George Poveromo - 20 Years of TV Shows, Seminars and Educating Anglers

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Podcast Synopsis - George Poveromo on the Tom Rowland Podcast

This week I had the chance to sit down with the Legendary George Poveromo. George has been on television for 20 years now, hosting “George Poveromo’s World of Saltwater Fishing” which now airs on The Discovery Channel.George and I have a lot in common  from the Television world, and he has some crazy stories.  He shared one which was nearly his last.  While fishing with Capt Nick Stanzyk, he was pulled in by a swordfish and thought he was going to lose his life.  We share some other great stories including how he and his father used to go to the Marquesas Keys when he was just a kid and many more in this podcast, so be sure to listen all the way through to hear everything we talk about!  If you are a fan of George, share this podcast with someone you watched his shows with.  Tag us both on Instagram and let him know you listened.  

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George Poveromo Transcript

Table of Contents:

George Poveromo & His Obsession with Fishing - (06:36)

Fishing Key West & The Marquesas Islands with Dad - (08:56)

Fishing Unchartered Waters in the Keys with Old School Navigation - (14:52)

First Technological Advances Making Navigation Easier - (19:37)

George Poveromo + Conservation - (22:46)

George Poveromo + Acquiring Lowrance Partnership - (26:14)

Tournament Fishing & Cheating in the Early Days - (28:02)

George Poveromo’s World of Saltwater Fishing + National TV Networks - (36:09 - 41:24)

George Poveromo on the History of Saltwater Fishing - (51:55)

George Poveromo Life, Career, and Fishing Mentors - (57:13)

●      Getting on with Salt Water Sportsman + Dressing for Success - (57:13)

George Poveromo & Fishing with Bouncer Smith - (01:02:36)

Daytime & Nighttime Sword Fishing - (01:08:04)

Swordfish on the Attack - (01:09:56)

Sword Fish Pulls George Poveromo Overboard - The Incident (01:15:10)

●      Lessons from the Sword - (01:20:26)

Thank you George - (1:24:28)

George Poveromo: (00:01)

You know, what had happened was, we were fishing with Nick Stanczyk doing a show. We run-up to a spot. We dropped down and got hooked up with a swordfish, immediately. We got this fish near the boat, and probably fought him for about an hour. Beautiful fish. I'm looking at the fish, thinking 250-300 pounds. So what a remarkable fish for the show and the hook pulls. We go back to that spot; no sooner did the bait hit bottom, we get hooked up again. We fight another fish for an hour, maybe a little bit over, get the fish a little bit farther up, to where we could see it. Another beautiful fish, we pull the hook. I said, man, we're just snake-bitten, and it's terrible. We go and do it a third time. We hooked up. Now I'm fighting this fish for two hours.

George Poveromo: (00:40)

Now, keep in mind that this is almost constant fighting. We're finally getting the fish somewhat close to where we think we're going to beat it. I'm standing by my outboards, facing out. My buddy Carl was running his boat as our camera boat and crew. I see Carl coming around the outboards with the fish angled right in his direction. I said, Carl, what are you doing? He said that the camera crew said that they did not want to see your butts. They said we've got to get in front of you. I said, Carl, we've had bad luck. We pulled the hooks on two swords. At that angle, you're going to cut the fish off. I said, back up, go around the bow of my boat and come in that way. The sun will be at your back, and the fish is nowhere near there. You can get all the footage you need. I said we're already having bad luck.

George Poveromo: (01:21)

So he backs out, and he goes idling around. The last thing that I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye was his boat coming around the bow of my boat. As he was trying to get positioned, I go to crank down. I felt his wake, and it wasn't a bad wake. It lapped the side of my boat. It just so happened that as I was going down to take a crank, the wake splashed on my boat, bounced it. My feet went up, and next thing you know, I catapulted in the water with the Swordfish, and I'm going down. I remember this because I always had an escape plan, just in case something like this happened. I am a small boat guy, I big game fish, and I knew that sooner or later with your stand up gear, there's going to be a chance you're going to go overboard. So how do you survive it?

George Poveromo: (02:05)

So, I had these three things in my mind, a play out. Firstly, when you hit the water, slowly back down the reel's drag to alleviate the pressure. Some people will freak and not do anything, and that Swordfish will pull you down. Sometimes, they will freak and go into free-spool, which creates a giant bird's nest that locks the reel up, and you still go down. That was number one. I did that. When I did that, the pressure came off, and he came back to the top. The second part of the escape route was to grab the rod, pull to my chest, and unclip and swim out of the harness. That's where something went wrong. I'm doing it. I can't feel the rod, but I know I'm stuck to it. I knew I free-spooled a good bit, and I said I have to figure out what's going on.

George Poveromo: (02:44)

So I grabbed the side of my boat, and Nick Stanczyk is holding me by my shirt, and I'm slapping his hand off me. Because if I go down, Nick Stanczyk is 80 pounds soaking wet. If I go down, I'm going to take him with me, and I'm not going to drown the kid. So I was thinking to myself, I got one shot here. I have to take a breath, find out what's going on with this rod. And I've got to get out of it. Fortunately, Kevin saw what was happening. He jumps off the camera boat swims over to me. When I had flipped over, the rod somehow twisted itself going between my legs. I'm out there trying to grab it. I can't get to it. Kevin gets in there and gets a hand and unclips me. We put the rod back into the boat, and I get back in the boat, and continue to fight the fish.

George Poveromo: (03:33)

But the third part of the escape plan wouldn't have worked. You can grab your pliers and cut your line. But the pliers were underneath the big standup harness that I had. I'll circle back to that in just a second, but I got back up in the boat, and I said, Nick, push that drag down, is this fish still there? The fish was still there! So I got back up and got in the harness again, beat beyond comparison and fatigued. Fought the fish another half hour, and we got it alongside the boat. Nick asked, do you want me to fly-gaff him? or do you want me to dart him? I said, kill this thing the fastest way you know how because I do not know how much I got left in me. And he did. We brought it in, and it was a 256-pound swordfish.

(04:15)

I'm George Poveromo, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

[Intro Music]: (04:19)

Tom: (04:35)

Welcome to the show today. We have a great guest for us again today! George Poveromo is a legend in the television business. He's taught millions of people how to fish through his seminars, his national fishing seminars that he's done, alongside Mark Sosin. Now he has them all by himself. He has the George Poveromo World of Saltwater fishing, which has been on ESPN and NBC Sports. Now, you can watch them on the Discovery Channel. George is a wealth of knowledge, and he certainly does have a lot of stories. I enjoyed hearing some that I'd never heard before. If you're a fan of George Poveromo chances are, you may never have listened to these stories either. So standby for a great conversation, an entertaining hour and a half with the legend George Poveromo. All right, George Poveromo, how are you?

George Poveromo: (05:26)

I'm doing fine this morning, and I hope all is going well with you.

Tom: (05:29)

Yeah. After we worked out all of our technical issues. You got two guys here with AOL addresses. So you know that technology is probably going to be an issue. But after writing notes to one another across zoom, we figured it out. We got it going!

George Poveromo: (05:45)

No doubt. Just like if the GPS goes down on the boat, you have to resort back to the manual compass, like before all these new electronics came into play.

Tom: (05:53)

That is exactly right! That's the way to do it anyway. So speaking of that, I mean, George, you're a legend in this world, and you have had a great career. You've been on TV for 20 years. I don't know your story before your television show. So I'm interested in learning about what you did before the show. I did some research online, and there were all kinds of stories about you fishing with your family when you were young, especially in the Marquesas Keys, which I found very interesting because it is some of my home water. But, fill me in a little bit.

How did your obsession with fishing get started? It was with your dad, right? And your family.

George Poveromo & His Obsession with Fishing

George Poveromo: (06:36)

Absolutely. It all started with my father. He's the one that gets the blame for this crazy addiction that I have. My dad was a dentist in the Bay Harbor Islands, which is the Miami Beach area. He had a crazy passion for fishing. He would love to fish. Going back, as far as I remember, about six years of age, on his way back from work, he would pick me up, and he would take me to the seawall in North Biscayne Bay. You know, by the Broad Causeway bridge. They had that seawall and a little pier. I'd had this little plastic kids outfit with a little tiny hook. He would bring these small pieces of shrimp. I would catch these little grunts and snappers that had to be all of, maybe three inches long. I remember that small fish telegraphing through that short rod and the excitement when I caught it, still to this day. Of course, we let them go.

George Poveromo: (07:29)

That's when it hit me. When I think about this whole thing, a lot of my passion came from my genetics. I was hooked early on! So my dad would fish; we had a 23-foot boat. When I started getting old enough to go with him, we would go to Biscayne Bay and play around for trout. He had some reservations about taking me out offshore. His favorite spot to explore and go fishing, though, which he had done religiously for decades. He would  trailer the boat to Key West, run out to the Marquesas, and hit the rock piles with a goal for Groupers and Snappers. As soon as I was old enough to survive those trips, he would take me, and pretty much it was him who put that bug in me, and then growing up, I never really did any other sports.

