Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 699 is my conversation with Mick Guthrie, the Australian founder of CAST Fishing Co. Mick walked away from a fifteen-year civil construction career, turned an online fishing magazine into a full apparel and tackle brand, and now runs remote multi-day boat trips to the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef. We talk about why being good at something is not a reason to keep doing it, how CAST grew from real stories instead of sponsorships, and how an Australian brand cracked American bass fishing.
Listen now: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube · Press play in the player above to watch.
Mick Guthrie is the Australian founder of CAST Fishing Co., a fishing brand based in Queensland that began as an online magazine and grew into apparel, film series, and a full tackle line. He fished from age four, studied civil engineering, and spent roughly fifteen years managing civil construction projects before walking away to build CAST. The company now sells through tackle stores across Australia and expanded into the United States about two years before this conversation, gaining most of its early American traction in bass fishing.
CAST Fishing Co. is an Australian fishing brand Mick Guthrie founded that started as a digital magazine called CAST Magazine, which ran around twenty issues focused on real fishermen telling real stories rather than selling gear. Reader demand for shirts and hats grew it into apparel, then film series such as Goals and Home Turf, and eventually into its own tackle and lures. It is stocked in dozens of Australian tackle stores and has co-owners in the United States, including Ryan Hanks.
Mick spent about fifteen years in civil construction management, building roads, bridges, tunnels, and subdivisions, and he was good at it. He explains in the episode that he reached a point where the work only took from him instead of giving back, where he was losing sleep over other people's money and arguing with people he would never invite to a barbecue. His takeaway was that being good at something is not a reason to keep doing it if it has no purpose for you.
Mick fishes the Carpentaria region and the remote outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, including Cape York and the Torres Strait. He describes driving small center-console boats for two days, running offshore to sand cays on the continental shelf, and camping for several nights with world-class fishing for giant coral trout, GTs, dogtooth tuna, marlin, sailfish, and Spanish mackerel, plus fly fishing for permit, triggerfish, and milkfish on largely untouched flats.
Mick says it happened almost by accident. He and his partner Ben traveled to Florida around 2019 for ICAST, toured both coasts for about two weeks, and noticed how many anglers were fishing live bait for the same species he targets with lures back home. CAST entered the US about two years before this episode and found its strongest early traction in bass fishing, one of the hardest and most particular markets to crack.
Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 699 with Mick Guthrie is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and iHeartRadio. The video version is embedded at the top of this page.
Mick reached out through a mutual friend, and what hooked me was not the brand. It was the way he described leaving a successful construction career because it had stopped giving him anything back. I have a lot of respect for people who are good at something, walk away from it anyway, and rebuild around what actually feeds them. Mick did that, then turned a magazine idea from his wife into CAST Fishing Co., and now he is fishing parts of Australia most of us will never see. I wanted him to walk me through the whole arc in his own words.
Press play in the YouTube player at the top of this page to hear the full story.
Mick was good at construction management — roads, bridges, tunnels, subdivisions. He says the realization that changed everything was simple: just because you are good at something does not mean you should be doing it. The work had stopped being a challenge and started being a source of stress, conflict, and lost sleep over other people's money. He describes the exact light-bulb moment when he asked himself what he was doing. It is the kind of honest career reckoning a lot of listeners will recognize. Hear how he tells it in the episode.
The origin story is not what you would expect from a tackle company. Mick's wife suggested an online magazine, and he sat on the idea for months before launching CAST Magazine for iPad and iPhone. It ran about twenty issues, and the whole flavor was real fishermen telling real stories — nothing sponsored, nothing about selling gear. Readers started asking where they could buy a shirt or a hat, and that demand built the brand from the ground up. Listen to how a magazine became apparel, film series, and eventually tackle.
This is the section I keep replaying. Mick describes driving small center-console boats two days north, loading them with fuel, food, and water, then running offshore to sand cays on the continental shelf where the reef drops into nothing. He camps for five nights with world-class fishing in his front yard — giant coral trout he calls dino trout, GTs, dogtooth tuna, marlin, and fly targets like permit and triggerfish on flats that see almost no pressure. He also gets honest about what nearly kills those trips. Watch the YouTube player above for the full breakdown.
Mick says it happened by accident. He and his partner Ben came to Florida around 2019 for ICAST, toured both coasts, and could not understand why so many anglers were soaking live bait for the same species he chases with lures back home. CAST entered the US about two years before our conversation and found its strongest traction in bass fishing — one of the most particular, secretive markets in the country. How that happened is a small-business story worth hearing. Listen to that part of the episode.
Listen to the full conversation: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · or watch in the YouTube player at the top of this page.
The day after talking to Mick, the line I could not shake was that being good at something is not a reason to keep doing it. He had every reason to stay in construction and chose purpose instead, and the brand he built came from telling real stories rather than chasing sponsors.
What I admire most is that CAST grew because people wanted to support what Mick was actually doing on the water. The adventure came first, the business followed. That order matters.
Press play in the player above, or grab Episode 699 on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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Mick Guthrie · CAST Fishing Co. · CAST Magazine · Ryan Hanks · Ben · Tyler · Great Barrier Reef · Gulf of Carpentaria · Cape York · Torres Strait · Brisbane, Queensland · ICAST
Mick Guthrie is the Australian founder of CAST Fishing Co., a Queensland-based fishing brand that began as the digital publication CAST Magazine and grew into apparel, film series, and a full tackle line. A lifelong angler who started fishing at age four, he studied civil engineering and spent roughly fifteen years managing civil construction projects before leaving to build CAST around purpose rather than profit. He is known for remote multi-day adventures on the outer Great Barrier Reef and for expanding CAST into the United States, where the brand has found strong early traction in bass fishing.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 699 with Mick Guthrie, founder and co-owner of CAST Fishing Co, discussing Australia's remote Gulf of Carpentaria and Great Barrier Reef, giant trevally, fly fishing, and building a global fishing brand.
