Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 651 with Mike Anderson.

Introducing Mike Anderson

Mike Anderson: Captain Mike Anderson here, Reel Animals TV and Radio, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Mike, how you doing?

Mike Anderson: I'm good, Tom. How are you, bud?

Tom Rowland: I'm doing great. What have you been up to?

Mike Anderson: You know, it's tarpon season for us, so we've been tarpon fishing and grinding here. I just finished up my last trip before I start vacation, so I'm ready for a breather.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, how was it for you this year?

Mike Anderson: You know what, it was okay. When I talk about tarpon for me, I cut my teeth in Boca Grande. I spent ten years guiding in Boca Grande Pass. When you go from Boca Grande Pass to Tampa Bay, the amount of water and area that you find tarpon in changes so much. In Boca Grande, those fish are pretty concentrated, they're either on the hill, in the ditch, or on the beach. It's real simple. In Tampa Bay it's such a big, expansive body of water, they could be in thirty different places. Because they have tails and we have tides, they move a lot, and that makes it much more difficult here. I think we actually have more fish in Tampa, if you shoved them all into Boca Grande Pass, I think we'd have more fish, but they get spread out. There's just a lot more room for them to play here, so it's a different fishery. It's a great fishery, but we're extremely crowded here, so that makes it a challenge. You, being a legendary Keys guide, know the importance of fishing etiquette, and it gets a little challenging here in Tampa. But we're making it work, we're getting through it.

Tom Rowland: Which do you like better? When you look back at the ten years you spent there and what you're doing now, which do you like better?

Mike Anderson: There's no, it's not even a contest. Boca Grande is a special, special place. It's my favorite fishery on the planet, and I miss it. But my world just got crazy busy, two radio shows, the TV show, my youngest daughter was playing AAU basketball, I ended up coaching, and it was just hard to be gone for two straight months grinding fourteen, sixteen hours a day. It just got to be too much, so something had to give, and that's what I gave up. I came home, and I stay home now. I still fish hard, but I'm at home, so it makes it easier. There's very few things, and I don't know if you've ever gotten to enjoy Boca Grande Pass when it's really right and firing off, it's incredible. What an incredible place.

Tom Rowland: So the answer is you like Boca Grande better.

Mike Anderson: Yeah, much better.

Tom Rowland: I just wanted to make sure I'm clear, because I've never fished there for tarpon, but we did have a redfish tournament up that way out of Burnt Store Marina, and we ended up going by there during tarpon season. I said, man, we've got to go take a look at this thing because I've heard about it and I want to see it. We have a couple of magnet spots in the Keys, Long Key Bridge is one, Key West Harbor is another, where for whatever reason it's a magnet the fish want to go to. You can go to other bridges and there are lots of fish, but not as many as Long Key. And Boca Grande is the king of that, it's the magnet of all magnets that we have in the United States, I guess, unless there's somewhere I don't know about. But what do you think it is about Boca Grande Pass particularly that makes those fish concentrate like that?

Mike Anderson: Well, I think it's the ambiance, the closeness, the way the water flows through that real tight corridor. It's not a very big pass, not tiny, but not huge either. And I believe it's the estuary up inside Charlotte Harbor, with all the grass and mangrove shoreline back toward Bull and Turtle Bay and up the rivers that dump out there. It creates that epic crab flush, when the crabs are flowing good, when you have good rain, those crabs pour out of that pass. To drift through and see those incredible fish slurping crabs off the surface, it's a magical place. The other thing, and this is probably the one thing that helped me most in my career as a guide, I'm not from here. Being born and raised in Wisconsin and coming down here trying to fit into this guide world with all the good old boys, being a Boca Grande guide kind of gave me a stamp, some street cred. I think of great Keys guides like yourself who are so great on fly down there, the fly fishing is so epic. For our little part of the west coast of Florida, being a full-time guide running trips every day in Boca Grande Pass gave you credentials. God, it's a special place. If you ever want to come fishing with me, I'd love to take you there.

Tom Rowland: Oh, I'd love to. I really would. When you look at some of the pictures and video I've seen, you think, whoa, I've never fished that close to a boat, I don't know if I want any part of that. But as a fan of tarpon fishing, that is a world-class, epic location. For me it would be a little uncomfortable to fish that close to other boats, not knowing the etiquette and worrying I'm messing somebody up. But to go with somebody who knows how to stay out of everyone's way and knows what's expected, that's a whole different deal. I'd love that. I don't think I want to go tackle it on my own.

Mike Anderson: It's really changed a bunch from what I did, I was a jig fisherman.

Live Bait Versus Jig Fishing

Tom Rowland: Well, I was going to ask you about this, go ahead and explain the differences and the way different people fish there.

