to shore trip is well past the red tide affected area.

Wow, man. I learned a lot today. That's crazy. Yeah, fishing is very intense industry, man. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot that goes into it, and it's as intense as you want it to be. You go out there and soak a line, drink a beer and have a good time, or you can get really involved. and stake your livelihood on the fishery,

and then you have to get a little bit more intense. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool to see you at 27, so knowledgeable about it, and so respectful of the industry and the fisheries and everything. Yeah. I appreciate you coming out. You're doing a lot, man. Yeah, and I appreciate it.

And taking care of the community and, you know, trying to educate as many people as you can. There's a lot of cool resources out there. I mean, myself, like I said, I only got into this two years ago, and I didn't really honestly know that much. I mean, I grew up listening to my dad, and my dad is a really good businessman, and he's really good at what he does. But when it comes to science and all that, not his strong suit.

But he joined organizations and listened to other people. And I grew up around some really sensationalized, really heavy-duty agenda-driven individuals. And I was kind of had a warped view of a very one-sided bias view of the fish. management system. So getting involved in the process and kind of learning all the players and their teams and their agendas was really eye-opening for me. And I really take advantage of the resources that are there. Like my favorite thing that I've done is the Marine Resource Education Program. It's a three-day workshop twice a year. So it's six days total. You go through that six-day work, those six days and you graduate that Marine Resource Education Program, you're going to have a,

and it's like going to fisheries management college in six days. It's really, really cool, and it was very eye-opening for me, and I've been blessed to do it twice. So going through that twice has really, really taught me a lot, and then just doing my research. So it's really cool, but I definitely appreciate the compliments, but it's all due to the people that I've been blessed to surround myself with. Cool.

Well, check out the Hubbard's Marina and the website and what, you've got a YouTube show. Yeah, yeah, we have a, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. I run all our social media and online marketing myself. So when you message our page, you message me directly. And we do a live fishing show every Sunday night at 8.30 p.m. for an hour. The first half is where we show photos and videos of what we've been doing that week. Second half is where we answer our guests and viewers questions live on air.

Is it on Facebook or YouTube? Facebook and YouTube. We streamed to seven channels at once. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's pretty cool. We can do the screen shares. It's gotten pretty advanced. Dang.

Yeah, and then I do a radio show every, two radio shows every weekend, and then I have a Bass Pro Seminar every week, or every month. Damn. Damn. You got it all going, man. You get you a healthy dose of Dylan. Yes, sir. Cool, man.

Well, thank you for coming on, Dylan. Yeah, man. We'll catch up with you soon. You got to remember the family motto, if you're too busy to go fishing, and you're just too darn busy. All right, man. We'll see if you can get me to catch a fish sometime, man. For sure.

No problem. All right, bro. Thank you.