Mick Guthrie: I'm Mick Guthrie, founder and co-owner of CAST Fishing Co, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.
Tom Rowland: Mick, how are you doing, bud?
Mick Guthrie: Really well, mate. Yourself?
Tom Rowland: I'm doing great, man. I'm really happy to have you on here. I've been a fan of your work and your company's work for a while. I don't know how long I've been following you guys, but I went to Australia and had probably the best trip of anywhere I've ever been in the whole world, so I've been longing to get back, and I've seen your stuff, and it's amazing.
Mick Guthrie: Oh, thank you, really appreciate it.
Tom Rowland: Explain to us, for people that may be unfamiliar with how big Australia is, where you're fishing for the most part and the geography of what we're looking at.
Mick Guthrie: I'll get to that, but first I want to say thank you for having me on, because it's actually quite ironic. When we first moved our business to America, I spoke to my co-owner over there, and the first podcast I told him to try to get on was yours. And I think we have a mutual friend, Tommy Domitina. It kind of feels a bit weird for me to even be on here, because when you go back through the history, guys that I really respect and admire have been on it — Captain Jack, even Dan Staton from ElkShape, whose bow hunting work I've been watching for a while, and Mark Chandler, a whole bunch of really high-level guys. And it's just little old me. Like, is this real?
Tom Rowland: It's kind of weird, man, well, let alone you. You've got some incredible content. So people can go check it out while they're listening to this podcast, tell us what your social media handles are and how somebody can go see what you're doing.
Mick Guthrie: Basically, the business side is I own CAST Fishing Co in Australia. It started as an online magazine. The Instagram for the Australian account is castmag.co, which is also the website for our online store. Then in America, it's castfishing.co on Instagram and also the online store. It's been a fun ride. We've been doing it for about eight years, about two years in America now, but nothing worthwhile is done easy or done quickly, so we're well and truly on the road, eight years deep in it and loving the journey. But to get back to your question about Australia, none of that surprises me that you want to get back here. When you live here, it's very easy to take it for granted, because it's just what we have. But I've done a bit of traveling the last five or six years, and every time I go away, I can't wait to get back. It's a very special part of the world — the continental mass is basically the same size as America, but the beauty of it here is, you guys have two coasts; we're completely surrounded by ocean, and we have ten percent of your population. So we just don't have the crowds you're used to. When you think about it in that context, we're very, very spoiled.
Tom Rowland: Where I fished was the Carpentaria region, which I know you go up in there too, and it's very similar to Florida for us — Florida kind of goes down toward the equator, and in Australia it's almost the opposite, where it goes up toward the equator. I noticed the vegetation was very similar, the fish were very similar. The only one I actually caught in Australia that's exactly the same as what we have here is the cobia, but we caught so many fish that were similar either in behavior or the way they look or the way you fish for them. It was just a wonderland for me. So let's talk about that area first — what do you like to do up there?
Mick Guthrie: I like to go on the opposite side of the coast to where you were. You guys were on the Weipa side, which is the inside, the western side of the Carpentaria, called the Gulf of Carpentaria. There's a lot of inshore fishery there — barramundi, threadfin salmon, queenfish, permit, blue bastards, a lot of good fly fishing, sailfish, all sorts of things like that. Whereas on the opposite side, it's almost like comparing the Gulf of Mexico to the opposite side of Florida. The Gulf side is kind of the calmer side, if you like, and the other side is the deep water oceanic side, like where you have the Great Barrier Reef. That's usually the area we love to explore, right from the very tip up in the Torres Strait all the way down to about halfway down Queensland. It's an untapped resource, really.
Tom Rowland: I can't imagine, with ten percent of the population — from what I saw, once I was at Cairns, there wasn't a lot north of that. Not a big population center, right?
Mick Guthrie: No, not at all. It's harsh country up there, very harsh living, not very well populated at all. It's remote, it's rugged. The Northern Territory and the northern part of Western Australia are some of the most untouched coastline in the world, I'd imagine, but definitely in Australia. We always say when we go on trips, don't wish us luck, pray for adventure — those are the kind of places you go for adventure.
Tom Rowland: So how do you get there? It seems like a wild place. What does a trip up there look like?
Mick Guthrie: There's been a couple of times I've been there filming on mothership guided trips — you fly into very small airstrips, jump on a boat, go out to the mothership, and explore remote areas. I've done that a couple of times as a filmer, and I was lucky enough to get a couple of days on the fly rod during those trips too, which was really cool. But then trips like the one we just did a couple of weeks ago — we drove our 17-foot center consoles about two days, or a day and a half, north. Then we heavily loaded them up with sleeping gear, food, water, and extra fuel, and went from a little remote boat ramp in the middle of nowhere about a hundred kilometers — call it sixty miles — out to the outer edge of Australia, basically the continental shelf, right where the Great Barrier Reef just drops off into nothing. It's the edge of Australia, and there are sand cays out in these regions that don't go underwater at all, so you can camp on them. We stayed out there for five nights in our little seven- or eight-foot tinnies and had world-class fishing for five days straight. It was amazing.
Tom Rowland: What kind of fish live in that area? Certainly ones that haven't seen a lot of lures and flies.
Mick Guthrie: That's for sure. In terms of reef species, you've got giant coral trout, which if your viewers aren't familiar, is kind of like a really pretty gag grouper — similar shape, very big. They can grow over 40 inches and they're mean as hell. They'll come and hit topwater plugs in thirty or forty meters of water on some occasions. They're kind of the pinnacle of non-GT fish around the reef edges — we call them dino trout over here because they're just like dinosaurs, massive and mean. Then we have dog-toothed tuna, marlin, sailfish, wahoo, and our version of Spanish mackerel, which can grow very big and launch lures up into the air — quite exciting fishing. And obviously the Great Barrier Reef is just full of GTs. If you go to the Great Barrier Reef and can't catch a GT, something's wrong — that's how common they are, and there's so much fun in it.