Mike Anderson: There's a great group, and I'm not one to bite into all the head-butting that goes on down there, of guides who live-bait fish Boca Grande Pass at night, and they jump hundreds of fish a season. It's incredible. The jig fishing thing came about later; by the time I got into it, it was just the thing to do, and a lot of the Tampa guys were going down there to jig fish the pass. My first season, I spent a whole year without sticking my nose into the middle of that chaos, you're almost rod tip to rod tip jumping hundred-fifty-pound tarpon. Even sitting on the outside of the hustle and bustle, you could jump six or seven fish a morning just learning it, watching how the best of the best attacked that fishery. There was a lot to it, your line had to stay straight up and down, certain color jigs worked depending on water clarity, sometimes you'd use a six-ounce jig closer to the moons because the line had to stay vertical, and you were fishing mono, not braid. Back in the day you could hardly drop a jig ten times without sticking it in a hole on the bottom of the pass and losing it, it was a rocky, ledgy mess. Besides the live-baiters and jig fishermen finally going to battle over it and taking it all the way up to the FWC, I think the big change came from the beach restoration project on Boca Grande. They did a large beach reclamation, piling sand back onto the island, and a year later you could jig fish all day and never lose a jig, because that sand dumped right into the pass and filled most of those holes.

I also think the sharks got worse as we did more closures and better regulation on long liners to protect them, that population grew, and they really like to eat tarpon, so they show up in the pass in big numbers. When I first started, you'd have a week to a week and a half at the start of the season where the sharks were bad, then they'd go away, like they'd gotten a full belly and were done. There's nothing worse for a tarpon fisherman than losing a fish to a shark. I had days where I told my people, we're done, we can't catch one, we're just feeding them.

Tom Rowland: The sharks we deal with primarily are hammerheads, though other places have big populations of bull sharks eating tarpon, which might even be worse. We've had situations in the Keys where bull sharks are bad, but primarily it's hammerheads for us, Long Key Bridge, Bahia Honda, that's another magnet spot I forgot to mention. What's the split for you, is it fifty-fifty hammerheads and bulls?

Mike Anderson: No, I think we have a bigger bull shark problem than a hammerhead problem, although we do lose a fair amount of fish to hammerheads too. When the bull sharks get in that ditch, it's unbelievable, you're coaching your people, hey, if I tell you to open that bail, you open it because I need that fish to run, and everybody hang on because I'm going to buzz the boat over and try to run these sharks off. It'd get to the point where there was a pack of six, seven, eight bull sharks, and there's no winning, we're going to lose, I'm not hooking another one. That got frustrating. But it's a magical place. My wife has said she's felt bad because I've mentioned in interviews that even now when I film down there, if I go by Boca Grande Pass I have to stop and take it in for a minute, because it's going to be a special place in my soul forever.

Choosing Family Over Boca Grande

Tom Rowland: It's interesting to discuss this too, because you made a career decision based on your family, for the most part. What went into that decision for you? Obviously Boca Grande is very important, but your family is very important too. How did you come to terms with that?

Mike Anderson: Well, there were really two factors. You love it, it's what you do, it's who you are, it's who you become. But your family, to me, there's nothing more important. The other wild card, really two things: financially, if you're renting a condo, renting a boat slip, creating a whole other house down there for two months, there's a great deal of expense, and if your wife and daughters come down on weekends, that's more expense. By the time you do the math, I could probably stay home and make just about the same money without all that expense. And then the unfortunate battle going on between the live-baiters and the jig fishermen, at some point something bad is going to happen and you're going to be in the middle of something you don't want to be in the middle of. Maybe you do want to be in the middle of it, but you know that's not good for your career. I got to the point where some of the live-baiters were taking shots and I was snapping back, and that's not what Boca Grande Pass is to me. The bad part is it was a turf war, they accused us of snagging fish, which I can 110% assure you was not the case. There were many days we'd drift for six, seven, eight minutes through a thirty-foot stack of tarpon, six to ten boats sitting around, no bites, and the minute the tide switched, it was game on. It was a turf war, and that turf war really came from the Pro Tarpon Tournament Series, which kind of took things over the edge for the locals down there. I was in it, fished it every weekend, we took that place over. I'd even mentioned to the powers that be in the PTTS that there was a way to do this where they could still make the same money without taking over the pass, running sixty-five boats fishing a tournament there on a Saturday and Sunday. That's not going to go over big with the locals, too many cameras and everything going on. It turned into a turf war, which was too bad and not necessary. All of that kind of pushed me to say, you know what, I'm a big boy, let's just go home. I can still catch tarpon in Tampa and be done with it.

Explaining the Boca Grande Turf War

Tom Rowland: Well, this is very familiar to me, but we have people who listen to this podcast from all over the world, so I'd like to go over it for somebody not familiar with the area, Boca Grande is this channel with tons of tarpon in it. What are the jig fishermen doing, what are the live-bait fishermen doing, and why was there this conflict to begin with? Can you walk through what caused this rift and why?

Mike Anderson: Here's the puzzling part I never could understand. Most of the live-bait fishing, the big live-bait boats that would get in there, were mostly inboards, big old wooden beautiful Boca Grande boats, if you've seen pictures of Boca Grande, these big old wooden boats with tarpon jumping behind them. Ninety-five percent of the time, we weren't even fishing at the same time. I don't think it had anything to do with water time, it had more to do with us taking business from them. I always believed the problem the live-baiters had was that they fished at night. What's the most beautiful, epic part of tarpon fishing for you?

Tom Rowland: The jump, and it's visual, for sure.

