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After a Life on the Water, a Chance to Give Back

by Lauren Doyle on February 05, 2010 at 03:47AM

“My goal in life wasn’t to be the best fisherman; my goal in life was to fish every day.” To that end, Captain Skip Smith learned everything he could about boats. He learned how to fix engines and toilets, and everything in between. “But the best thing I learned was to make sure that people were safe and the boat was running well. That’s how, after all these years, I don’t have any horror stories.”

Captain Skip Smith has been a lot of places. He’s been to Australia and Africa and Hawaii and Costa Rica and Cabo San Lucas and Panama. Anywhere you can fish for Marlin, he’s been there and back again. Along the way, he’s found that the greatest place to be as a fisherman is right where he grew up. “Because every different country is wonderful during their peak season, the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area is great. You can catch anything you want between Fort Lauderdale and Bimini, and then you can get on a plane and go to Costa Rica or Panama.”

Throughout his career, Smith has been responsible for more than 50 world record catches and has more stories than you have time to hear. But the story he’s most interested in telling is the one about the future of fishing. A future that integrates science, conservation and good old fashioned fishing fun.

Smith knows what he’s talking about. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all professional fisherman. Smith himself spent more time on water growing up than he did on land, baiting hooks for tourists on a drift fishing boat off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. By the time he was 18, he was fishing for marlin off the coast of the Bahamas and went on to Captain a boat called Hooker. (He later traded in Hooker for a bigger boat called Madam.)

Being out on the water as long as he has, Smith has seen more than a few changes to the sport, particularly when it comes to science and conservation.

“In the early tournaments, we killed everything we caught. Nobody would believe you otherwise.” Then, he says, the media and the Billfish Foundation started putting pressure on sport fisherman to change their ways. “That’s when we started with catch and release.” But even catch and release wasn’t the answer; or at least the full answer. To keep the fish from being hurt permanently, fisherman started using circle hooks. “Of course, everyone complained about it at first, saying they wouldn’t catch as much. But it turns out that you get a better catch ratio with the circle bait.”

All the while, there was a struggle to get fisherman to adopt a new, conservationist, mentality. “Often, the thrill of the kill supersedes your reasoning. You have a limit of ten fish so you catch ten fish. Then you’re trying to give it all away to your friends because you can’t eat ten fish, and you certainly don’t want to have to clean ten fish,” Smith says.

But that’s what education’s for. Smith says that the more that people know about the fish, and about their sport, the more they’ll want to ensure that there are still fish to catch for generations to come. Because, he says, there’s nothing better than sitting out on a boat and fishing. And, he says, “We’re making great strides forward to ensure that our kids and grandkids can enjoy the same thing.”

Toward that end, Smith will be joining other expert anglers at the Billfish Expo on Saturday, February 13th to teach conservation-minded fishing and the intricacies of the sport. To join him, head over to BillfishExpo.com and sign up.