Tom Rowland: That sounds like the trip of a lifetime. Are there mothership trips that do that type of thing?
Mick Guthrie: There has been in the past. I'm not sure what the state of play is at the moment with those kinds of operations since COVID, but prior to COVID we hosted a couple of trips on the Eastern Cape, the eastern side of the Gulf of Carpentaria, Cape York, Queensland. There were operations there running mothership trips out to skiffs on the flats, because that particular area, in terms of fly fishing — and I didn't cover this before — the Great Barrier Reef has one of the biggest diversities of fish on the planet. You never know what you're going to see. What makes it so unique for fly fishing is that it really doesn't have any pressure. The flats are absolutely world class and largely untouched, especially in those super remote areas. Everyone goes there for the big coral trout, giant GTs, dog-toothed tuna, and marlin — especially now, since off Cairns is a big black marlin season. But if you're into fly fishing and don't mind a bit of adventure, you can tap into stuff that's truly world class. On one flat you can hook permit, triggerfish, blue bastards, GTs, bump-headed parrotfish, milkfish, snappers, sweetlips — whatever you want, basically. I say all the time, world class doesn't do the Great Barrier Reef justice, because it's just absolutely amazing.
Tom Rowland: You sent me some pictures before this of so many of the things you're catching, and we'll post them along with this episode. Just incredible looking stuff, and so many of them are similar to fish we fish for — but similar and bigger, similar but with more teeth.
Mick Guthrie: Yeah, exactly. If you look at that photo, you can probably see our boat moored in the background — that's right in front of a little shade structure on the back of the sand cay. That's where we slept, with world-class fishing right in your front yard, basically.
Tom Rowland: So when you're taking a trip like that, driving for two days with 17-foot boats, what's going to be the bottleneck? Are you going to run out of fuel, water, or food? What is it that keeps you from being able to stay?
Mick Guthrie: It's probably a combination of all of it. It's a unique scenario where you need multiple stars to line up, because in that kind of area, the time of year that produces the best weather for those small boats to get out there is also potentially the time of year with the most volatile storms and cyclones. So you get these really hot, steamy glass-outs with no wind, but then at night you can get absolutely obliterated by storms — that happened on our last trip, actually. So it's a combination of weather and potentially running out of fuel. If we're just doing a fly trip, you wouldn't really run out of fuel because you pretty much fish the one or two sand cays right where you camp — you're using a gallon of fuel a day once you're out there. But water is a big concern because it's so hot there at that time of year. So water and weather are really what can kill those kinds of trips. We had Tyler — I think you had him on the show a couple of days ago talking about it.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, with you.
Mick Guthrie: Right. We had him and the other co-owner from America of CAST, Ryan Hanks, over to Australia for a couple of weeks, and our plan was to go and stay on a sand cay on the outer reef, but we just couldn't quite get the weather window. In the whole coastline of Queensland, which is half the coastline length of the East Coast of America, we had one little section where we could get three days of fishing out on the Great Barrier Reef. So we just got in the car and picked where the weather was okay, and that's where we went — we'd never been there before either. That's the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef: wherever you think you want to go, just look at where the weather is, and you'll find something else world class if you have a little sense of adventure and want to have a crack.
Tom Rowland: You know what's cool about this? We often talk about, in the Keys, wouldn't it be cool to go back in time and see what guys were doing in the twenties, or the eighteen hundreds. And I've always said, yeah, but I'd like to see it with the equipment we have today — my boat, my tackle, everything. When you're telling me about Australia, that's the first thing I think of: you're just driving down an empty stretch, the weather looks good, you dump the boat in and go, and nobody's there, and the fishing is like it was in the eighteen hundreds. That sounds like a fisherman's dream — to go with the tackle we have today, the boats, the electronics, the fuel, the speed, and get out there and experience that untouched fishing. That is the dream.
Mick Guthrie: It really is, because it's almost like I said — you kind of feel spoiled here. You go out to the reef, you see one or two other boats, and you think, why are they here? It's one or two nights, and it's pretty crazy — even in the remote area we went to, you see one or two boats and you think, I'm really disappointed, because I wanted to come here and not see anyone. You want to feel like you're on the edge of the earth by yourself. You see one boat and you think it's a ruined spot.
Tom Rowland: But on the other hand, you might be out there on the edge of the earth thinking, at least if we break down, there's one other person out here who might have some fuel or something.
Mick Guthrie: It's funny, actually — a few years ago we had a breakdown out there, if you'd like me to run you through it. It's got us all for a little while. It was back in 2016, I think. We did a similar trip and were out on the outer Great Barrier Reef — three of us in a boat, past the edge of the continental shelf, chasing yellowfin on top of the water. My business partner, Benny, went to turn the boat on to chase these fish again, and there was just nothing. We're like, oh, shit. He said, now I've got a spare battery, so he goes to the back of the boat, looks for the spare battery, and that spare battery's dead too. We're like, oh, shit. Then he goes to the other side, finds it, we hook it up, boom, click, away we go. Happy days — nobody thought anything else about why that first battery had gone flat. Two more days out there, we had the time of our life — world-class fishing, adventure mode at level a thousand, it was so good. Then, on the way back into our camp on the mainland after staying out on the sand cay, the motor started to cavitate, tried to trim up and down and couldn't — didn't have enough power. We turned it off, tried to turn it back on, and it just wouldn't start.
Tom Rowland: Oh, no.