Mike Anderson: Right, we don't eat them, so we're not taking them home, it's all visual. If you're fishing for them at night, where's the visual? You lose it. So when the jig guys got in there and figured out those fish would eat those jigs, now everything's jumping, you're getting pictures of everything, it's epic, everyone can see it, you can see the fish rolling, even if the fish weren't biting, everywhere you looked there were rolling tarpon, so you knew you were in them. I'm not sure why it became such a turf war, because we didn't even bump heads all that often. On the full and new moon outgoing tides when the crabs would flush, we wouldn't jig fish, we'd dip crabs and drift through on spinning gear and catch them just like the live-baiters were, except they used conventional gear with a weight straight down, and we used spinning gear, letting the crabs drift back on the tide so the fish would slurp them up. I never really had issues with them during that. The crazy part about the jig, I could see how someone might think you were snagging, originally it was a four-ounce jig with the tail zip-tied to the bottom of a big J-hook. We ran forty-pound mono, eighty-to-hundred-pound fluorocarbon leader to that J-hook, hung with a plastic tie designed to break away, so that when the fish ate the jig and jumped, the violent head shake would break the jig away rather than have a hundred-fifty-pound tarpon jumping around throwing a four-ounce lead across the pass. Have I snagged a tarpon? Yeah, I've snagged a mullet working a school for a redfish before too, it happens, but ninety-five percent of those fish you hook right in the corner of the mouth, they're eating the jig. It was a silly battle, and it got pretty heated, the Coast Guard and FWC officers were all over those tournaments because they thought something bad was going to happen. My wife telling me, you're not going there, we're staying out of there, even though obviously my guys were in the jig boats. It was a crazy time, bro.

Tom Rowland: So how did it get resolved? It doesn't seem to be as crazy now, was it the beach project that changed things?

Mike Anderson: There are still guys jig fishing. What the FWC did, and I think that whole process was kind of crazy too, that's for another podcast, was rule that the jig head couldn't be lower than the hook, changing the way we had to jig the pass. There are still some legendary Boca Grande guys jigging all day every day and catching piles of fish, so I don't think it really changed anything mechanically. Now it has to be a non-intentional breakaway jig, tied so it doesn't leave lead all over the pass, they used to do pass cleanups after the season once the sharks cleared out, divers would go down and peel the lead off the bottom. I wouldn't partake in that, but guys would. I don't know that it's ever really been resolved, I'm sure the live-baiters and jig fishermen still don't like each other, but basically they saw it as a win when the Pro Tarpon Tournament Series went away. I said the whole time, if somebody had just come to me and said, we know you're not really snagging them, this is just a turf war, we don't like y'all here, you're a pain in our butt, we want you to go away, I'd have said, I can respect that, I totally get it. Especially once we went to sixty-five boats in the pass, I told my own team this isn't going to last very long with us completely taking over. It started as one day, then they added a ladies' day tournament on Saturday, and I said, this isn't going to go over big, this is all about money, all about greed, and once it's just about the money, it goes south. And that's what happened.

Tom Rowland: Well, that was kind of entertaining to watch, there was some incredible footage that came from that.

Mike Anderson: Yeah, it was a great time, so much fun.

Tom Rowland: I could see how people wouldn't be down with that, you're taking a place that's basically old Florida at its core with a lot of tradition, and shaking it up in a way the locals don't really like. If they had come to you and said that in a respectful manner, would you have left?

Mike Anderson: I don't know that I'd have left, but I think it would have tempered things, I could have gone to my guys and said, what they're saying isn't wrong, what we're doing here is crazy. I actually went to the PTTS guys, who were friends of mine since I was fishing for Century Boats at the time, sponsored alongside Yamaha, and told them, make it a twenty-five-boat tournament, charge three times as much for the entry fee, make it like NASCAR, make it about the anglers. Right now you're making it about the fish, which is great except it's just tarpon on, tarpon jump, tarpon hit by shark, over and over. NASCAR is popular because people fall for the drivers and the story behind the scenes, obviously they like a crash, and they'll like tarpon jumping too, but if you make it about the personalities of the captains and anglers, the top twenty-five jig-fishing tarpon fishermen in the world, you can run with it forever, sponsors will eat it up, you'll make the same money, and you can ease the noise, because the noise was coming from us taking over the pass. But it was so much money so fast that they never wanted to hear it. So now it's gone, which is sad. Things change.

Tournament Days on the Redfish Trail

Tom Rowland: Do you fish any other tournaments?

Mike Anderson: I did a lot of redfish tournaments, fished the Redfish Tour for ten years. I still mess around with a redfish tournament now and then, but scheduling is tough, and you've got to pre-fish, which is a lot of time away from home if you want to win. I did it for ten years and never won one, I had top fives, top tens, one year I fished nine tournaments and finished in the top twenty in every single one, which I thought was a phenomenal year, but I never won a big one. It's really hard to win. Guys like Brian and Greg Watts, Rick Murphy, Jeff Page, Gus Murphy, Guthrie, who had runs where they won a couple in a season, that's really hard to do against that field of talent.