George Poveromo: (08:18)

There was no other sport that interested me. I couldn't wait to get back from school because there was this freshwater canal that was two streets down. I would walk that bank until dinnertime chasing largemouth bass. When I was young, all I did in my spare time was fish. I did some go-kart racing back in the day, but the fishing was the whole big deal. When my dad finally got tired of it, I was 16 at the time. I had my driver's license and was able to trailer the family boat, and it just spiraled out of control from there.

Tom: (08:50)

So, tell me about the Marquesas. As you said, you were going out there when you were six years old?

Fishing Key West & The Marquesas Islands with Dad

George Poveromo: (08:56)

Yeah, the Marquesas, he probably started bringing me there when I was around eight years old. We fished a lot of local water before that because I was too young. Back then, you know, it wasn't like it is today, where we have these fast boats and fuel capacities. Back then, you'd run 28 miles west of Key West. That was a long trip. So in a lot of cases, he would leave early in the morning, run out there, we hit the rock piles all day. After that, my dad would anchor at night, cook some of the fish that we caught and then go night fishing. After night fishing, we would come back in, anchor up, and the next morning for pretty much, most of the day, we would fish and then drive the boat back to Key West. So it wasn't feasible based on the low speeds and limited fuel to be able to run back and forth each day like we've been doing for a long time now. But his whole thing was mutton snapper and grouper primarily, mutton snapper.

George Poveromo: (09:46)

That was his favorite fish. He would hit those rock piles. To him, there's only two fish in the world that existed, mutton snapper and grouper. Then, having done so much bottom fishing, I'm more of an offshore person. I remember, later on, we'd have arguments. I would have to talk him into going offshore fishing. He would say “I don't want to go out there and troll; it's boring. Let's drop for grouper and snapper.” We'd have these friendly arguments. Most of the time, I would win. If something didn't eat offshore in about an hour, then I started hearing it, "come on, let's get back on the reef, dropdown, maybe try to get mutton or a grouper." So it was a big toss between offshore and bottom fishing. But the Marquesas, by far, was his favorite spot. I had been there so many times since I was a young kid with him through my early twenties that it got to the point when I would hear him talk, "Hey, what do you think about running to the Marquesas this weekend and I would shudder when I listened to the word Marquesas."

George Poveromo: (10:41)

Here we go again.

Tom: (10:43)

[Laughter] That's an exciting place for somebody in the Miami area because it is a long way to go. Back then, there would have been so much other great fishing right there in Miami. Why or how did he even find out about that? That seems like a long way to go.

George Poveromo: (11:01)

It is. And it was a fact. A gentleman by the name of Bob Colvin introduced him to it. My dad was a dentist, as I mentioned, and Bob Colvin sold dental supplies. Early on in my dad's career, they become close friends. Bob Colvin was the one that supercharged him when it started to come to fishing, and then Bob Colvin was the one that said, "Hey, you ever fish the Marquesas?" And my dad said, "Oh, what are they?" After that, they took the boat down there! Bob said, "Let's go down there!" Bob had lived in Homestead, and that was his savored area. So Bob Colvin was the one who introduced my dad to the Marquesas, and then my dad fell in love with the place because it was a spot that you could drop down with light tackle or anything.

George Poveromo: (11:42)

And you're always getting strikes. There's a lot of undersized fish there, as you well know, but there are some beauties to be had as well. It was he who got my dad interested. Shortly after, that was my dad's favorite. I remembered in 1979; we upgraded from a 23ft Mako to a 25ft. I wanted to go to Bimini. I said, you know, let's go to Bimini. So we had run over to Bimini. My dad got tired of that, like real fast, "come on, let's put this boat on a trailer. And head to the Marquesas, after this Bimini trip." But he fell in love with the place, and I still love it. Marquesas Keys is rich with family history, so I try to get down there once a year. It's a special place, and the memories are just so abundant. Every time you come by that area, your mind just goes back to all those wonderful times that you had. It's just an extraordinary place.

Tom: (12:38)

Isn't that something? Like the way that a place will do that to you. You know, I could go back to a little pond I fished with my dad in Tennessee, and the same thing would happen, but I could go to another one, and I wouldn't get those memories. It's like a geographical place kind of does that to you sometimes.

George Poveromo: (12:55)

It does, and it just gets you hooked. It is a special place. I think my father was the first unofficial mayor of the Marquesas out there.

Tom: (13:04)

Do you remember stilt houses being out there? I've heard that there were still houses there, and people have told me they've even shown me where the base was. Almost like the Ernest Hemingway house off Cut Trail, you know, I heard there were other places out there in the Marquesas. Do you remember anything like that?

George Poveromo: (13:22)

I do not. I don't remember anything related to stilt houses, that I don't. But I can tell you some of the things that I do remember as I mentioned, we would anchor overnight, and then in the morning, you wake up, and you fry some eggs on a Bunsen burner, or whatever we had back then.

A couple of times, I guess this had to be in May, and you would know this better than anybody. I woke up, like super early, heard all this water splashing and chaos. I looked out into the water, and there had to be thousands of tarpon just migrating past us where we anchored. I'm throwing everything in a world but can't even get them to look at it. It was like, unreal. Would that have been May?

Tom: (13:59)

Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure, and you were probably right on the Northeast corner. The tarpon were pouring by. You could have anchored up anywhere. I mean, every spot out there is a pretty good spot, on some tide.

 In that area, would you see anyone else out there, any other boats, commercial boats, anything?

George Poveromo: (14:21)

The Commercial boats you would see. In lobster season, you would see the boats out there as well. Every once in a while, you'd see a commercial fishing boat. I wasn't sure if they were fishing for yellowtail snappers or something else. Pretty much back in that timeframe, it was a remote place. I mean, if you saw another recreational boat out there, that was like really an odd sight, because back then was the wild, wild West and pretty much-uncharted frontier going that far back in time.

Fishing Unchartered Waters in the Keys with Old School Navigation

Tom: (14:52)

I mean, I would think for sure it was the wild, wild West. Even in the 70s, it was the wild wild West. The 80s! I mean, because what you're talking about, we did not have the boats we do today. We did not have the engines or the fuel economy. Like that was a long way to go. You would hear stories from Ralph Delph talking about finding the wrecks out there and just finding them by the Cobia. You would just run, and then you would see Cobias floating, and he'd be like, "okay, this seems like a pretty good spot."

George Poveromo: (15:26)

Oh, it's impressive how they did that before Loran and especially the GPS. They would just run that stopwatch and figure it out. Bob Colvin, the gentleman I told you about, who was a buddy of my fathers, was from that old school era, and he would do a timing deal to get out to a lot of those spots of the keys.

Tom: (15:47)

Yeah, well, a lot of the young listeners will not understand what you're referring to. Explain that. So that people understand how that works and how it worked only with your boat. You had to do it with your RPMs on your boat.

George Poveromo: (16:00)

You did. I remember what we had to do before we went down to the keys with Bob Colvin. He said, go to Government Cut in Miami. They have that measured mileage that you can run. Figure out what RPMs and what speeds you're running. So what it was, it was based on your particular boat at a certain RPM, at a certain speed. You would have a specific timeframe and one particular heading direction to tell you where the wreck lies. So it was a combination of the speed, time, and the heading direction. Back then, you had nowhere near the pressure that we see today. You would see life come up, like barracudas at the surface, and you would see turtles popup. So even if you were 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 feet off, you could tell where the wreck was just by the amount of life concentrating in that one area. So then you would circle over, and you had the old paper graph machine, and you would start marking. And here we are! It was speed over ground versus time. But then again, you had the advantage of unpressured waters to where a lot of this life would also give itself up and told you there's a good piece of the bottom structure under you.

Tom: (17:12)

Right. But then you had to start factoring in like, what if it's blowing 20mph, instead of being slick calm. Then, I mean, I'm sure there are so many days where you would just not find anything. It's like, well, we can't run the same speed that we ran at Government Cut because of the wind or the waves or whatever. And, or maybe we have too many people in the boat, or it's loaded down too much. We're not even close.

George Poveromo: (17:40)

In case of that, you would have to know what your different speeds were and apply those speeds to different time frames. If you were to run slower, how much more time you would have to add on the clock to try to get you in that area. You had to have somebody brilliant in math to figure a lot of that stuff out, and then don't bother them.

Tom: (18:02)

More importantly, don't bother them while they are driving! Because if you took your mind off of what you were doing, then it's all lost. You can be off your heading by 5 degrees and be in the middle of nowhere in no time. Like, if you're talking like you would do today, that you would end up in the middle of nowhere quickly.

George Poveromo: (18:23)

I know! So whoever was running the boat at that time had to be unsocial until they got out to the spot and found it. Then he can unwind and relax. From that point, going back a little bit better because at one point, and you're going to hit land somewhere. So it was more critical to get to that spot and those wrecks than anything else. Going back to what I remember, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, we would find these better rock piles. In order to do so, we would drift over areas. While doing so, we dropped down lead sticks or a sinker. You would lift and drag it and then you were able to tell when you came over the hard bottom by the dents in that sinker.