Mick Guthrie: And the wind was starting to get up, maybe twenty knots out of the southeast. We had the mainland on one side and Papua New Guinea in the direction the wind was blowing, away from land. So we got our oars — there were three of us — and we could see a shipping channel marker maybe four or five hundred yards away, so we started paddling on an angle where the wind would take us just past it, figuring we'd grab it. Long story short, we got to that channel marker, and the guy on the front of the boat — me and Ben had him by the feet — reached out and grabbed it. For some crazy reason, we'd used our anchor rope back at camp for a pulley system to keep the boats off the land, so there was only about three meters of anchor rope left in the boat. It was a silly mistake, one of those situations where all the holes in the Swiss cheese line up and something bad happens. We ended up tying that three meters of rope to the channel marker, and the wind kept building — pushing twenty-five knots southeast by that stage. We were tied up to that marker for about four hours, and a couple of trawlers went past us. We had a V-sheet and flares out, and they just didn't take any notice and kept driving past. In the end we had to set off an EPIRB, and that same trawler that had driven past us an hour and a half earlier had to come back and get us. When they came back, a whole heap of stuff happened that I won't go into — it makes the story too long — but the trawler set up downwind and kept telling us to just cut the rope and drift back into them and they'd grab us. We said no, come ahead, you've got power, get ahead of us and come back to us — but there was a bit of a language barrier, since they were foreign crew. So anyway, we ended up cutting the rope and drifting back into them, right near where their net boom was. Me, Ben, and our mate Robbo were lifting the net up over the outboard as the boat drifted into it, and the net actually grabbed Ben by the chin and dragged him toward the front of the boat, nearly dragged him overboard. We got it off his face just in time, and it all worked out in the end. We got towed back to the mainland, and we were having a cup of tea with the skipper, saying our prayers, when we looked back and there was no boat behind the trawler — it had snapped the tow line, and they had to go back and get it again. It was a nightmare, but a lesson in humility — those kinds of places are very remote and very dangerous. When things go wrong, you have to be prepared, and we are now. It's one thing to pray for adventure, but you also have to be ready for it. If you ask for it, you've got to be ready for it.
Tom Rowland: You are literally on the edge of the earth out there. What are the most crucial things you've learned that you now pack on a trip like that?
Mick Guthrie: We have a couple of things that really come in handy. We have a device called a Zoleo — it's kind of like an inReach, but it has an app that everyone in your community can download, so your partner or your friends can text over the satellite link. On our last trip it was an absolute lifesaver, because on the first night we got obliterated by a storm — fifty-plus knot winds, heavy rain for two hours, came out of nowhere and really caught us by surprise. We still had four more days left on that trip, so we were wondering how we'd get through it. We didn't sleep. But we were able to get weather reports through the Zoleo device, which gave us peace of mind and let us stay in contact with everyone. We also now have the ability to charge boat batteries with solar blankets, and we always make sure we have spare anchor ropes. We learned from every trip — looking back, I'm surprised a couple of trips didn't go wrong sooner than they did, but it really took a big event like that to sharpen our tools.
Tom Rowland: With your company, I'm interested in the origin story. I can only imagine it was because you couldn't find what you needed to catch these fish and do everything you wanted — but how did it start?
Mick Guthrie: It's an interesting story, I guess, if you like personal development. I've always fished since I was about four years old, always been in the outdoors, grew up in the Cubs and Scouts, always out hiking and riding and fishing. I was never really an indoors kid. I came down to the capital city of Queensland, Brisbane, to pursue my sport at the time, which was cricket. I wanted to reach a higher level in that sport, and I was studying civil engineering at university at the time. I finished that and ended up starting a fifteen-year career in civil construction — contracting, managing projects, building roads, bridges, tunnels, residential subdivisions, commercial structures, that kind of thing. I'm a very tunnel-visioned kind of guy, so once I got into that career, I kind of left my sporting aspirations to the side. I didn't get to fish or explore as much as I wanted, because that phase of my life coincided with the baby years with my family — we had a couple of little kids, which puts the handbrake on a few things unless you're really obsessed. At the time I wanted to make the most of my career, because I'd been given some good opportunities at a young age that I grabbed with both hands, and they took a lot of my time, effort, and dedication. I got through that phase, ended up at a higher level in construction management, and then realized it's a very stressful life if you're not passionate about it. One thing that became clear to me through my thirties is that just because you're good at something doesn't mean it's something you should be doing. It needs to have that blend of purpose in your life; it needs to give you something rather than take away from you all the time. And that's what construction was becoming for me. I love a challenge in everything I do, and it was a challenge at one point, and then it stopped being one. I used to look at sets of drawings and think, okay, how am I going to do this — and that's when I really loved it. But then I got to the point where I'd just look at it and think, that's going to be a problem, that's going to be a stress, I know about this, blah blah blah, and it just wasn't fun anymore. I realized one day that I was having conflicts and arguments with people I wouldn't invite to my house for a barbecue, arguing over other people's money, and I was the one losing sleep over it — it was a light bulb moment. I thought, what am I doing? My wife at the time had the idea that I could write fishing articles and get back into it, since I'd still maintained fishing through my life, but not to the level I did as a kid, and I really wanted to reconnect with that side of me because it feeds my soul and brings me back to who I really am. I didn't want to do articles, though — that didn't feel like the right move for me. My wife came up with the idea of starting an online magazine, since that was all the rage in women's content and media at the time, and there wasn't anything like that in Australia. I sat on it for a couple of months, then went for it and ended up making CAST Magazine, available on iPad and iPhone. We ran through about twenty issues, and the whole flavor of that magazine wasn't about selling gear or anything sponsored — it was all about real fishermen telling real stories, trying to teach young kids or anyone getting into it about what fishing can give you in life, rather than what fishing can get out of your back pocket.
Mick Guthrie: It got a lot of support in the early days, and people started asking where they could buy a shirt, or a hat, or how they could support us — and that started our apparel line, which fed into more and more products. We started doing our own film series, too — a couple of them, one called Goals, one called Home Turf, again all just purely about the fishing, nothing else. That got a lot more support as well, and it gave us a bit more free time to start designing our own tackle. Now, pretty much everything behind me here is our own — you can step into your boat and have everything with our name on it almost. We're in about thirty or forty tackle stores around Australia, and we expanded into America about two years ago; we're right at the start of that journey now. Interestingly, all our traction in America is in bass fishing, which is incredible.