Tom Rowland: It's so hard. We won Key Largo, and I was so relieved, I thought, man, we just need to win one of these, to be able to say Redfish Tour champions. When we were starting our career it felt like, well, we ought to be able to do that, we've won plenty of tournaments in the Keys. Then we got second in our first one, Titusville, and thought this is going to be easy, we're just going to do what we do in the Keys everywhere else. Boy, did we get our butts handed to us when we went to your area near Burnt Store Marina, our worst finish ever. Back then there were still mullet boats and people burning shorelines, and that's where we were trying to fish, but we didn't know how to fish anywhere else, and we weren't going to learn it in the next twenty-four hours. I think there were sixty-five boats in that one and we finished sixty-fifth. Then the next ones were up in Louisiana, competing against guys like Anthony Randazzo who live and breathe and fish that water like it's their heartbeat.

We got embarrassed and humbled to the point where what we do in the Keys, and even in Mosquito Lagoon, wasn't going to transfer, we had to learn a whole new type of fishing, which was actually exciting. It was humbling and at times humiliating, but exciting, because you might have one little thing dialed in, but thinking that's the way it is everywhere and you can compete with people in their home water is naive. Every place, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, everybody's great, and you're taking on the home-field advantage plus the Andrew Bosticks and Watts brothers and Rick Murphys of the world.

Mike Anderson: It's so funny you say that, my first IFA in Jacksonville, I wasn't even a captain yet, hadn't even guided. I was catching a few redfish around Tampa Bay, and my original Reel Animals partner, Billy Noble, was sponsored by Ranger and said they were having this tournament in Jacksonville. I said, dude, I'm in, I've got the entry fee, let's roll, I've always been competitive, always been an athlete. Jacksonville and Tampa couldn't be any further apart.

Tom Rowland: Same with the Keys, Jacksonville is a hard place for me to fish. Huge tides, and they're eating crabs we don't even have.

Mike Anderson: Huge tides, we were so lost when we got there, it was ridiculous. The fact you did well early in Titusville says a lot about your talent, it took me about five years before I ever cashed a check in Titusville. There's no tide, how am I supposed to fish somewhere with no moving water? I used to call Jacksonville and Titusville the Vills on the radio show, and I hated them both because they took forever to figure out. Charlotte Harbor, no problem, west coast Florida, Fort Myers, no problem, we'll find them. That east coast boogered me all up, and Louisiana is a whole other kind of craziness, the way those fish eat and the amount of forage in that estuary.

Tom Rowland: What I still have a problem with, and I ask my friend Anthony about it every time we fish, is I can get my arms around the tide, but there's also the salinity of the water moving back and forth that I'm trying to understand. I went to him once after pre-fishing and said, I found the winning fish, I found them. He asked where, and even though I told him, because I trusted him not to go there, he said, that's a good spot, but they won't be there tomorrow. I said, but there were so many, and they were perfect, eleven-pound slots, if I saw that in the Keys they'd be there for months. What happens with our spots usually is a big school will trickle out gradually, day after day dropping off a little, so you're never surprised when it's finally gone. He was just sure, go back tomorrow, they won't be there, and sure enough, I went back on the same tide and they were gone. I asked him how he knew, and he said it's the salinity of the water, though he's never been able to give me a real explanation of how he forecasts that, it's almost a gut feeling based on barometric pressure, rain to the north, whether the river's going to pulse, how many days of rain, is the pressure high or low, are the tides strong, which way the wind's flowing. He just understands this natural, pulsating wave of salinity that we just don't deal with in the Keys at all.

So here I am in awe of him, thinking you guys are just really talented fishermen to do well in Titusville, but really it's that you have a certain skill that transfers to a certain area. Andrew Bostick is a good example of someone who wasn't the best in any one area but was right there in all of them, he'd never fish far from the ramp, figuring there's got to be plenty of fish right there, and he'd just do what he does at home. But where he was from, there was enough variety that he could fish tailing fish, structure fish, jetties, beach fish. The Keys are actually pretty limited for redfish like that, so the transferable skill we had was tailing fish, something visual, and then you go somewhere you can't see a quarter inch into the water, and you're really lost.

What Separates the Great Anglers

Mike Anderson: Here's what else happens on the tour, and it was a hard thing for me to learn. My uncle, Bill Klutzpacher, was a four-time World Walleye Fishing Champion on the PWT up north. When I first started pointing my nose in this direction, I called him and said, hey, what's the deal? He said, I'll give you two pieces of advice. One: whatever your game plan is, stick to it, don't vary. If you say we're leaving at two o'clock because you need to be somewhere at two-ten, and you catch a fish at five minutes to two, don't change your plan, there's a reason you wanted to be there at two-ten, go, stay with your plan, you pre-fished it, you know what you want to do, follow your plan. The other thing he said was, good luck finding a good partner, because that's the key. And when you mentioned Andrew Bostick, you know what I thought of? Seppi. When Bostick and Seppi were together, that's when it got really scary, because you had guys with really strong skill sets in different types of redfishing, and when they had the right partner with the complementary skill set, it changed everything, it put those teams way ahead because they had that extra book of knowledge on the boat already.

I do a lot of work with the freshwater guys here too, because Central Florida and Polk County are so big into the bass world, and they're the ones who really blow my mind. I recently did a fishing seminar locally with Bobby Lane, who'd just won the Redcrest Cup, one of the hundred best bass fishermen in the world, and the group wasn't asking many questions, so I asked one myself: how do you figure out how to catch bass when you grow up fishing Central Florida and your first tournament of the year is in Minnesota, or Oklahoma, or Texas, or upstate New York? You go from fishing where a cold day is fifty or sixty degrees to fishing where it's twenty-five, and you've still got sponsor money involved, this is how you chose to make a living to feed your family. Those guys are so talented, it's mind-blowing. Even though our saltwater guys get a lot of love and we're all good at what we do, that group of top bass anglers, skill-wise, is on a whole other level.