George Poveromo: (19:08)

So if you're dropping it down and you're hitting the sand, you're not going to get those dents, but you go down, and you start hitting harder bottom. Number one, you're going to feel the difference between sand and the rocks. Then you reel it up, and you could see the dents. Okay. Here's a rock pile. Let's throw the anchor on this and start fishing. So this is going, before the equipment that we have today. Now you put in these charts, and you can see every single thing in the world, and go for it!

First Technological Advance Making Navigation Easier

Tom: (19:37)

What do you think was the first significant technological advance that made it easier for you and your dad to find these places? What was the first thing after the paper chart? I mean, that paper, I remember my grandfather having one of those Lowrance paper charts, and it was real paper. Like if water got on it, it got messed up. You know, nothing was waterproof back then. Like there were significant issues with that. But I wonder if you can think about the first thing that made it so much easier?

George Poveromo: (20:11)

It would have to be like a combination of several things. It was when Loran-C came to the recreational anglers as one of your Nav AIDS. It would be that, and quality fish finders. It allowed you to be drifting or running over an area and see a good representation of what's on that bottom. I would say those two were the breakthroughs and everything else followed in place as far as the reliability of the outdoors and the power for that particular timeframe. Then, boat companies were starting to put some more fuel on the boats. So, it's a combination, I would have to say was Loran-C and the fish finders that opened a lot of that. You no longer had to rely on guesswork. You could look at charts and figure out where you wanted to go based on the coordinates, so that's what I would have to say.

Tom: (21:07)

And then when you found something, you had a reasonable chance of finding it again, with a Loran number. That seems like that would be a big deal instead of kind of like, okay, like if you went to a wreck or you tried to go to a wreck, and maybe you missed it, but then you found another one which you could easily do in the quicksands area of the Marquesas. So now you're like, okay, this has been excellent fishing, but you had to head back home to Boca Grande. How were you going to find this place again? Especially when you found it by accident. That would be tricky before Loran, but then once you had Loran, you could at least assign some sort of a number to it and get you real close to the same spot.

George Poveromo: (21:54)

Absolutely. Yeah.

Tom: (21:56)

That's fascinating! I'll tell you, I mean, and then just learning all this stuff and probably navigating without any GPS, but also in the dark because you had to leave so early because the boats were slow and that's pretty tricky. I think I was fortunate enough to learn how to navigate before the GPS, but today it's a different deal. I mean, it's like playing a video game. You just follow along, and you can pretty much go anywhere, but back then, it was easy to make a mistake. Very Easy!

George Poveromo: (22:32)

Oh, I know. You look at all the advances we have today, and you wonder how these fish even have a shot anymore. It's like, wow, a lot is going against them. You know, thank goodness we have some decent conservation measures in place.

George Poveromo & Conservation

Tom: (22:46)

Conservation is something you have been a part of as well, especially with the CCA. How long have you been involved with them?

George Poveromo: (22:51)

A long time, for as long as I can remember. I'll give you a little lesser-known fact about me, which ties in with Darrell Lowrance. You know, Founder of Lowrance Electronics and all. When I graduated from college in 1981 from the University of Miami, I had gone to work with Salt Water Sportsman a couple of years later. From 1981 to 1984, I helped run the Greater Miami Billfish tournament. They had started the Miami sailfish tournament that would run as a triple crown event with the Fort Lauderdale billfish tournament and then the Pompano beach fishing rodeo. The problem back then was that these tournaments were all kill tournaments. So in that month and a half timeframe, when all three would run, there'd be 300-400 sailfish killed amongst the three tournaments, which was horrendous. So I was on the board and ran it the first year. In doing so, I tried to convince the board that we need to turn these tournaments to a release-only tournaments.

George Poveromo: (23:51)

You had all the old school Captains that were more selfish and, we're not interested in doing it. They fought me every step of the way. I was very close to Darrell Lowrance because Darrell had fished the Mako owner tournaments and the outdoor writer tournaments. He got involved with a lot of that. So I had known him, and he took a liking to me. We became good friends. He was a major sponsor of the Miami billfish tournament back then. So finally, we wanted to make this a release-only tournament, and the board shot us down. So I called Darrell and said Darrell, I know you're a committed sponsor, but I said, I have to ask you this. Would you back me on something? I knew Darrell was a prominent conservationist.

George Poveromo: (24:33)

I said we need to make this a release tournament. These billfish tournaments are killing Sailfish by the numbers, and it's terrible. Since you're a major sponsor, I said I need your help. I know your commitment, but I want you to back me up. I'm going to go to the next meeting and say, Darrell Lowrance says, they're going to pull his sponsorship if we don't become a release tournament. He said, "I've got your back with 100% certainty." So the next meeting came up, and I said that, and they screamed, he can't do that? And I just said, Hey, people look, let me know. Do we have a tournament or we don't? Because without his sponsorship, the tournament can't go on. Let me know. I'll wrap up tonight, and we'll go home. Are we going to make this a go? And they'd begrudgingly said, well, we've got to do it.

George Poveromo: (25:14)

So with that, we became a release tournament where the winners had to get polygraphed. The next event that we did, by just irony, was the lowest number of Sailfish ever caught. You know, people thought anglers would go rampant and cheat but the reality was much different. What had happened because of that, the pressure went on Fort Lauderdale and the Pompano Beach Rodeo. Fort Lauderdale converted to a release deal. And then Pompano converted to a partial release deal, and at one point, they ended up doing away with bringing these billfish in. So, because of a little bluff that Darrell Lowrance backed me on, we converted that whole scene of South Florida Sailfish tournaments to all release. Subsequently, all these other events, especially Sailfish events, had to be all release-only as well. That was a little lesser-known fact. I was the director of the Greater Miami Billfish Tournament back then, and because of Darrell Lowrance tag teaming me, we changed the whole face of kill Sailfish tournaments out of South Florida.

George Poveromo + Acquiring Lowrance Partnership

Tom: (26:14)

That's super cool. I didn't know that. I didn't know that at all. I certainly didn't know the tie in with Darrell Lowrance. He was probably very influential in the catch and release bass scene as well. Right?

George Poveromo: (26:26)

Darrell was a prominent conservationist, all the way around. He always practiced conservation everywhere and then preached it. What was funny about that was in my Salt Water Sportsman years, and the writer tournament days, I decided to come out with a television series. I talked to him and said, "Darrell, just to let you know, I'm going to shoot a pilot. I said, if national television wants it, don't spend that advertising money because I'm going to call you up. He goes, "all right, George, you get on a national network, we'll be there." Sure enough, we got on our first year on ESPN 2. I called Darrell. Hey, Darrell, guess what? I hope you didn't spend all that advertising money. I'm on. He goes, did you get there? Yeah. And you said, what do you need to do this?

George Poveromo: (27:08)

And I told him, he goes, I'll call my advertising people tomorrow. He says, sends a contract. He signed off, and he's been my television sponsor ever since. Back then, Lowrance got acquired by Navico, which is a Simrad. Since I was more an offshore guy, they converted me to the Simrad brand. So really, that whole Darrell Lowrance relationship still lives to this day because of that whole deal. But I was that close to him. I told him, don't spend that advertising money. If I get a show, I'm calling and true to form, and he's right there!

Tom: (27:44)

That's super cool. So, what was the major complaint about going away from the kill tournaments to the release tournaments? Did people think you were going to cheat or if other people were going to cheat?

Tournament Fishing & Cheating in the Early Days

George Poveromo: (28:02)

Sure, people make things up. They had to have it structured. We had an incident and not the first year, but the second year. The Attorneys that wrote the rules up and put stipulations on the rules. Not only did you have to release the most Sailfish to win, but you also had to pass a polygraph test to the satisfaction of the board of directors. So there were two hurdles you had to do. So the first year was remarkable. In the second year, in the fall event, Lauderdale had an issue with a captain. They warned us. Miami's tournament was always in April. They said, this captain is coming to your tournament, and he cheated and everything. I said then, why did you let them win? Well, we are afraid of getting sued. I said, well, that's a stupid thing.

George Poveromo: (28:48)

You're defeating the purpose. Anyway, the guy fudged it, big time in a billfish tournament! So we pulled the captain, his son, and the mate off to be polygraphed. We went into the room, and the polygrapher examined each one of these individuals separately. We would sit there and watch it. I was never one to even know how accurate a polygraph exam was or wasn't because I never took one in my life, but I watched the questions they asked. Every time that needle would spike up and down and down. They did the captain twice. They did the captain's son, and they did the person who was part of the team as well. They laid all four of these exams alongside each other, along with the questions. Every single one spiked on this one question.

George Poveromo: (29:39)

So, finally, we called the captain in and said, here's the deal. You're not going to win this because you cheated, and it is apparent right here. We are going to disqualify you. We can let you out easily and say that there was a technical mishap when you reported your results. We'll let you slide out without embarrassment. He said, "no way, we're going to sue you." I said, that's fine. That's why we had attorneys on the board of directors. They said they would take up the cause. I said sign this deal. He fought, and I remember Harry Vernon was sitting in there, and he was threatening Harry Vernon. It got ugly and took place at the Biscayne Bay Marriott, but we stood our ground and said, that's it. They said we're going to go ahead and disqualify you. The Miami Herald was there. They asked, what happened, and I said we disqualified them because they failed the polygraph exam!