Tom Rowland: I mean, congratulations, because if you're interested in selling a lot of lures, you're never going to sell more to anybody than a bass fisherman — but it's very difficult to gain traction there, because those guys are very particular about what they use, and even secretive about what's working, since they don't want anybody else using it. So it seems like a difficult way to tap into America, hitting bass fishing first. How did that happen — was it accidental?
Mick Guthrie: It very much was accidental. As we talked about, Florida is so similar to Queensland. Myself and Ben traveled to Florida for ICAST, I think in 2019. One of our partners at the time flew us over to do some content for them and hang out at their booth, and we had the opportunity to do about a fourteen-day tour around Florida — based in Fort Lauderdale, then Jacksonville, Sarasota, Orlando for ICAST, bouncing around for a couple of weeks and getting to see a bunch of different fishing on both coasts. We looked at each other, because there were so many people fishing with live bait, even the guides, and I thought, why aren't these guys fishing the way we fish? It's incredibly fun and it's the same species. So we started throwing stickbaits around, and thought, when we go back to Australia, let's work out how we can base ourselves in Florida, because as a business we felt the bass fishing scene there is miles ahead of any tournament stuff happening here, whereas on the saltwater scene, since we're on the Great Barrier Reef, we throw artificials all the time — that's all we've done for a long time. I felt like our techniques, our tackle, and the way we target certain species were in some regards a little bit ahead of what people were doing in Florida, so I thought maybe we could show these guys something different and crack into that market. That actually proved very difficult, to be honest — slow-pitch jigging is starting to take off over there, but there's still a real handbrake on artificials in general, though it's starting to show through social media more, with people using big swimbaits and topwater stickbaits and jigs starting to bubble up. I thought that would be a huge market given the population size in Florida, but it's typically quite difficult to crack — people like their live bait and doing what they've always done, though we're starting to get somewhere with younger guys and people who think outside the square. Getting back to the bass fishing side, our co-owner is from Georgia, from Lake Lanier, and has a number of close friends up there who used to fish bass tournaments. He used to watch some of our trips to Cape York on YouTube, and that's what got him started throwing stickbaits in the Gulf of Mexico. Now he's a co-owner of the business, which is quite weird, but he has mates in bass fishing, and he saw one of our lures, a sixty-gram lure — kind of like a woodchopper, with propellers on the front and back.
Tom Rowland: Those used to be par for the course with bass fishermen — you'd throw that out, pull it along, and eventually you stop seeing those work as well, but then they come back and get used for something else, like peacock bass, which was a hugely popular peacock bass lure. But eventually it stops working as well, and that's what's great for tackle companies, because it's always this inventive space of, maybe the silhouette was right, or the swim, or the color — and how do we change that to show them something a little bit different that will get the bite.
Tom Rowland: With the GT, it's pretty obvious — when those things bite, they're maybe the most aggressive fish I've ever fished for when they want to be, but I've also seen them be very shy. In your experience, can GTs be hard to get to bite even in areas where they're not seeing pressure?
Mick Guthrie: I think it's more to do with bite windows — having conditions lined up where there's a feeding trigger. You'll hear words like pressure edge, building tides, current. For GTs to really be in the mood, you need three things: structure, current, and bait. If you come across an area where you're up-current of some structure that has bait on it, that's when it happens. Plenty of people make the mistake of fishing too close to structure — the target area right on the structure is often very narrow, but if you have a wide piece of structure getting hit by a lot of current, you could be fishing too close and only get small fish, when the bigger fish are sitting off in fifty meters of water, forty or fifty meters away from the structure where you think you should cast. Giving yourself more room away from the structure can actually increase your big-fish percentage, because they'll come up into the shallows to hit and then go back down. In the Great Barrier Reef sections it's very tide dependent — with the moon phase, you get building tides toward the full and new moon, and the three or four days building into those tides is when there's more energy in the water and GTs start firing up in their feeding cycle. After the moon, it gets a bit tougher, especially on the neap tides. But further south, away from the Great Barrier Reef, we have giant GTs off Brisbane, and it has nothing to do with tides there — it's all oceanic current. If the current's running, it can be the neapest tides of the year and it'll still be on; or it could be the biggest tides of the year with no ocean current, and you won't catch one. It's all to do with energy in the water. When that situation lines up, you could throw a cut-off broom handle at them and they'd eat it.
Tom Rowland: There's that amazing video of somebody catching one on a flip-flop.
Mick Guthrie: I've seen people catch them on beer cans and everything. If they're in the mood, they'll hit it.
Tom Rowland: When you're fishing for unpressured fish on the edge of the earth, you must be catching some of the biggest ones in the world. Can GTs get too big? Are you able to handle the biggest ones as long as you tailor your tackle to it?
Mick Guthrie: There are places around the world that regularly handle sixty- and seventy-kilo fish. My business partner's Instagram is GT Buster — his biggest one is fifty-seven kilos, an absolutely giant fish. I wasn't with him for that one, but I've seen the video. Guys in Oman, and I fished with a guy named Nikola Vitale in Sudan, who runs an operation called Wild Sea Expeditions doing trips to a place called Socotra off Yemen — they regularly get sixty, seventy kilo GTs. I've read stories of people in the Great Barrier Reef seeing GTs in the eighty- to hundred-kilo class but never getting a chance to catch them, so you don't really know how big they grow. But you see photos of fish in that sixty-to-seventy-kilo class quite often.
Tom Rowland: An eighty-kilo fish is close to a hundred and fifty pounds. What's the tackle like for that?
