8 minute read
From the Bridge
Hook, line and sinker
Sportfish boats are far less formal and much more interactive, aficionados say.
Triton met with captains via Zoom recently for a “From the Bridge” roundtable on what it’s like to run a sportfish boat. To encourage candid discussion, Triton’s policy is to not identify participating captains or their comments.
When you interview for jobs, is the owner more interested in your fishing ability or your ability to be a captain?
• For me, it was personality in the beginning, I was nothing to brag about at the start in my first chase boat, we were really just out there having a good time. And the same thing with the job
I’m at now – we just really got along. • It just depends on what the owner’s focus is. I worked for a very novice owner that was really into the fishing, and he was just very focused on my ability to fish.
I had a guy recently who — well, I started as a delivery guy, and then he asked me to stay and try to get him squared away. That turned into a month, and then a year — and it was my ability to manage the program.
Where I am now, they did not want a young, aggressive, tournament kind of sportfishing captain; to be able to be a comprehensive program manager was more important to them. The one before that, there was no emphasis on managing the program — it was a large sportfish and a large yacht, but it was all focused on fishing.
Are there some sportfish captains and crew who prefer tournament fishing, and some who don’t? Sort of like some yacht crew prefer charter yachts, and some don’t.
• Certainly, there’s a competitive side of it, and if you’re a competitive individual you’re going to plug into that. So, you’re doing something you love, you’re competing in it, and oh, by the way, you can win a significant chunk of change as well. That, to me, is what seems like drives a lot of sportfish captains toward tournaments: the ability to add to the bottom line at the end of the year.
• If we do tournaments, we’re into ones like the Jimmy Johnson where they’ve got a nice, good party. It’s not just about the fishing, it’s about getting together on the dock and just having a good time. Personally, for me, tournaments are a little more stressful — there’s a lot more going on. Especially the sailfish tournaments. Being out on a 74-foot boat, it’s not easy to catch the fastest fish in the ocean.
• I’ve never worked for a guy that is like this, but there are guys out there, if you don’t win a tournament, if you don’t win money in a 12-month period, you’re out.
Some owners are hugely competitive and are dying to get into it, and others are just there for a good time. If you’re there for a good time and everyone wants to have fun, that’s what fishing’s about, and it makes your life a lot easier. • Every fisherman’s been there, when you don’t catch anything, and there’s two types of boat. On one, you might have an owner and the crew pissed at you and everyone in a bad mood. On the other, you hear: “That’s fine. We had a great time. We’ll head in a little early and hit happy hour. It was good to get out there.”
Compare the life of a sportfish captain with the life of a regular yacht captain.
• The yacht side is more silver service.
There’s a lot more waiting, you’re dressed up a lot nicer, you get a shower before dinner. For me, it was rarely ever going to dinner with the owner, and you always had to look busy, shammy in hand, you know… maybe a radio. They want you there and they want you to just be waiting on them, which is fine.
Sportfishing, from my experience, it’s a 180, and I’ll never go back to yachts. You know, we get in and the boss will say,
“Oh, here man, have a beer” and, you know, “Relax, you did great today, let’s just rinse the boat.” You’re not always busy. We’ll all go out to eat. They kind of bring you in more as a family. They want you there. They want you around.
They’re not there to impress anyone, it’s just to have a good time. It’s just way more relaxed.
a hobby which is a fantasy, and you’re making that possible for them, and in that, it creates a very strong bond — a very intimate bond. It’s completely different. In the yacht world, you are a manager, an administrator, and a servant. That is their mansion on the water, and you are there to serve them, serve their needs with white-glove treatment. It’s the lifestyle basically that they’re looking for there, versus when you take somebody fishing and you catch fish —even if you go out and you don’t catch fish, but you had a great day. It’s a completely different mentality, a completely different mindset.
Say, in the chase boat program, something mechanical goes wrong and you’re struggling to figure it out. Would you ever use the engineer off the yacht to help you out?
• Absolutely. In my case, absolutely. Now,
I’m not going to tell you that they’re real good at it. LOL! Every time I ask them a question, they’ll ask for a manual. I’m like, ‘We don’t have any manuals – get in there and be an engineer and figure this out!’ The guys I work with now are awesome and they will do anything they can to help me out, but not all the time are my problems resolved. More times than not, it’s not resolved. They will get me to a point where I know I need to call in a subcontractor.
So, how does it work on the chase boat — does the chef on the yacht provide your meals, do they do your laundry, etc. Or are you completely independent?
• I’m completely independent, but I have those services available to me. It just becomes more trouble than it’s worth sometimes. For instance, this winter, we were in a bunch of different places.
Sometimes we’d be anchored out and
I’d be on the hip, where I could just jump on the boat and grab something to eat. Sometimes I’m anchored myself.
Well, then, I’ve got to have them come get me in a tender —that’s ridiculous!
Laundry-wise, I’d say bulk items, beach towels, and anything the guests were using we’d send back over there, but 90-95% of the time it was just easier to do personal stuff yourself. And I would say 75% of the time we would cook for ourselves.
• We weren’t very often docked near each other — it would be, like, a 15-minute walk. By the time we walk down there, eat, and come back, we could have cooked and been done and moved on to something else. When you have gotten up, gotten ready, gone fishing, come back, and now have to fix anything that broke, service anything that needs to be serviced, and get ready to fish the next day, that 30 minutes matters.
The people on the yacht were very, very helpful and very eager to do anything they could for us, but most of the time we’d eat just on board here, and I’d say 95% of the laundry that was done was done on this boat.
Do you think the sportfish captain network is tighter than the yacht captain network?
• The difference that I would see is when you’re a yacht captain and you see another yacht captain, you kind of look at each other, maybe shake your hand or something, and if you get to talk, that’s great. As a sportfishing captain,
I’d go up to a couple and I want to talk to them: “hey man, what have you all been doing, where you coming from, how’s the bite been...” If they’ve been there longer than you, you ask them what they’ve been trying or maybe even the area they’ve been, you know. And then, oh, you guys going to the bar tonight, we’ll see you there – that kind
most of the time — I mean, there’s always some outliers — but most of the time people are going to help you out. • It’s just more about the time on the dock that a yacht guy just doesn’t get.
They just don’t understand that — they come to the boat, they get on the boat, they’re isolated in this big capsule, and then they leave and they’re gone.
And they might go to, like, you know,
Rybovich, you know, where you have crew houses and all that. Sportfish? We ain’t got none of that. None. It’s on the dock, cooler, maybe some chairs, sitting around a fish-cleaning table and just kind of shooting the shit. And you don’t
of thing. Actually, I’d say more with the sportfishing captain, cause the yacht captains are busy. • It’s a more informal connection. Dock time for a sportfish guy —it’s real, it’s significant, Yacht captains don’t stand around the dock and talk. They have their offices, their emails, they got 99 people working for them, they got HR issues — in the sportfishing world, we don’t have any of that. My office is my settee. You sit there, you’re at the dock level most of the time you’re doing any administrative stuff, you’re watching out the window, and if you see a few guys, you go talk to them. ‘Hey, where you been, what are you doing, where are you from? Oh, I’m heading there, you got any insight for me?’ It’s very much an informal thing, and if you’re genuine,
PHOTO DANNY DAVIES