George Poveromo: (30:23)

Well, the person they were fishing with came back in and was crying to me. I'm sorry. They made me do this. They made me do; please stop this bad publicity. I work for Florida Power and Light. I can't afford to lose my job. I said, well, you should have thought of that before you pulled this stunt. Anyway, it was in there, their names, and that they worked for Florida Power and Light. It just so happened that the guy who got caught worked at the FPL lot or division that one of my close friends worked at. So he called me up. He says, my God, this was after the tournament. The guy pulled his truck in the lot, and got on the big Florida power trucks. When they came back in, people messed with his truck. They put stucco poles, fake outriggers, and lair boxes all over this truck.

George Poveromo: (31:12)

He took a beating for that one, but we upheld it. We barred this individual and his boat for life. He got caught blatantly cheating. The cheating aspect was a big deal, but we had safeguards. One of my arguments still to this day is, well, if you have a kill tournament, let's just say you have Dolphin, Kingfish, Wahoo, non-bill fish. People bring those fish in. Who's to say, Tom, you and I, we got a connection. You're 20 miles off Miami, and I'm 25 miles off Fort Lauderdale. You get a 30-pound dolphin. I got two, nice dolphins here and say, we've got a third buddy who's got a big King. We all have a point to meet up and throw all these fish in one boat. Just because you pulled at the dock and offload these fish, people assume that you caught them. That may not be true. See, there's an easier way to cheat in those events. Having to go in front of the polygraph test makes all the difference, in my personal opinion!

Tom: (32:09)

Yeah! For sure. And today, like now, you can do it with video and all this other stuff and digital photography, which is instantaneous. But back then, like, even if you gave them cameras, which was almost an impossibility because cameras were expensive and disposable cameras weren’t around yet. It would even take a long time to develop the film. So that makes it useless as well. So that's interesting. So what was to gain? Why would someone go through all of those measures to cheat? How much money were we talking about?

George Poveromo: (32:45)

I remember back then, our top prize was like $10,000 cash. It was a pretty healthy paycheck. If that individual or boat cheated at the Fort Lauderdale tournament, it would all add up quickly. I don't know what they paid them up there. It could have been five, six, seven grand, or I'm not sure, but you know, you win all the classes in a Miami Billfish tournament, it has to be worth at least $10,000, if not more than that.

Tom: (33:10)

Right! So, it's a good thing that those aspects of the tournament did not bring it down.

People could have said that the release tournaments were not working, because of the cheating. Look, somebody cheated in two of these; we're going back to the kill, which you're saying that you kind of rallied against for the reasons that you gave us, was there any backlash on that?

George Poveromo: (33:38)

No, the fact that the first time we did that, we had the lowest catch rate in Miami Billfish tournament history at that time. The second time, when we got challenged, we stood up to it, won, and blew them out. So I think that strengthened the whole deal, and everything pretty much was falling into place, and people feel more comfortable with that style of the tournament going to release.

Tom: (34:03)

Everything causes ripple effects! When you do something significant like this, especially in a big sailfish tournament, it will undoubtedly create a ripple effect. Those ripple effects would go right into tarpon tournaments, bonefish tournaments, and even the Red Bones. For a long time, tarpon got killed in their tournaments as well. People did not want that to go away either, but it did finally. Probably for an excellent reason. I mean, it has to be that way.

George Poveromo: (34:38)

There was another twist that showed you how many legs the sailfish kill tournament had. Now, they tried to justify the kill in a lot of cases. They would take the Sailfish, have it smoked, and distributed to needy people. But, I never knew, and the board never knew just how much of that had gotten to needy people. Back then, there was a big black market for Sailfish. It was illegal, you couldn't sell it, but a substantial black market existed. Big-name captains would take these sails after-hours and sell them. Back then, you were getting $2-$2.50 per pound for the whole fish to smokehouses. They would sell that as smoked fish and just distribute that. The Miami Billfish tournament was a major collector of all that. So, I was never sure of how much of that went to needy people or the black market, lining somebody's pocket.

Tom: (35:41)

It sounds like a Carl Hiaasen novel, in which there is this dirty underworld, but you could not tell because it seems so naive on the surface. You're just going out for a fishing tournament, but then you have people trying to cheat and a black market to support it. That's a pretty exciting story! George adds, "We're in South Florida!" Yeah. Anything can happen in South Florida, that's for sure and usually does!

Salt Water Sportsman + George Poveromo TV + National Seminar Series

Tom: (36:09)

So you alluded to how the TV show started; you had a good relationship with Darrell Lowrance, but were you already working at Salt Water Sportsman at this point?

George Poveromo: (36:18)

1983. I came aboard with Salt Water Sportsman, and I'm still there. I pen their tackle and tactics column. Write several features a year. So I've been with them since 1983. In 1983, I came aboard, and in 1987, Mark Sosin and I had these discussions about coming out with a national seminar series tour. How that came into being, our saltwater sportsman national seminar series, which enters into year 34, this coming January. How that came into being was at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show each October, early November. Saltwater Sportsman would call us, Hey George, Hey Mark, and several other writers. We want you to do these little clinics for the Fort Lauderdale boat show. The Fort Lauderdale boat show talked to Salt Water Sportsman and said, "Hey, you do the clinics."

George Poveromo: (37:17)

So, it was the most embarrassing thing in the world. We went to the Lauderdale boat show, and it had the stage, and it was by the food court. So you would walk up on stage. They would announce that Mark Sosin was coming up at Seven at night. I was coming on at Five in the afternoon. We would go up there and give a half-hour clinic, and you'd look out there, and it'd be half a dozen people just sitting there not to hear you, but to eat the hotdog and a hamburger at the food concession. It would happen to the point where Sosin and I talked and said, "This is embarrassing the Salt Water Sportsman name, let alone our names. So, after a few years of that, we told Rip Cunningham, "Hey Rip. We have to stop this. These clinics are an embarrassment.

George Poveromo: (37:59)

The only people we're attracting are people who want to eat and need a seat. After that, boom, they're gone. I said the mentality is different at a boat show. People are there to eat a sandwich, drink a beer, walk around and look at boats. They're in a movie mode. It's not a seminar mode. We need people to sit down with their minds open, ready to learn. Two different animals here. So, Mark and I came up with this idea about doing a national tour and taking it around the country and getting Saltwater Sportsman to back this. So we put everything together. Darrell Lowrance was first to jump on that as well. We had a good lineup of sponsors. We still do. So in 1988, we hit the road with the Salt Water Sportsman National Seminar Series. It was a hit right out of the box. We're packing auditoriums, all-day seminars on a Saturday.

George Poveromo: (38:46)

I had done that and currently am still doing it. Year number 34 will be coming up in 2021. Twenty years earlier, from today, I was thinking, what's my next logical career move? I am with Salt Water Sportsman, and it's the number one saltwater fishing publication out there. We have the seminar series, Mark Sosin did 10-years of that, and then he dropped out. I took it from there. He and I were equal partners for the first 10-years of the tour. He retired from it, and I took it and have the whole thing as I do now. My next logical career move would be to come out with a television show, but a national one. I didn't want to do something on a local level. It was hard for me to watch television shows back then because I thought it was insulting to the sport of fishing, two guys in a boat.

George Poveromo: (39:36)

"Hey there, Jerry, that's a beautiful fish!" Oh, that's wonderful. Look, man, I look how clean that fish is. Yeah, she's a beauty, and they do it. It's the same old thing. I said it's almost like mind rot. I came out with the show concept that patterned our seminar series in a way, in that with my connection with the Salt Water Sportsman; I had the opportunity to travel abroad a lot and write features. My show, I could easily travel to great international destinations, but for the average saltwater, recreational angler going to say Venezuela for a White Marlin outing might be a dream trip, once in a lifetime, if he was able even to do that. So I said, let me go onto the backbone of the saltwater recreational market. I wanted to target anglers who fish saltwater in 17-foot boats on up the 45-47 foot boats, which was the backbone.

George Poveromo: (40:29)

That's where I had come out with the show concept to focus on the coastal U.S. Now and then, we'll do a show abroad, but the coastal U.S, targeting that saltwater market from inshore saltwater, nearshore to offshore, which would hit the majority of a recreational market. Where you'd make an entertaining show, but you're also fishing. You're talking technicalities; you're showing how you're doing it. So if you were doing a Dolphin show, say out of Islamorada, somebody from up in Virginia who Dolphin fishes, well, they're not fishing our same waters, but could look at the techniques they're using here. The goal was to have them adopt and adapt our techniques to their home waters. Of course, we knew the show being national; this could help. We shot our show everywhere! We went to every coastal fishery from Maine, Texas, and even Alaska as well. So that was a huge hit. We could tell we were doing it right with our show concept, and it worked out nicely for us.