Tom Rowland: Certainly for some things. We had the Sweetwater show and did a lot of filming with Miles Burghoff and Joey Nania and different guests, and coming from redfish tournaments I'd always say, why don't you go to these locations a few days early and really get it wired, and then we'll come in with the cameras, and they were always against that, because the rule set for their competition doesn't allow it. It's not that they were obeying tournament rules while filming, it's that they do better figuring it out live, on the clock, if we're going to give this twenty minutes and it doesn't work, we're heading to deep water, or looking for a thermocline, or weeds. That's their comfort zone, going somewhere they've never seen before, and it's a developed skill. For us, if we're going to Texas, let's leave two weeks early so we can figure the place out, though I guess navigation for a bass boat is a little easier than what we're doing on the Redfish Trail in Louisiana or Texas or the Keys for someone who's never been there; you can run aground real easy.

Mike Anderson: Real easy.

Tom Rowland: But there's a skill set there that's incredibly respectable, and once they find the fish, that's what that whole game is about. Shaw Grigsby says it's not really about catching the fish, it's about finding them consistently and being on them, the catching is secondary, but the secondary part is still super hard. You can look at your bottom machine and see the same things they're seeing, but then you actually have to get the fish to bite. I've had some great bass fishermen on the show, Defoe was on not long ago, had a great career. It's awesome, and sometimes these guys do well in places you wouldn't expect, like a southern guy showing up in Minnesota, because some part of what they're good at at home has transferred there in some hybrid form. At some point they got onto something and said, I can do this, and I'm going to stick with it and win.

Mike Anderson: Yeah. I'm really close with Bobby Lane and Shaw Grigsby, and I've had Shaw in my boat before, the skill set is just, and I tell people all the time, I don't think I'm a great angler, I think I'm a very good angler. Put me in a boat, I can catch fish, and if I'm with someone who's a great angler, I'll hold my own, I'm not going to embarrass myself, but I don't know that I call myself great. Even here in Tampa Bay we have guys who think about things in a whole different way that separates them from the group, there'll be ninety percent of the fleet that didn't catch anything, and two or three guys who figured out what those fish were doing and caught them when nobody else did, and they tend to do that all the time.

Tom Rowland: They tend to do it all the time. When I first started fishing tournaments in the Keys, one of my favorite parts was the Redbone tournaments, before digital scoreboards, they had a big board and a ladder, everybody's name on it, and I'd just sit there and study it. I knew all these guys, and there were certain guys who always told you at the dock they'd caught fish and were always talking, and then zeros across the board. And there was this real quiet guy who never said much, and his name was always at the top, full points across the board. After a while doing these tournaments, it emerged there were six or seven people who were always there, they might not always win, but they're always in it, about ten who'd alternate in and out, and two or three who were always at the top, always in the hunt.

It's like what you're saying, they think about things differently, they do the homework. I asked Tim Hoover about it once, I thought a lot of him, kept seeing him in a lot of my spots, fishing the same water, so I knew I was doing some things right, but he was winning all the time. I asked him, what are you doing, man, I see you in all these spots? And he said, I just pay attention to details, I make sure all my hooks are super sharp, that's a one-percent advantage, I make sure my line is fresh, the knots are tight, that's another one-percent, is your angler elevated so they can see, that's a one-percent advantage, and when you add up all those one-percent advantages and do them every single day, you can have a fifteen-to-twenty-percent advantage over the rest of the field. I started thinking about it and realized, that's exactly right. That's where I came up with control the controllable, a sharp hook, a good knot, fresh line, the best rod-and-reel combination, the right net, because if the rules allow a six-foot net and you're using a five-and-a-half-foot net, you're giving up six inches. Where can you control the controllable, because there's so much you can't, the weather, the tides, the wind, the other anglers, even your own angler, can you make them make the shot?

Mike Anderson: That's the advice I give to new guys all the time, brand-new guys, somebody's son or grandson who just got his captain's license and wants to talk. When they ask how to be successful, I say, take care of the things you can control, your boat clean, livewells working, cast nets in good shape, all your line spooled up, using good tackle. The people who fish with us regularly come from Ohio and Indiana, that guy's been grinding for two years to bring his family to Florida, they're going to sit on the beach one day and he's going to get to go fishing, he's been watching the shows and the magazines. You can't make them eat, I don't care how good you are, even if you're Tom Rowland, you're special, but you can't make him eat, that's not a controllable. Making sure he's got good tackle, sharp hooks, a clean boat, everything right in your control, will get people to come back and fish with you again. Now, I think the great ones, we've got a couple of guys here, and one of the best in the whole Bay area is Captain Jamie Goodwin, phenomenal, been on my show several times. We actually used to live together in Boca Grande, and I'd get irritated because Jamie would come in last after we'd all run a double, and he'd ask, bird dog, how'd you do? I'd say, we got three. Oh, three, that's good. And then he wouldn't say anything, and I'd ask, how'd you do, Jamie? Oh, we did okay. How'd you do, Jamie? Oh, we went ten for fourteen. Ten for fourteen! Even now when you talk to him here in Tampa about snook and redfish and trout, it's a daily game for him, he'll tell you, I don't need you to tell me where they are, if you tell me what your fish are doing, I can put that together somewhere else. I can take whatever they're doing on the water that day and catch fish somewhere you're not. It's amazing to me. He's not happy just knowing where they are today, he wants to know what they're eating, where they were yesterday, where they'll be tomorrow. He's got to know it all, and that's why he's so good, it's that attention to detail, controlling the controllables, being in the game the right way all the time. It's not easy in our environment, with the salt, the weather, the wind, so many variables. The great ones just stand out.