Mick Guthrie: You've got to be ready for that sixty-kilo fish — when you're driving two days and then a hundred kilometers out to sea, living on the edge of the earth, if you're going to chase them, you've got to be ready for the biggest version. Typically you run something like an eighty-pound braided line, a hundred to a hundred-and-twenty-pound leader, up to a hundred-and-fifty or two-hundred-pound leader, three-hundred-pound split rings, big hooks, and big baits. We just use chain knots and an FG knot rather than crimping. One of the baits we typically use to chase these big guys is about a hundred and fifty grams, roughly eight or nine inches long — big bait, big fish. You've got to be ready to sling them around most of the day, sometimes for days on end, but as we've gotten more experienced over the last four or five years, we've become more selective about when to throw that big gear, learning to recognize big-fish areas. They can come out of nowhere, but typically you know when you're in a big-fish zone, and that's when the game face comes on. For me personally, though, my passion with GTs is away from the conventional side — chasing them on fly, which is a whole other challenge in itself.
Tom Rowland: What would a real trophy fish be on fly?
Mick Guthrie: The biggest one I've got on conventional tackle is around forty kilos — that was a big fish, and I got it on fairly light gear. I'd say if I could get a fish in the thirty-to-forty-kilo class on fly, I'd probably die happy.
Tom Rowland: Thirty to forty kilos, that's sixty-five to eighty pounds — that's a hell of a fish. When you're fishing for them on fly, are you targeting different areas, like on the flats?
Mick Guthrie: Yeah, the bigger ones are on the flats, coming down by themselves or in pairs.
Tom Rowland: The only experience I have with fish of that size is in Christmas Island, where we saw some very large ones — I have no idea how big, because they didn't bite. They'd run right up to the fly, soak me with a tail kick, and then head down the beach, and I'd run down after them to get in front of them again. I made about five or six shots over two and a half miles, and it was super exciting, seeing these giant black fish and running past them, getting tired but trying to get enough of a lead to strip out and get the fly out there again. Those fish would rush right up to the rod tip, and I don't know what I could have done to get them to bite, but they were plenty big to me.
Mick Guthrie: Yeah, they all pull hard no matter the size, like a jack crevalle. The amount of shots I've had at a decent GT here in Australia — an acceptable size where you'd say, yeah, that's a decent GT — is about twenty kilos; that's the entry level. Thirty kilos is a good one, and a twenty-kilo GT is kind of the forty-inch mark. Then you get up to forty-four or forty-six inches, which is the next level up. I've had quite a few shots at forty-inch-class fish on the flats with my shrimp fly and an eight-weight.
Tom Rowland: Those fish on the flats — are you just seeing big black fish coming down over the sand in super clear water?
Mick Guthrie: Yep, it's pretty cool. There have been a few where I've seen them mooching around like a permit, and a few just cruising down the flat. Probably eighty percent of the time I've had an eight- or ten-weight in my hand with a crab or shrimp fly on, and I still have a crack at them, even though it usually doesn't end well. The times I've actually been prepared with my twelve-weight, I've only had a handful of shots. One was on a true forty-kilo-class fish, with two of my mates in the boat — we saw them from a long way away, put the hammer down, got well ahead of them, made the perfect shot. Three of them were crawling all over the fly, got right to the rod tip, and just disappeared. We looked back at the video, and I'm sitting there talking to myself saying, it's going to happen, it's going to happen — and it just didn't. It was the perfect recipe, and it still doesn't happen. Then the latest one I caught, forty-one inches to the fork, was on my twelve-weight, and I was actively hunting them — that was probably one of the most rewarding fish I've caught in recent memory, a nice little milestone for myself.
Tom Rowland: GTs get a lot of press, and people travel for them — you talk about Australia and people think, the GT is over there. It's funny, because we have the jack crevalle here, which gets almost none of that attention, and people consider them almost a trash fish, but they're not. What are the other fish over there that get you excited that maybe we don't know about?
Mick Guthrie: It's always on the flats, honestly — my favorite fish are all fly fishing targets now. I like a challenge in pretty much everything I do, and to me the ultimate challenge in fishing is stalking a fish on the flats and trying to make the right presentation. There are probably three species I really enjoy. One is permit, obviously — it took me about three years to catch my first one, and I've always done it by myself, which I think is a lot more rewarding. The first couple were very small fish; I think I've got five or six now, but permit is something I really enjoy. The other fish I really enjoy targeting is a black-spot tuskfish.
Tom Rowland: A black-spot tuskfish? I don't know what that is.
Mick Guthrie: It's like a parrotfish without the beak, so it's got teeth. They get around little rubble flats, on sand with a bit of broken rubble, chasing crabs and shrimp. Because of their color, you can see them a mile away, but the interesting thing about that species is they have a unique ability to act like they haven't seen you when they've seen you way before you've seen them. They make you think you've got a chance, and then they just say, nah.
Tom Rowland: We have freshwater carp that are a little bit like that — they can be incredibly hard to catch, and they do the same thing, giving you the idea you have a chance when you really don't.
Mick Guthrie: Absolutely. They'll tail and get really aggressive on the fly sometimes and then just not like it and see you later. I've caught fewer of those than I have permit on fly, and they're easier to find and easier to hook, but the areas I chase them in, it's gnarly country — jagged rocks and coral. If you're lucky, like the one I sent you a photo of, it's a little rocky area on sand and easily captured, but most of that island is pretty gnarly, and they're dirty fighters — they pull so hard and find the nearest rock.
Tom Rowland: We fish for triggerfish too, and some of these pictures look like similar areas. That's how it was on Christmas Island — the triggerfish were over elkhorn coral, two or three inches long, really hard to walk on, would shred your boots, but that's where they wanted to be. It's interesting, because the first time I went, no one fished for the triggerfish — none of the guides fished for them, we just fished for bonefish and GTs. Then the second time I went, twenty years later, everybody was all about the triggerfish, and the bonefish had dropped to third place.