George Poveromo World of Saltwater Fishing + TV + National TV Networks

Tom: (41:24)

Did that debut on ESPN?

George Poveromo: (41:29)

It did; we had sent two VHS tapes out. Back then, the networks wouldn't talk to you. They wanted to see if you were up to their standards. So back then, it was ESPN and the national network, TNN. I sent two packages out simultaneously. I got a call a week later from ESPN, saying we have a time slot. “Somebody dropped out of our new ESPN 2 at 7:00 AM, would you be interested in taking that over?” I said absolutely! So we flew to Connecticut and worked our deal. So we had gone with ESPN for the first ten years of our television series. ESPN waited to get everybody's contract to end in the same timeframe, and then they did away with their outdoors. Three days later, we got picked up by Versus, which was NBC sports.

George Poveromo: (42:26)

So we ran nine years at NBC sports till about a year and a half ago. They said the same thing; we're getting out of all the outdoors. So I called up my team and said, all right guys, it looks like we're going to fish for fun coming up because it looks like our show is officially done. It was our show's 19th year. I said I've got to get my 20th-anniversary series. Through a connection, an excellent connection I had at ESPN, who had connections over at Discovery, helped me land a deal. Two weeks later, we ended up over at the Discovery Channel. That's where we celebrated our 20th-anniversary on television. That's where we are locked in to do our 2021 season. So our ongoing joke is, you know, we wore out ESPN 2 then went to a major network. We were at NBC sports and wore them out too.

Tom: (43:12)

Yeah, well, that's a very similar path that we were on. We did our first season on the outdoor channel; Rich and I were both still guiding at the time. We were so proud of this show. The outdoor channel was so small. The first year, we had just done this show, put our heart and soul into it. Every client that got on the boat, I would say, have you seen the show? They would say, "ah, no, no, not yet, not yet. Uh, what's it on?" And I'd say the outdoor channel, and they'd say, "Oh, I get that" That was when it used to be outdoor life, instead of Versus right, and now the Outdoor Life Channel. Then it changed to Versus, which then changed to NBC sports. I would say, no, it's not that one.

Tom: (43:51)

It's the one with a Moose logo, and then I would get "moose? No, I never saw that." I just kept asking everybody, and they just said, "no, never seen that. Nope, never seen that. I don't get that channel." Even my dad, he's like, "how do I see the show?" He was going to have to get a Dish Network or some sort of dish. He had too many trees around his house. He couldn't even get it. I said we have to do something about this. Then the next year, we had a show on OLN, Outdoor Life Network, which turned to Versus, which was where the full-length show was. We also had a two-minute show on ESPN, right there, probably between your show and somebody else's, you know, we had those little vignette shows, and it was fantastic. That was such a great network.

Tom: (44:34)

Both of those, I mean, the ratings on both of those networks were just astronomical. So on the weekend, we would do just huge ratings, and then that all changed. ESPN decided we're not doing this anymore, then OLN changes to Versus, and then Versus changes to NBC, and then NBC says, we're not doing this anymore. We found ourselves on the Discovery Channel with a few other things going on too. You've had a crazy career over there with all the different TV networks. Where do you see that going?

George Poveromo: (45:08)

Well, we're going to run, as I said, we have a history of wearing networks out, so we're going to run the Discovery. Rating's been super. So we're going to run Discovery, and we'll see where it goes from there. We second-handedly have more core sponsors than anyone else. We put our episodes over on my YouTube channel, George Poveromo TV. So if somebody happened to miss our first or second quarter airing on Discovery, they could go over there and watch it, and 4k broadcast it. We are just going to keep on trucking in that direction. Circling back, here's an ironic story. In our first year, I'll always remember this. It was our first episode that we aired on ESPN 2. It was a Sunday. We were airing Sunday, and so was the Daytona 500. 

George Poveromo: (45:58)

I got a call on Tuesday from the programming person at ESPN. He called me up and said, "George, we got to tell you something. He said your show on Sunday had 580,000 household viewers. It was the number one watched show in the entire ESPN block until Dale Earnhardt got killed. That was the day Dale Earnhardt died. Of course, after he died, he took the top ratings. I remember feeling amazed. Here we are running away with it. Dale Earnhardt beat us on that one, though. He took the top ratings that day; unfortunately, that was when he had died in the crash. I will always remember that phone call on that day!

Tom: (46:44)

That's incredible! I often wonder, like, why do you think that women's soccer in Australia will out-rate what we've been doing on ESPN?

George Poveromo: (46:56)

I'll tell you why. I'll tell you the exact reason why. You may know this, my inside sources at ESPN told me what had happened. ESPN had a very successful outdoor blog. The majority of the shows were all time-buys. Therefore, they knew how much time they were giving out and the income it was generating. They were a beast of a network. Everybody wanted to be there, and they started getting on the cocky side. They would get all these videos from different shows, and off-beat concept shows. He said, okay, we liked that, but they'll go to the producer. We want to pay you to produce the show for us. It will own the show and sell the show as they deemed fit, and we'll pay you X amount to produce it for us. So he started doing that. They were acquiring all these shows with these producers.

George Poveromo: (47:52)

They were branching out trying to do some of their own John Lards or some odd beat shows that ran somewhat with the outdoor block. They overextended themselves with that. When the economy turned south, they had their sales teams going to ICAST, trying to branch into our industry. Our industry is a mom and pop industry, and they were trying to sell these shows. ESPN couldn't do it because the industry stays with some of the more notable names to keep them going, especially the more recognizable names. They had contracts with these people, multi-year in a lot of cases. So they had to pay these producers to play the shows, even though ESPN was losing money. So finally, the beat counters looked at it and they were upside down with the outdoors block. We need to get out from under this thing.

George Poveromo: (48:40)

That's not the politically correct story that they gave. ESPN wanted to get back to the roots of live sports programming. It was a facade, and they had lost. They were losing their rear end because of that. Over at NBC Sports, they had a few shows that they were doing that too. They jumped out of that entirely and went to the time-buys. They saw what happened over there with ESPN. So that's what brought down those networks that they just stayed, or ESPN in particular, with the time-buy, they probably still had a very, rich and rewarding outdoor block now. Things always change too.

In many cases, whoever ends up taking over the programming director, may not be a fan of fishing or the outdoors. So they said, we don't need this stuff. It's not a good look for us. Let's take up as you said, women's soccer, professional bowling, not there's anything wrong with bowling.

Tom: (49:42)

You go wherever, but they pick up these kinds of sports that people aren’t familiar with like, Australian Rules Football or something like that. It is an exciting sport and maybe on a global market, it has a more significant rating than what fishing can pull in. They used to have hunting on there too, but they wouldn't allow kill shots. They would get right to the kill shots, and then the next shot would be the animal on the ground. That spawned the juries. They wanted to see kill shots. We're just going to put this out on DVD, about the time that DVDs came out and created a whole industry of that because they wouldn't allow the kill shots ESPN. It is interesting how you kind of tie all that stuff back together.

Tom: (50:30)

But then specific networks would allow the kill shots or the Gaff shots. We had a spearfishing show get axed off of NBC Sports. They said, no, we're not doing that. Anyway, that's back in the days where there were, real gatekeepers, even if you had the money and you were ready to do the time-buy. You had to send them something, and they looked at it, and they were like, "ah, I don't know this guy. Yeah. I don't think he's, I don't think we can. I don't think this is a good look here" or whatever. For whatever reason, any reason, no reason, they would just say no, and then you'd have to try again. Luckily, it worked for both of us, you were talking about Mark Sosin there.

I just read this excellent book. A book that you'll want to read too. It had this guy on the podcast the other day; his name is Monte Burke. He wrote this book called "Lords of the Fly." It's all about the fly-fishing world record hunters and when they were going to Homosassa and everything like that. In this book, he talks about so many other things, and the history of the sport. I learned history about Mark Sosin as well. He had been almost solely responsible for making fly records in the IGFA, International Game Fish Association. Do you remember those days when he was working on that?

George Poveromo on the History of Pioneer Anglers in Saltwater Fishing

George Poveromo: (51:55)

Oh yeah, he was mainly a fly angler. A fly and then light tackle, but he had a huge name and reputation with a fly fishing end. He pioneered just a lot of that stuff. He and Lefty Kreh, those were pioneers in fly fishing. I don't Flyfish, but I tried it a couple of times. It didn't move me, but they were the pioneers with that. Suppose you look at the anglers or guys before us, Mark Sosin, Lefty Kreh, Bob McNally, and Frank Sargeant. These were the ultimate heavyweights. It would be like looking at the old heavyweight boxers like Larry Holmes, George Foreman, Muhammad Ali. I mean, that's who these guys were, and these guys were larger than life themselves.

George Poveromo: (52:50)

So naturally, you aspire to be like they are. A lot of that, maybe work ethic wise, bleeds off into like what you and I both do. Right. I was very fortunate with Mark, who was the biggest name in saltwater fishing. It was related to Mako Owner tournaments, he was friends with Bill Monroe, and he would go on the rider trips. When I first met him, I knew who he was, but Bill Monroe brought Mark and introduced him to me. I was laughing. I said this guy looks like Curly from The Three Stooges. He had that haircut and everything.