By the way, I did a little homework on you, I knew you were a great fisherman, but your tournament resume is quite impressive, my friend. The redfish stuff you did, congratulations, that's a little fly on the wall to the rest of your resume, chief.

Tom Rowland: Oh, thank you, I enjoyed it, I had a good time with it. But then, much like we began this conversation, it was something I loved and wanted to do but wasn't really compatible with family. A lot of people ask, don't you want to just go get in one? And I say no, I don't have any desire to fish a tournament I'm not going to put the deserved time into, and I don't have that time anymore. You'd have to be naive to think you could be a part-time tournament fisherman and go win. There's not much luck in it, if it were a one-fish, biggest-fish-wins tournament, sure, some luck could come into play, but over a couple of days there's no amount of luck that lets you compete with an Andrew Bostick, a Kevin VanDam, an Anthony Randazzo, the greats, they've taken luck out of the equation and are doing things that are really hard to do, and in some ways even other pros at that level don't want to compete with them at their own game, because it's just too hard to keep up.

Athletic Roots and a Career in the Air Force

Tom Rowland: Before we wrap up, tell me about your athletic background.

Mike Anderson: I played a lot of sports in high school, I was probably a better basketball player than anything else, a top-100 recruit in my state going into my senior year. The unfortunate part was I was about a bottom-100 student, so I had grades just good enough to play. I had a bunch of letters and interest coming out of high school, but my dad wasn't going to pay for school and I wasn't strong enough academically for a scholarship, so I went into the military, spent almost seven years in the Air Force. My first three and a half years were overseas; I played basketball overseas, made the base team, traveled all over Europe. It was a great time, and it was something I needed, the military was the right choice because I wasn't going to go to school. The best part that still resonates is that when I got to Germany, I was about two hundred pounds and could jump out of the gym, but I wasn't playing against twenty-one-year-old college kids anymore, I was playing against twenty-eight and thirty-year-old grown men who weren't happy I was out-jumping them, so they pushed me around pretty good, and that led me to the weight room, which has been part of my life ever since. And having daughters, I think that's been a blessing too.

I still play competitive slow-pitch softball, which even my wife doesn't understand at my age, but I really enjoy it, I'm still pretty active. Actually, when we're done with the podcast, it's leg day.

Tom Rowland: Nice, I'm tempted on one of these ICAST trips to fall into one of your little workouts.

Mike Anderson: I'm not sure I could do it, I've seen some of your videos, I know what you're talking about.

Tom Rowland: I'm not going to try to kill anybody at ICAST, my thing is a hundred percent scalable. Every ICAST I do these workouts in the mornings, typically a deck of cards, and the easiest way to do it is to just do half the number, you turn over a ten and it's push-ups, you do ten push-ups, or you can do five, or say I'm tired, I don't want to do that card, whatever, nobody cares. It's good camaraderie with a good group of people getting started in the morning, turn over another card, four sit-ups, you can do one, or four, or eight, whatever you want, and we just keep turning the cards.

Mike Anderson: I'm not wired like that, whatever the card says, I'm gonna have to do it, that's just how I'm wired. I'll be like, that's Tom Rowland, and Tom said I've got to do ten push-ups.

Tom Rowland: I'm gonna put you on the spot, you've got to come, at least one day, out in the parking lot. There's a great group of people, it's really fun, and we get a good workout in. You can put it out to your fans too, and we'll have a whole bunch of people show up.

Mike Anderson: I might do that, we'll have to see where you're staying, this is the first year I'm going to actually stay, I live pretty close, so we'll have to figure it out. In years past I've always driven back and forth.

Tom Rowland: I stay at the Hilton, which connects to the Rosen Plaza, across the street from the Hilton there's a fire station and a parking garage next to it, plus a bus parking lot nearby with places you can do pull-ups and run around. It's a great place to meet, and that's where we've been the last few years. I'd love to have you, that'd be fun.

Mike Anderson: I see all your social media on it, I'm really impressed with the fitness side of Tom Rowland. I'll be honest, I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but I found myself listening to yours, I think you do a great job. I just think you're an interesting cat with the fishing and the fitness, and I think you do a little hunting too, so we've got a lot in common.