Mick Guthrie: We have that diversity here too, and a lot of people are into it. The whole saltwater fly fishing scene has really elevated in the last five or six years — social media has a lot to do with that. Permit fishing is a classic case of social media accelerating people's learning curves. Twenty or thirty years ago, people didn't even know what a permit was — you might get one shot every three or six months and think, what was that, what would I even throw at that? The guys who pioneered that here in Australia, and over in your part of the world, don't get enough credit for how difficult that must have been, because now it's quite easy — you see someone catch a few, send them a message, they tell you to try a number-one white Flexo crab, and the learning curve accelerates. That's part of why I like chasing species like tuskies and blue bastards and triggers — I don't seek out a lot of information from other people. I like to figure things out myself, and I think it's a lot more rewarding that way. I think the art of chasing delayed gratification is getting lost, and there's a lot to be said for it, which is why we take our time with our business and don't chase short-term things just for money — we make sure our values stay aligned and keep going down the same track, staying authentic. I like to chase delayed gratification almost everywhere in my life, and fishing is no different. Bow hunting, no different either.
Tom Rowland: That's where the real reward is — in the delayed gratification. You put in a lot of work, and then it actually happens. And what's interesting too is if you find yourself somewhere with no cell service, not talking to any other fishermen, trying different things that don't work, then something starts to click, and you're not seeking help from anyone else — and then you encounter someone else doing it on their own, and you compare notes. That's one of the most interesting things ever — seeing a fly that's so different from what you're doing, but you're both having success on it. If you find somebody you can have that kind of conversation with, who's willing to share what they're doing on the down-low, it's this whole different approach, and it's crazy — you think, why didn't I think of that, and they're thinking the same thing about you.
Mick Guthrie: Exactly, and I'm super fortunate in that regard, because CAST and going down that journey has really changed my life, since it's brought people like that into my life. Some of the closest relationships of my life, friendships and whatnot, have come through this journey. Everyone in my small circle now with CAST are my closest friends, and they're all killers like that — it's almost like you don't know how the universe conspires to put people like that in your life when you go down a certain path. Now I can count ten really close friends who are all about that kind of life — birds of a feather. It's really interesting how those conversations between all of us, on the phone and in message groups, have evolved over the years, pushing each other in certain directions, chasing certain fish on certain techniques. It's become this big momentum of forward-facing energy, where you just go chase what you want to chase, knowing that if you want a hand, you've got one, but everyone's right there saying, go do it for yourself. It's one of those hidden things about CAST I never saw coming, and I'd never want to give it up.
Tom Rowland: Iron sharpens iron — one man sharpens another. And then you get motivation and inspiration from those same people around you.
Mick Guthrie: Exactly. I've got so many mates like that now — one of my closest friends is a young guy called Flynn Sulfur, Saltwater Prodigy on Instagram. I've known him since he was fourteen; I remember when I first called his dad, because I liked the way they operated and wanted him involved in what we were doing. I knew straight away they were my kind of people, and we formed a close friendship, like a big-brother, little-brother kind of thing. When he was young I was kind of his inspiration, and now he's my inspiration too, given what he's gone on to achieve. It's amazing to have relationships like that, and to see the way the close group of people within CAST have pulled each other out of difficult life periods, that real close bond — all forged on that way of fishing, that delayed gratification, chasing your own goals. Those are the intangibles you never really think about or talk about, but they're there every single day.
Tom Rowland: Where do you see this going in the next few years?
Mick Guthrie: It's hard to tell, honestly, because in business you always want a pipeline of opportunity, and that's something we're fortunate to be flush with. I'd like to continue growing in America through the bass scene and reach further into the saltwater scene as well. I'd like to be able to get to America more myself, but I went to Africa in 2020, so I can no longer get a visa waiver — I have to get a full-blown visa now to come to America because I went fly fishing in Africa. We went to Sudan, so now I'm on the block list to get into America because of that trip.
Tom Rowland: What would happen if an American went to Sudan?
Mick Guthrie: We went with a few Americans, so I'd imagine they're allowed to come home, but between Australia and America there's a visa waiver program — normally you fill out paperwork online and twenty-four hours later you have your visa waiver. That's what I did, but on the checklist it asked where I'd been in the last ten years, and Sudan was on the list. I clicked it, and it came back denied. So now I can't get a visa until October next year — that'll be about two and a half years after I applied, because of COVID delays.
Tom Rowland: Well, I guess the obvious question is, was the Sudan trip worth it? Did you have good fishing?
Mick Guthrie: Have a look at some of those triggerfish photos — it was worth it.
Tom Rowland: Sudan, I never even considered fishing there.
Mick Guthrie: Neither did I. It's essentially the Great Barrier Reef, basically, in the middle of the Red Sea — it's been a dive destination for like forty years, one of the world's most high-level scuba diving and snorkeling destinations for tourists. I didn't realize they'd been running those kinds of operations there for ages, and we had an opportunity to do an exploratory trip for two weeks in the southern part of the Red Sea that they'd never had a big enough boat to reach before. We got to hit some atolls on the fly that not many people, and definitely not many fly fishermen, had ever been to. So that was a cool experience — it was worth it at the time. Now that I know my business situation, I probably wouldn't have done it, but it is what it is, and things seem to be going pretty good regardless. There are plenty of opportunities, and some amazing people involved, and that's really all you can think about — being thankful for the people involved. We say all the time, small circle, big vision, and the people in that small circle are rock solid. That's something I'm grateful for every day, because it's not an easy thing to come across.
Tom Rowland: No, it's definitely not. But you bring those people to you — I fully believe you attract those kinds of people to your life and your business, and those are the people you want to spend your time with.
Mick Guthrie: I don't think it'd be any different for yourself. You don't have any level of success in life without good people around you — no matter how much credit people want to give you for it, you know it's not just you.