George Poveromo: (53:27)

Yeah, and pretty much almost the same build. To me, Mark was just a jovial, friendly guy. He took an instant liking to me. We would sit, and we would talk. We became very, very tight. So as I mentioned, we started the seminars, but I started my writing career in 1983, coming on board with Salt Water Sportsman. He sat me down, and he gave me an inside track that would later prove to be so valuable. How that went was he said, I am going to tell you who the good guys are in this industry and the ones you can trust. Also, I am going to tell you who the buttholes are in the industry. You will want to watch your back and don't have any substantial dealings with these guys. He named names. Some of those on the other side of the fence were some big-name people that would have surprised you!

George Poveromo: (54:20)

He guided me in a lot of different ways. It was like getting ready to start your first Indy 500, and you have Mario Andretti as your coach. That's how I felt, having him tell me how to write quality-wise, who to trust, and how you deliver. He always had great advice that was consistent with what my family taught. He says, "you always deal with honesty, you put your best work forward, and your reputation is what's going to get you through there.” He told me, he said, "I see people striving to become an editor of a publication, like Salt Water Sportsman, or I want to be the editor of Outdoor Life. He says you never, ever, ever want to accept an editor position at one of these magazines. I looked at him and said, Why??

George Poveromo: (55:14)

The magazines get bought out. They put their people in, and then those editors are gone. If you remain independent, your name will be your drawing card. So whatever happens with a magazine, whether it gets bought out or not, you will always have your name to draw on. You can use it as a business card to help you stand out with other industry people. That's why you want to be strongly independent and not get locked down to where somebody buys a magazine, they clean house, and you're gone.

At the time, I didn't understand what he was saying, but looking back, I said he was so incredibly right. That was probably one of the best pieces of advice, just do your own thing and build your reputation, your name, and your own business.

He had given me a lot, and then about ten years of seminars, we started going our separate ways, and then we worked out a deal. He and I were equal partners in the seminar series. I ended up buying his half out. I continued with that aspect of the business.

Tom: (56:14)

Interesting! Did the advice he gave you about who to trust and not trust remain in the future? Many years later, did you go, you know what, somebody told me about that guy!

George Poveromo: (56:26)

100%! You just watched different instances and the whole bit, and absolutely. They were some just incredibly valuable pointers and tips that he had bestowed upon me. It was remarkable because he was the kingpin back then; he was the big guy. He had a big saltwater show; it was a rarity to have a saltwater show back then. I did several episodes early on with him. We did go sailfish fishing once, and I can't even remember what year, but I look at my boat, I'm fishing with him. I'm looking, and I said, well, there's Mark, but who the heck is standing there?

George Poveromo Life, Career, and Fishing Mentors

Getting on with Salt Water Sportsman + Dressing for Success

Tom: (57:13)

Did you have other mentors that were very influential in your life and career?

George Poveromo: (57:20)

Absolutely. The Salt Water Sportsman team of Barry Gibson, Rip Cunningham, and Spider Andresen. Particularly, Barry Gibson, who was the editor. He took a liking to me too. Barry Gibson was a very staunch, hardcore, New England style editor. If you could write and get a piece in Salt Water Sportsman, and Barry to prove it by, you could write for any magazine in the world, named any title. That's how strict he ran, and he wrote things like the King's English. He and I got along so well that one of my things he would tell me, "all right, George, it's November turn in your George's Christmas list so we can approve it." My Christmas list was eight or so places in the country and out of the country that I would travel to fish and write the features for Salt Water Sportsman.

George Poveromo: (58:22)

It was the greatest thing in the world. The world was your map. We've been to Ecuador and Brazil exploring Marlin Fishing. We've been everywhere and to get a stamp of approval like that was remarkable. It was a rarity to have a team like that for Salt Water Sportsman, Barry Gibson, Rip Cunningham, and Spider Andresen. They all had considerable family money, and they were all fishing addicts. So it wasn't like, well, I don't fish much, but I like it, but I'm going to be an editor. No, they were fishing people first and foremost, that happened to get into the magazine business. When you looked at the original members of Salt Water Sportsman, I was the only one who needed a job in that crew.

George Poveromo: (59:06)

They were a great team of guys to work for, and they built that magazine to what it is today. I had the honor of working under them and them taking me under their wing. I remember when Barry Gibson called me, their headquarters up in Boston. It was like 1982. He said, would you be interested in coming to work with Salt Water Sportsman? And my jaw dropped. I said, where do I sign up? We'll pay, get your air. We're going to want to fly you to Boston. We want to have a meeting. We'll cover your air, your hotel, and your meals. Let's have the meeting and see where it goes. So I was like, Oh my God, I'm going to Salt Water Sportsman. I had gone out and bought this three-piece suit. I mean, from the shoes, everything.

George Poveromo: (59:54)

I wouldn't say the suit was burnt orange back in its time, but it was that brownish orange. I don't want to tell you what I spent on that suit. I flew up there, and I went to the meeting. I walk in there, and I see them all in there dressed in their slacks and fishing shirts. They were looking at me up and down. So we sat down, we talked, they took me out to lunch.

So Barry calls me the next day. He said, "George, congratulations, you're on board." I said, "Fantastic!" Oh, my God. He says, you know, "we like you because you're a strong saltwater angler. You're knowledgeable. You're a good guy." But Barry said, "in my book, you know what sold me on hiring you?" I said, "No, What?" "That suit! Anyone that would come up to this office wearing a suit like that has to be a good guy. So we hired you!" So that turned out to be one of my better investments I’ve made.

Tom: (01:00:45)

That's funny, really funny! That was back in the day where you dressed for success! Today, if you wore a three-piece suit to an interview at a magazine with everybody in there wearing shorts and t-shirts, they'd be like, who is this guy? Why would you? You missed the mark!

George Poveromo: (01:01:07)

It is. I remember my earlier ICAST Shows; I would go in with a suit like that until I remember years, people started making fun of me. So I started dressing down from that point.

Tom: (01:01:16)

I did the same thing; I always dressed up at ICAST. My dad was an insurance salesman and always gave me good advice. Most importantly, he said, you make the first impression. You show people that you're there to do business and nobody wants to talk to anybody in shorts. You dress like one grade higher than them. So if they're wearing a polo, you should wear a button-down. If they're wearing a sport coat, you should wear a suit. If everybody's wearing shorts, you don't go to a tuxedo. There's this fine line of how to present yourself, but it's changing all the time. It's becoming much more casual, but there's still that same kind of thing. I still look to my dad's advice there and say, well, one step higher. So if they're in shorts and a t-shirt, then I need to be in nice shorts and nice polo or something like that.

George Poveromo: (01:02:20)

That's the way it was. I think I even saved that suit. It's somewhere in the back of my closet. I can tell you for sure; I cannot fit into it anymore but I saved it as a token. You would sweat to death. You can lose 20 pounds wearing that thing.

George Poveromo & Fishing with Bouncer Smith, a legendary saltwater fishing Captain

Tom: (01:02:36)

Yeah. That's so funny. So you've been able to fish with so many different people, right? One of the people I know that you have had a tight connection with, who I think very highly of is Bouncer Smith. How did you guys meet? How did that happen? That you guys started hanging out and becoming friends?

George Poveromo: (01:02:56)

I had met him before I accepted the position to run the Greater Miami Billfish Tournament. I'm trying to think exactly where, it might've been at a fishing club meeting or whatever. Then he invited me to go fishing with him. Shortly after that, he and I worked together. He was on the board of the Greater Miami Billfish Tournament. He gave me support when it came to catch-and-release only tournaments and its impacts on conservation. So he was one of the guys I did have in my corner. He and I just formed this bond. All these years, it was just remarkable to watch what he had done as far as being a charter captain. And I say this, and I probably get myself in hot water with a lot of the other Miami captains. But as far as charter captains go in the Miami area, he was an elite totally unto himself.

George Poveromo: (01:03:43)

Here's a fantastic guy. No one was catching sea trout and tarpon in the Miami Biscayne Bay like Bouncer. He was exceptional at fishing snook in the inlet. Also, a master on the reef. Live bait fishing offshore, and daytime swordfish. He covered every single aspect of saltwater fishing, where some captains specialize in something that's your strong suit. Bouncer specialized in every single thing that swam in Miami.

 He was brilliant early on in his career. He befriended a lot of the outdoor writers. Back then, Jim Hardy was with the Miami Herald, Sue Cocky, Steve Waters from Sun-Sentinel, Chris Stomach at the Palm Beach Post, and later Willie Howard and Jan Foe. So what he would do was have an open invitation. He would call, “come on down the Mackerel are running, come on down; it's a good sailfish bite.”

George Poveromo: (01:04:40)

“Come on, let's get some Tarpon.” He would always bring his newspaper writers and these magazine writers in for a full day of fishing with him. No charge. Show them a great time. He had built up such a press-friendly relationship that transcended all these major magazines where people would write about or mention him to where he became a household name. It was so smart of him, just fishing with press people and hooking up and doing some television shows. He was very press-savvy, and he graded the Bouncer Smith aura that he enjoys right now.