Why Fitness Became Part of the Job

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's pretty cool, we definitely do. The fitness angle for me, some people don't understand where that comes from and why it's so important to me, but when I was a guide early in the Keys, first coming down from Montana and Idaho and Wyoming, I couldn't spend three days on the boat. The sun was so strong and I didn't know how to take care of myself, wasn't drinking enough water, wasn't wearing the right clothes. The people I was with could go for days and days, even weeks, though eventually even they'd get tired and we'd have to take a day off. So I thought, I've got to do something to get in better shape. Part of it was just conditioning to the heat and acclimating to being on saltwater on long days, balance, being more comfortable on the boat. Eventually, once I started guiding for a career, seven days in a row followed by three days off wasn't going to fly, so I started paying more attention to my physical condition and health, hydration, covering up, then I started running, then lifting weights, and every little thing I did bought me another day I could go. One year I did a hundred seventy-five days in a row, no days off, that was my record. That meant I could support my family; it's very expensive to live in the Keys, much like Boca Grande, so you don't have time to take days off. I stopped planning days off, but that only worked because I was physically prepared for it, for many years I wasn't, so I'd plan to fish seven and take two off, fish seven and take two off, because I knew I'd be tired. But when you've got a wife and kids waiting on you and fishing is your only means of support, you end up just booking every day. I heard Tom Pierce say once, I just book every day and let the weather sort it out, even when it's rough, your people are there and ready to go unless it's borderline hurricane conditions. The only way I was able to do that was by really paying attention to physical fitness, and then it stops being drudgery and becomes something you enjoy, part of your life you can't imagine being without. That's one of my gifts to give other people who don't know how to do it, I was an athlete like you.

Mike Anderson: I'm still guiding, and I hear it from the guys all the time, I just turned fifty-four. I don't guide like I used to because I've got other things going on with my schedule; I'm probably still guiding three days a week, sometimes four or five if I've got trips with people I've fished with for years. But even then, in the middle of summer when everybody's hanging around hot and tired after the morning trip, I'll say, dude, it's leg day, and they'll ask if I'm really going to the gym. I'm like, it's leg day, going to the gym, I was given leg day. I think that's really helped me get through this business, it isn't easy on the body, and being a gym rat has saved my body. The reason I can still play ball, run around with my youngest daughter who was a college basketball player, and not look like a fool on the court, is because of the active job I have mixed with my love for being in the gym. I think it becomes a drug, I've had doctors tell me, you're hurt, you're out six weeks, you're grouchy and miserable, and the endorphins released when you train as much as you and I do become part of who you are.

Tom Rowland: Yes, sir.

Mike Anderson: I think you're on another level with that CrossFit thing you have going, I'm not sure I understand all of it, but I dig it, I respect you for it. It's a whole other level, but I think it just becomes part of who we are, and it's a good thing.

Tom Rowland: For sure, and I truly enjoy it, though it took a while. I was a wrestler in high school, so we ran all the time, but I never thought I'd do a marathon. When I took time away from any kind of working out because I'd found fishing, I figured I'd get enough exercise just walking up and down the river or hiking wherever we were going, but that's not the case, you don't, and then you're not paying attention to your diet or anything else. There were several years where all I was doing was fishing, and then it became obvious because of the saltwater that I had to be in better shape, that I couldn't do the minimum required. My first thought was, I was a wrestler, so what am I going to do, go wrestle? I really didn't know what to do, then I thought I'd join a gym, but I think gyms are super weird, depends which one you go to, so I decided I'd do my own thing and just start running. It was misery at first, I just told myself I'd run for thirty minutes without paying attention to how fast or how far, and some of that could even be walking. That developed into, wow, this isn't drudgery anymore, it's not painful, and then I decided to run a marathon, which was awesome. The process of running a marathon is very similar to entering and winning fishing tournaments, so much preparation, building a plan, sticking to it, occasionally altering it, but for the most part you get the plan, you stick to it, and the end result is you accomplish the goal, with lots of little details along the way. That really started my love for training. I don't do as much running now, but it taught me a lot about myself and about life, there's a lot of time to think out there, like moving meditation. I'd leave the house thinking about how I was going to pay the bills or get more fishing trips, go run for an hour, come back, and think, okay, I know what I'm going to do now.

Mike Anderson: Right, a hundred percent. The gym can do that for me too, I'm not a big talker in the gym, I don't need people chatting with me, I put my tunes on and go to work. It's as much a workout and a relaxation for my brain as anything else, a little bit of what I call Mikey time. I've been married to the same great woman for almost twenty-six years, and if I miss three or four days, she'll look at me in the living room and say, go, go to the gym, don't touch anything, get in your truck, go to the gym, do not come back until you've worked on it, you're a mess. And I think that's all true, I've been lifting in the gym probably three days a week minimum for thirty-five years. It becomes part of who you are. The only place I'm probably happier is in a basketball gym, an old gym with a wooden floor and a basketball bouncing off it, I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, and a lot of those gyms were little band-box gyms with wooden floors.

Tom Rowland: Like the movie Hoosiers.

Mike Anderson: Yes, that movie painted it so well, I don't even really like basketball, but I love that movie. That's how I grew up, in gyms just like that all over Central Wisconsin, so that's kind of a happy place for me, and I don't even have to be playing, I can just be coaching or watching kids play and I'm in a happy place. It's interesting how that becomes part of who we are.