Tom Rowland: I do believe that iron sharpens iron, and paying attention to the circle of people around you is one of the most important things. They say you're the sum of the five people you spend the most time with, but I think you have different groups — business people, fishing people, other people — and surrounding yourself with high-quality people across those groups is a great recipe for success. It's obviously working for you, and it's worked for me too.
Mick Guthrie: It's bizarre, because I feel like only in the last five years have I really gotten my life sorted out. I've done some cool stuff in my life, but I come from teenage parents, so we never had any money whatsoever — that's why education was so important, and I got kind of pushed toward university because I was good at math. So I became an engineer and chased money, because none of that stuff was important to us as kids since we didn't have any. Now, the last five years, I've realized you don't actually need heaps of it — you just have to fill your life with purpose and people who mean something to you.
Tom Rowland: That's exactly right. Fill your life with purpose.
Mick Guthrie: Took me forty years to figure it out.
Tom Rowland: Hey, it takes some people eighty years, and it takes some people who never figure it out at all. If it only took you forty, you're doing pretty good.
Mick Guthrie: I guess you're right, actually — it's a credit to all the people in my life who made me think about it.
Tom Rowland: Well, let's stay in touch, man. It's great to get to know you a little bit, and we'll do this again. Alright, Mick — tell us where we can see your films and follow you on social again, and check out CAST. Where is that available?
Mick Guthrie: The best way to support us is through our online store. In America, it's castfishing.co, that's where you'll find all our equipment. We ship out of Clearwater, Florida, so it's fast domestic shipping. In Australia, castmag.co is our online store. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube under those same handles, and if you want to follow me personally on Instagram, it's at Mick Guthrie, nice and simple. Mainly, for people who want to support the business, jump on the castmag.co or castfishing.co Instagram or websites, and that's where you'll find what we do. If you have any questions, shoot us a DM, and we're always happy to get back to every single person who contacts us.
Tom Rowland: Right on. Alright, Mick, it's great to get to know you a little bit, and we'll do this again.
Mick Guthrie: One question before we go — the elk that your son shot, did you get that with a bow?
Tom Rowland: Yeah, that was last year.
Mick Guthrie: That's awesome.
Tom Rowland: And he spent — that was a five-year journey for him to get there. He really worked hard at it, everything from learning how to shoot the bow to learning how to find the animals, and then the combination of both. I have two sons; Turner's the oldest, and he's the one who killed the elk last year. Hayden was also out in Montana and hunted with us for a couple of days before he had to go back to school, so it was just me and my oldest son out there ourselves. Elk hunting is just so badass, I love it so much — it's got this thing where I keep saying, just when you think it's going to get easier, it gets harder.
Mick Guthrie: It gets hotter, I know — that's the way it is.
Tom Rowland: You're hiking up all these mountains, not seeing anything, it's super physical, and you think, well, as soon as we locate them we won't have to keep doing all this walking. Then you find them, but they're way up there, so now it's harder, and you're chasing them around. It got to the point where we finally killed one, and I thought, thank god we did this, now it's going to get easier — but it only got harder, because we had to carry the thing out.
Mick Guthrie: Yeah, exactly.
Tom Rowland: What an incredible thing. We invited Dan Staton to go hunting with us next year, and he said he wanted to go.
Mick Guthrie: I've been watching his stuff for so long. I've actually been doing a bit of bow hunting myself.
Tom Rowland: I see that. Tell me about the animal behind you — is that a …
Mick Guthrie: That one there? Yeah, that's a European red stag, a red deer. I got that in April this year. Here in Queensland, you're not allowed to hunt state land at all, that's poaching, so I've gotten lucky enough to have a couple of people with these animals on their property from time to time, free range, on cattle grazing leases. One friend in particular has been cultivating his land for about twenty-five years — they cull a few heads that aren't right and grow up some trophy heads, taking one good one every year. His dad and two friends alternate each year, and his son, who's my friend, and I alternate as well. This year he took up bow hunting after seeing me — that was the first one, taking my bow onto that property, and it's inspired him. He's got a bow now, so I'm going to go help him get his first one in April, hopefully. It's like the elk rut — they're bugling, roaring.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, they've heard that.
Mick Guthrie: It's crazy, sounds awesome. I would love to get into that side of things, honestly — there's so much stuff I want to do with my life, but I've just got to stay the path.
Tom Rowland: If you focus on what you've got, you'll make that happen, and then you'll have the freedom to do more. It's like Jocko says: discipline equals freedom. You get the discipline to pay attention to what you've got right now, and you'll have the freedom to hunt as much as you want a little later.
Mick Guthrie: A hundred percent. And like I said, I'm just grateful for really good people in my life — it seems like every turn over the last three or four years, I've met someone else who's become a massive part of my life and contributed to our collective success. It's so weird how things like that keep happening, and it kind of lets me know I'm on the right path.
Tom Rowland: I do believe it lets you know you're on the right path, but I also believe you're bringing those people into your life — you're putting out there what you want, and here's this person who's exactly what you were hoping for, what was missing in your life. That's happened to me a bunch of times, and I fully believe it happens, but you also have to be open to it happening. If you meet somebody and think, why wouldn't I want to do business with this guy, he seems really cool — a lot of people just close the door on it. But you're manifesting those things and allowing them to happen. It's kind of strange, but it happens so much, and it's a subject I've encountered many times in my life. It's fascinating to me, because it just continues to happen.
Mick Guthrie: Yeah, it's bizarre. I kind of feel like only in the last five years I've really gotten my life sorted out. I come from teenage parents, so we never had money, which is why education was so important, and I got pushed into university because I was good at math, so I became an engineer and chased money, because that stuff wasn't available to us as kids. Now, the last five years, I realize you don't actually need heaps of it — you just have to fill your life with purpose and people who mean something to you.
Tom Rowland: That's exactly right. Well, let's stay in touch, man — it's great to get to know you a little bit, and we'll do this again.
Mick Guthrie: Appreciate you, man. Thanks a lot.
Tom Rowland: Thank you. See you.
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