On top of that, he was an excellent angler too, but he was very people friendly. So he had a smart business plan. Didn't cost him anything but a day fishing out on the boat, but what he got in return, which stories or television episodes paid, a hundredfold on what his initial time and fuel investment was. So really just an incredible bank of knowledge.

Tom: (01:05:43)

Yeah. Bouncer has a good heart too! He's just a friendly, sweetheart of a guy. I hear people say that about him all the time. "Oh, Bouncer, he's a sweetheart of a guy. He just has a good heart. He's just a nice guy from all my dealings with him. I haven't had a tremendous amount of dealings with him, but I did get a chance to go to him and get his whole story. He started from being a kid, and like you've touched on like trout fishing and snook fishing. He used to ride his bicycle down to the seawalls and do all that stuff. He would walk along and kind of troll back and forth by walking along the seawalls and found all this stuff. But, he's fascinating. I think highly of him. I just saw that he retired!

George Poveromo: (01:06:34)

He did! What an incredible legacy! 50+ years in the charter business, and to give you an idea of how strong a guy he is. You have to remember, in his hay day, until about a year ago, he'd run three trips a day. He would run the night Tarpon trips on top of it all and get ready the next morning to either do a half-day or a full day. He was just almost a 24/7 machine. Anyone that wanted to run on his level, he would burn them right out. I was surprised that AB Raymond, who was his captain and mate in those later years, was able to hang in there. I always said that anybody who could be a mate and work with Bouncer, who could hang in there, would learn so much about spots and techniques. Bouncer's hard; he runs the boat, its Bouncer's Way, and he'll let you know it too.

George Poveromo: (01:07:29)

He did chew out a few mates. They couldn't hang with them, but AB did, and AB since went out on his own as a charter captain. But the amount of knowledge that he acquired through those years working with Bouncer has to be immense. Bouncer has his ways of doing things. We have some funny Bouncer stories there, too, based on that. I can do some things to him because we are friends, I could tease him, and he lets me get away with it. Whereas other people, he probably wouldn't let get away with it.

Daytime & Nighttime Swordfishing

Tom: (01:08:04)

Yeah. I bet. I bet there are some great stories there. So the Daytime Sword Fishing, were you kind of at the forefront of that?

George Poveromo: (01:08:12)

No, not in daytime stuff. I did a fair amount of the night time stuff. That is how swordfishing originally started before starting the daytime swordfishing. I started daytime swordfishing a little later on. Once you go daytime fishing for Swordfish, you don't go nighttime fishing for them. In my opinion, it is so rewarding to see this fish leaping and jumping into the air. Watching it go back down and look at it when it is 50-60 feet deep, and see those iridescent purples. It is different at night; it is just a world of difference when fishing for them during the day.

Tom: (01:08:59)

What a world of difference in just the production of the whole thing as well. The first time I went night time swordfishing was with Kenny Harris in Key West. We went fishing during the Tarpon season. I'm dog tired because I am fishing every single day. He's like, you have to go night time swordfishing it with me. You're getting up at four in the morning anyway. So I'm like, okay, I'll go. He said, meet me at 10 PM. I said, "God. Okay," and I didn't recover from this trip for three weeks, and we didn't catch anything, but he was using those big lights, and he had the whole thing all rigged up. But I mean, I went that one time at literally the worst time. I think I had babies at home that weren't sleeping well. Tarpon fishing every day took its toll, but Kenny Harris asked me to go swordfishing, so I went. My wife's like, you hadn't slept in weeks. I felt terrible after that trip. But the daytime thing, I'm way more of a fan of the daytime now.

Swordfish on the Attack

George Poveromo: (01:09:56)

It's incredible, and I think pound for pound, without a doubt that the Swordfish is one of the strongest fighting fish out there. I've caught a large amount of Swordfish and some big ones, too, throughout my career.

Until that, my vote was the big eye tuna. The largest one that I caught, I was doing a show up in Maryland. It was a 215-pound big eye that I fought in a 50-wide stand up. Compared to yellowfin, especially compared to a bluefin, those big eyes don't give up. They fight till you bring that fish to gaff. Big eye and swordfish provided some of the most challenging fights that I've had. Swordfish would out-do the big eye pound-for-pound because the Swordfish is a fantastic animal that could charge to the depths and come back up. It's not bothered by anything. It's an intelligent fish, in that compared to a Sailfish or Blue Marlin, it's out there jumping, the Swordfish, realize it's in trouble and a lot of times wants to seek out what's causing this trouble and could become violent, especially by running at a boat.

Tom: (01:11:02)

When I was doing a little research on you, I noticed that you had a cameraman attacked by a swordfish, we did too. I mean, it was close. We had the camera mounted on a scooter that pulls the diver along, right? So it's got a big, rigid plastic cone on it. The bill of that thing pierced that hard-plastic cone went in about eight inches and then broke off. We have a video of it, and this fish is swimming along, and it sees the diver and turns and attacks, and it was scary. I mean, if that bill, if it hadn't hit that scooter, it would have gone right through his chest. So, did the same kind of thing happen to your diver?

George Poveromo: (01:11:49)

The same thing. Fortunately, what saved our guy, Kevin Tierney, was that he's highly experienced underwater with billfish. The fish tried to get him three different times. After bringing this fish up alongside the boat to the leader, they wanted to film it. It was about 170-pound fish. Kevin said, "I'm going into the water. I want to get some underwater". So, I said Kevin, be careful. It is Swordfish. So fish runs off a bunch of lines. He finally gets into the water, and he's down there filming it. The fish makes a big circle, and I am cranking it back up to the leader. It noticed Kevin out there, and it started charging. I'm screaming, "Kevin, I couldn't stop the fish!" It runs probably 10 feet in front of him, hangs a 90-degree angle to the right, dives deep. I'm screaming at Kevin, "get out of the water, and he's trying to attack us."

George Poveromo: (01:12:37)

So Kevin's backpedaling to the camera boat. I fight the Swordfish back up alongside the boat. It looks at him again out there, it charges, and at this point, I can't stop the fish. I am putting all the drag pressure I could. I'm screaming, "Kevin, Kevin, Kevin!" And next thing I see is Kevin bounce up about half a foot and splashback in the waters. I said, "Oh my God, he got hit. Are you alright?" And he says, "yeah, he doesn't like me." And I said, get out of the water. By that time, the fish did the same thing, got alongside the boat again, and charged at him a third time. This time the camera boat operators saw what was going on, grabbed Kevin by his shoulders, lifted him onto the Gunnels. The Swordfish goes under the camera boat at him again. We finally bring the fish back up, get them on the leader, and then clip it free.

George Poveromo: (01:13:24)

What Kevin said happened to him, and he has the video and the still shot to prove it; The fish was coming at him. Through his teachings, when in the water suspended and a billfish comes at you, do a back float because it presents a smaller target. If you're straight up and down, that fish could hit you anywhere. You're not slowing or changing its momentum. If you do a back float, the fish would have to stop and go up 90 degrees to hit you. Now, how he had the nerve to do that is beyond me. He watched the fish come in. When he was doing his back float, the dorsal fin of the swordfish went in between his crotch. Kevin has the video to prove it. When Kevin lifted in the air, that was the back of the Swordfish going under him, lifting him and dropping him back on the water. He has videos of this, which were amazing. Kevin must be the only guy in the world that has a video of a swordfish going through his crotch. Since then, Kevin talks like Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees, with that high pitch voice.

Tom: (01:14:23)

Yeah, we don't do that anymore. Anything with a Swordfish, nobody goes in the water. It's a GoPro on a stick, that's it. That thing scared me, and we were in Louisiana. So we were far away from our regular hospitals, far away from the families, far away from everything. I just started thinking, if that fish had hit him, that could have been bad. When I look at the video, it was an absolute full-on attack. Your fish went after him three times.

 There's another story about you getting pulled in by a swordfish. How did that happen?

Sword Fish Pulls George Poveromo Overboard - The Incident

Fishing out of Islamorada's Bud N' Marys with Captain Nick Stanczyk

George Poveromo: (01:15:10)

I call that "My don't go over the wall in the Daytona 500 incident. [Laughter] That was part of this whole crazy weekend. Okay. That happened to me first.

George Poveromo: (01:15:21)

You know, what had happened was, we were fishing with Nick Stanczyk doing a show. We run-up to a spot. We dropped down and got hooked up with a swordfish, immediately. We got this fish near the boat, probably fought him for about an hour. Beautiful fish. I'm looking at the fish, thinking 250-300 pounds. So what a remarkable fish for the show and the hook pulls. We go back to that spot; no sooner did the bait hit bottom, we get hooked up again. We fight another fish for an hour, maybe a little bit over, get the fish a little bit farther up, to where we could see it. Another beautiful fish, we pull the hook. I said, man, we're just snake-bitten, and it's terrible. We go and do it a third time. We hooked up. Now I'm fighting this fish for two hours.