Tom Rowland: Isn't it funny, when you've been away from something and you mentioned the ball bouncing on the wood floor and the way it sounds and feels, it's the same for me with wrestling. I was away from it for a while, then my kids started wrestling, and I helped start the wrestling club in Key West. I was running by this gym and heard these sounds and thought, what is that, why is that so familiar? I ran all the way around the building and finally found the door that was open, and that's where the noise was coming from, it was a wrestling gym, no wonder it sounded so familiar. You step in there and it's like putting on an old leather jacket or your favorite pair of jeans, this is so comfortable, how did I let this escape my life, it's been gone for like ten years, and now I'm back in this place, and all these familiar sounds and smells come back, even though they smell terrible, like a bunch of kids with body odor. But that's where I grew up, and it's funny how it just comes back to you like that.

Mike Anderson: I hear it, I can hear it when you say that. When you said gym and heard a noise, I heard the squeak of tennis shoes on a wooden floor, starting and stopping, the basketball bouncing. It's one of those things you never forget, you fall in love with it as a kid and it stays with you forever.

Twenty-One Years of Reel Animals

Tom Rowland: That's right. Alright, man, well this has been great, but we didn't get to your show, how do people watch your show?

Mike Anderson: We're on Sportsman Channel, we're on World Fishing Network, we're on Bally Sports Sun, and we're on Waypoint TV, having great results with that digital platform, everyone can watch for free whenever it suits them, seems to be working out really well for us. I also do a local station here in Tampa, a local broadcast station where the show started, which does really well for us too. I've got twenty-one years of radio and sixteen seasons of Reel Animals TV, I don't know how I could get any more blessed, I really don't. To be in a group of guys like you, Rich, Blair, Rick, Rob Fordyce, George Poveromo, when I sit back and think about the group of shows that have come out of Florida, the national shows that have been around a while where people recognize the host, it's mind-blowing to me, because I have so much respect for that group. A lot of us have become friends, you and I haven't spent a whole lot of time together, but guys like Carter Andrews, these phenomenal anglers, phenomenal personalities, phenomenal people I feel blessed to have these friendships with. It seems really awesome to me, and I love doing what I do, you know the feeling when you're out somewhere and somebody just says, hey, I really love the show, I don't need a five- or ten-minute conversation, just a hey, love what you do, keep it up, and you get the feeling you're adding something, delivering your adventures to these people. To me that's just an awesome feeling, I absolutely love it. I didn't preconceive any of it, I'm a kid from Wisconsin, a basketball player from Wisconsin, I had no idea when I got stationed in Tampa that I'd live here the rest of my life, marry a Tampa girl, and become a saltwater fishing guy who ends up on radio shows and a TV show. That wasn't the plan, it just kind of all fell into place. It's really weird and humbling and awesome, and I'm truly honored to be on the Tom Rowland Podcast, it's crazy.

Tom Rowland: Well, I'm honored to have you, man. Congratulations on all your success, it's cool to watch from the outside, and you're doing really great things.

Mike Anderson: I appreciate you, brother. Like I said, I've got a good group of guys around me, some I look up to who help keep that train going in the right direction, and you're certainly one of those people.

Tom Rowland: Thanks, man, I appreciate it, and I appreciate you coming on. So they can watch your show, how do they listen to your radio show?

Mike Anderson: We're on the iHeartRadio app, you put the iHeart app on your phone and check out Reel Animals. We're on Saturdays and Sundays on two different stations, both on iHeart, both weekend mornings, so my weekend mornings are a little bit sharp. There are a lot of call-in shows, and what I love about that is it gives us an opportunity to give back, to teach people a little bit, and help them understand not just the how-tos and when-tos and where-tos, but the politics of fishing, which is a huge part of everything we have going on with fish closures and water quality issues. CCA Florida is a big part of everything I do, and Captains for Clean Water, a big part of what I believe in, the great work they're doing. It gives us a great platform to deliver that information to a pretty significant number of people.

Tom Rowland: Nice, that's awesome, man, good job.

Making Plans for ICAST

Tom Rowland: Alright, well, I hope to see you at ICAST, I'll see you at the workout.

Mike Anderson: You might, make sure, what time's the workout?

Tom Rowland: It depends on what time everything else starts in the morning, probably like five-thirty.

Mike Anderson: Five-thirty.

Tom Rowland: I think there's a Waypoint breakfast at seven or seven-thirty, so you'd need to get the workout in and be done before that.

Mike Anderson: What's a Waypoint breakfast? I don't know about this.

Tom Rowland: You will, it's just being put together today, but you'll definitely know about it if it actually happens, I promise. We were planning it today.

Mike Anderson: Oh, good, okay.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, cool. But there's a lot of things going on around seven or seven-thirty, a couple of breakfasts in the morning, so probably five-thirty or six, I'll let you know, I'll send you a message.

Mike Anderson: Alright, yeah. I'll have to get loose early, I've trained in the afternoon for a while, so five-thirty ought to be interesting, but I think that's a great thing to do. ICAST is an important part of what we do, so an early-morning workout might do me some good.

Tom Rowland: Alright, cool, man. Alright, thanks, Mike, I really appreciate it. Great to get to know you a little bit better and hear your story.

Mike Anderson: Thanks for having me, brother, I appreciate you.

Tom Rowland: Thank you. Alright, see you.