George Poveromo: (01:15:55)

Now, keep in mind that this is almost constant fighting. We're finally getting the fish somewhat close to where we think we're going to beat it. I'm standing by my outboards, facing out. My buddy Carl was running his boat as our camera boat and crew. I see Carl coming around the outboards with the fish angled right in his direction. I said, Carl, what are you doing? He said that the camera crew said that they did not want to see your butts. They said we've got to get in front of you. I said, Carl, we've had bad luck. We pulled the hooks on two swords. At that angle, you're going to cut the fish off. I said, back up, go around the bow of my boat and come in that way. The sun will be at your back, and the fish is nowhere near there. You can get all the footage you need. I said we're already having bad luck.

George Poveromo: (01:16:37)

So he backs out, and he goes idling around. The last thing that I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye was his boat coming around the bow of my boat. As he was trying to get positioned, I go to crank down. I felt his wake, and it wasn't a bad wake. It lapped the side of my boat. It just so happened that as I was going down to take a crank, the wake splashed on my boat, bounced it. My feet went up, and next thing you know, I catapulted in the water with the Swordfish, and I'm going down. I remember this because I always had an escape plan, just in case something like this happened. I am a small boat guy, I big game fish, and I knew that sooner or later with your stand up gear, there's going to be a chance you're going to go overboard. So how do you survive it?

George Poveromo: (01:17:27)

So, I had these three things in my mind, a play out. Firstly, when you hit the water, slowly back down the reel's drag to alleviate the pressure. Some people will freak and not do anything, and that Swordfish will pull you down. Sometimes, they will freak and go into free-spool, which creates a giant bird's nest that locks the reel up, and you still go down. That was number one. I did that. When I did that, the pressure came off, and he came back to the top. The second part of the escape route was to grab the rod, pull to my chest, and unclip and swim out of the harness. That's where something went wrong. I'm doing it. I can't feel the rod, but I know I'm stuck to it. I knew I free-spooled a good bit, and I said I have to figure out what's going on.

George Poveromo: (01:18:05)

So I grabbed the side of my boat, and Nick Stanczyk is holding me by my shirt, and I'm slapping his hand off me. Because if I go down, Nick Stanczyk is 80 pounds soaking wet. If I go down, I'm going to take him with me, and I'm not going to drown the kid. So I was thinking to myself, I got one shot here. I have to take a breath, find out what's going on with this rod. And I've got to get out of it. Fortunately, Kevin saw what was happening. He jumped off the camera boat and swam over to me. When I had flipped over, the rod somehow twisted itself going between my legs. I'm out there trying to grab it. I can't get to it. Kevin gets in there and gets a hand and unclips me. We put the rod back into the boat, and I get back in the boat, and continue to fight the fish.

George Poveromo: (01:18:51)

But the third part of the escape plan wouldn't have worked. You can grab your pliers and cut your line. But the pliers were underneath the big standup harness that I had. I'll circle back to that in just a second, but I got back up in the boat, and I said, Nick, push that drag down, is this fish still there? The fish was still there! So I got back up and got in the harness again, beat beyond comparison and fatigued. Fought the fish another half hour, and we got it alongside the boat. Nick asked, do you want me to fly-gaff him? or do you want me to dart him? I said, kill this thing the fastest way you know how because I do not know how much I got left in me. And he did. We brought it in, and it was a 256-pound swordfish.

George Poveromo: (01:19:38)

It had gone dark. We had that 40+ mile run in the dark to Bud N Mary's. I remember pulling in; it was 10 o'clock weighing the fish. Richard Stanczyk comes in; it was like a surreal moment to it all. What got me in trouble was, when we were swordfishing, Nick said, you want to put your safety harness on from your reel down to your boat. I said, in case you got an overboard as I did, somebody can pull you in. I said no, we don't need that. I'm saying we're pros, we're fine. We don't need that. In my mind, and I put this in the show was that accidents always happen to the other guy, so we don't need it. But that day, I was in the accident. So number one, you always put that safety cord on that rod and reel in case it ever happens.

Lessons from the Sword

George Poveromo: (01:20:26)

You keep those cutters outside of any harness, so that you can get to them fast. We certainly learned a valuable lesson on that one. It was an experience. I don't care how experienced you are out there. When I hit the water for the first time, it was the freakiest feeling ever! You just see bubbles. The first thing that went through my mind, so this is how I'm going to die, because you remember back that to those Marlin stories, mates getting the wire wrapped around their hands. I said, no, I'm not. Thinking back to those three escape mechanisms, and then I did what I did. We got lucky, and our other camera guy filmed it all. I said that's right. I'm sitting here and getting ready to drown and you're filming. He said I figured your wife would like that for the life insurance if you died. [Laughter] It was a fantastic experience!

Tom: (01:21:17)

That's crazy! It seems like the people who have the most experience and get themselves into trouble are always associated with something that is an everyday experience. It's not just some crazy extreme thing. I've heard of surfers that have surfed all these giant waves, hit their head on some little wave that they're trying to teach their kid how to surf on. It probably wasn't the roughest day you've ever been out there, it probably wasn't the most dangerous day, and something like that happens. It happens when you least expect it. It happens in trivial events. It was a small boat wake, and it just happened at precisely the right second to make you lose your footing. Then all of a sudden, you've got tremendous pressure from the Swordfish. So you're going in. That's what we all have to watch out for. It's not like you're going to get struck by lightning or something. It's probably something very, very trivial during an activity you've done hundreds of times before. Like, those are the things that the experienced boater and the experienced fishermen have to watch out for. Things like, "oh, it wouldn't happen here. I've done this over a thousand times."

George Poveromo: (01:22:37)

I was angry at myself, and people said, man, you almost checked out and left the building; whatever I said, "no, I didn't." I was so angry with myself for letting that happen. I said I was nowhere near any danger. I was angry with myself for well over a year for letting that happen. A year had gone by; I looked back at the video and said, "man, I was a little closer to trouble than I thought." I said I've been angry at myself for letting it happen. He says, "no, he said, do you realize that you were able to back the drag off, but the way that rod got twisted around, what if that braid wrapped around the rod tip or your foot, you were going down. I started thinking about that. To think about all that did not happen that day, you realize what could have happened. When I had first gone overboard, I was going down because of the pressure of fish going down. Now it looked back and said, yeah, I was a little bit closer to leaving the building than I thought.

Tom: (01:23:40)

Did that change anything for you afterward?

George Poveromo: (01:23:43)

I went back to being smart about this. When we hook up to a swordfish, like in the last swordfish show we did, I have a big stand up harness. I have a big cable-type restraint that goes on the back of that harness and attaches to a part of the boat that's not going to come apart if you go overboard. So if that ever happens, somebody could grab that if you're any kind of trouble and pull you in. So you went back to the standard safety deals that you had foregone for the lack of it looking cool. You just put common-sense back in the game, which you knew, but you put on the sideline, and it seems like when you put that common sense on the sideline, that's when you get in trouble.

Thank you, George!

Tom: (01:24:28)

Well, listen, I'm glad you made it out of that one and probably lots of other ones. You're a legend in the television business, and I appreciate you spending a lot of time with us today and telling us some stories, certainly that I've never heard before. I think that many of your fans probably haven't heard a lot of these stories, so it'll be very entertaining for them, as it was for me. Thanks, George. I appreciate it.

George Poveromo: (01:24:52)

No, thank you. I mean, I could sit here all day and just do this with you.

Tom: (01:24:55)

We'll do it again! You're good at it. You got a lot of stories, and indeed, we'll do it again. If people want to watch your show, go to your seminars, follow you on social media, how would people connect with you?

George Poveromo: (01:25:14)

They could go to my website, which is Georgepoveromo.com. We have our television schedule up there. Also, we have our How-To features and articles. They can follow me on social media. I'm on Instagram at George Poveromo, and then, of course, Facebook, I'm there as well. The website will take them to a lot of different places, and they can also watch if they missed a season on YouTube, George Poveromo TV, and catch our episodes anytime they want 4k broadcast quality.

So, that's where they can find me. You certainly know where you can find me, and I can't thank you enough for inviting me. You're a big legend out there too! It's amazing what you accomplished and how you've upheld the sport with a gentleman's approach, which I respect because you do it the old fashioned way. You're out there; you're fishing, you're teaching fishing. You don't have any special stunts that you need to sort of bolster up your show. You're a hardcore angler, and you do it the right way. I have the utmost respect for you, too, and I appreciate you having me on board.

Tom: (01:26:16)

I appreciate it! I feel very similar to you in that; we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Many people came before us and paved the road for the television world that we find ourselves. Also, even in the seminar world. Everything! They were true giants that came before and did most of the hard work luckily.

Thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. If you want to follow George, he has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to saltwater fish better through his seminars and television shows. I think hundreds of thousands is probably a far understatement, right? Because he just told us he got 500,000 people to watch one of his shows. So millions, millions of people to fish better. Anyway, George, it was enjoyable to get these stories from you, and I very much enjoyed it.

Stay tuned, guys. We got a big week coming up, and we'll have more great guests, just like George Poveromo. So stay tuned, and we'll see you next week!