Yesterday's conversation with Captain Bouncer Smith — a Miami legend with 52 years guiding full-time, 70 world records as captain, and a lifetime spent chasing everything from tarpon to cubera snappers to swordfish — runs from his childhood at Mulberry Creek to the docks at Bud and Mary's to the offshore reefs where he still fishes six days a week at age 70. I sat down with Bouncer at his home overlooking Biscayne Bay to talk about how he built a career that began on a bicycle at 04:00 in the morning and why he still gets butterflies every time a fish bites.
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Bouncer Smith is a Miami-based charter captain with 52 years of full-time guiding experience. He has 70 world records as captain, was inducted into the IGFA Legendary Captains and Crew, received the Billfish Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, and has won numerous offshore and flats tournaments including the Guy Harvey Outpost Bonfire Tournament and the Yamaha Contender Miami Billfish series. He fished as a flats guide at Bud and Mary's in Islamorada starting in 1976 and has run his 33-foot Dusky out of Miami Beach Marina for decades.
Bouncer's father was an avid outdoorsman who moved the family from Pontiac, Michigan to Miami in 1956 when Bouncer was seven years old. His father instilled a love of the outdoors in all four of his children. Bouncer fished local piers starting as a young kid, sometimes leaving the house on his bicycle at 04:00 in the morning. At 14, he worked on a fishing pier. At 15, he worked on head boats. By the time he graduated high school, he was working on charter boats during the day and head boats at night.
At age 15, Bouncer visited Islamorada and saw the muscular guides with raccoon eyes at Bud and Mary's telling tales about their days on the water. He decided that day he would become a flats guide in Islamorada when he grew up. He moved to Bud and Mary's in March 1976 and worked there as a flats guide until returning to Miami, where he transitioned to offshore charter fishing full-time.
At age 70, Bouncer has cut back to what he calls "semi-retirement" — six days a week, no longer fishing Sundays, and no longer running four tarpon trips per week at night. For most of his 52-year career, he worked seven days a week, leaving at 07:00 in the morning and frequently getting home between 10:00 PM and midnight.
Bouncer was the captain when angler Marty Arostegui caught a 46-inch swordfish on fly at night off Miami. Marty rigged his own rod, tied his own leader, tied his own fly (with a small glow stick inside), and cast repeatedly for over an hour before hooking the fish. The fight lasted about an hour from a dead-drifting boat with no engine input. Bouncer describes it as the greatest angling accomplishment in the history of fishing because the angler did everything himself. Marty Arostegui holds over 450 world records, more than twice as many as anyone else in the world.
Cubera snappers are large snappers that look like 50-pound mangrove snappers. Bouncer targets them at night on offshore wrecks using live lobsters as bait, a technique pioneered by Bob Lewis in the 1950s and 1960s. Bouncer has caught cubera snappers weighing over 70 pounds, and fish he estimated at 20 to 25 pounds turned out to weigh 33 and 37 pounds on the scale. The fishing is expensive — long runs, live lobster bait, heavy tackle — and highly pressured, with 15 boats fishing a single wreck on a recent Friday night.
Bouncer does not allow bananas, Banana Boat sunscreen, or Fruit of the Loom underwear with the banana logo on his boat. He has cut Fruit of the Loom labels out of customers' underwear on multiple occasions. He once had a customer who was vice president of sales for Fruit of the Loom, and within a year of that trip, the bananas were removed from the Fruit of the Loom logo. Bouncer explains that superstitions work by diverting mental focus away from the task of catching fish, which is why he maintains the rule even when it seems irrational.
I started guiding in Key West in the early nineties, and there was a short list of people I paid attention to. Steve Huff, Harry Spear, Robert Trusset, and Ralph Delph were the names I heard down south. From Miami, I always heard about Bouncer Smith. If I saw an article or a DVD he had done, I paid attention because there was always good information. Bouncer has been guiding full-time for 52 years. That is not a number you hear very often. Most guides I know have burned out or moved on to something else by year 20 or 25. Bouncer is 70 years old and still fishing six days a week.
I wanted to know how someone sustains that level of work ethic for five decades. I wanted to know what it was like at Bud and Mary's in the 1970s when he showed up as an outsider from Miami. I wanted to know how he built a clientele that has kept him booked for decades and how he thinks about fishery conservation after watching South Florida change from the 1950s to today. Bouncer was incredibly generous with his time. We sat down for an unhurried conversation at his home overlooking Biscaaye Bay, and he told fish stories, childhood stories, and stories about the greatest angling accomplishment he has ever witnessed.
This episode is worth hearing in his own words. Bouncer is a storyteller, and the article cannot do what his voice does. Press play in the YouTube player at the top of this page.
Bouncer's father moved the family from Pontiac, Michigan to Miami in January 1956 when Bouncer was seven years old. His father was an avid outdoorsman — fly fishing for trout, hunting deer with a bow, collecting butterflies, collecting walnuts — and he instilled that love of the outdoors in all four of his children. Bouncer remembers a childhood in South Florida that no longer exists. The paved road north of Hallandale Beach Boulevard was covered in beach sand. Sea oats grew everywhere. You drove into a pocket in the sea oats to park. There was a swing bridge at Hallandale Beach Boulevard and a lagoon on the north side where people water-skied.
Bouncer's father worked five days a week. One day was reserved for home and garden maintenance. One day was reserved for the outdoors, and the family took full advantage of it. Bouncer and his siblings were kicked out of the house early in the morning and expected home by dark. Bouncer's mother would blow a conch shell from the front porch when it was dinnertime. Bouncer has been known to leave the house on his bicycle at 04:00 in the morning to ride to the fishing piers. His one strict rule growing up was that he had to take care of his little brother, so wherever Bouncer went fishing or exploring, his little brother went too.
The way Bouncer describes that childhood — hiking the beaches at Marco and Sanibel when you could still drive right onto the sand, passing around one scuba tank among all the kids, casting in the surf for trout and snook — is a Florida that does not exist anymore. He has lived through the best of times and the worst of times in South Florida, and he tells that part of his story better than I can summarize it here. Listen to the full episode.
At age 14, Bouncer worked on a fishing pier. At 15, he worked on head boats. When he graduated high school, he was working on a head boat from 5:00 PM to 1:30 AM and on a charter boat from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM every day except Monday. On Sunday nights, he and his friends would drive to the Keys and fish off the bridges until 10:00 in the morning, then go home and sleep before starting the drill again Monday night. Bouncer thrived on it. For almost his entire 52-year career, he has gone to work at 7:00 in the morning or earlier and gotten home between 10:00 PM and midnight at least half the time.
At age 15, Bouncer went to Islamorada and saw the guides at Bud and Mary's — muscular, suntanned men with raccoon eyes telling tales about their days on the water. He decided that day he would become a flats guide in Islamorada. After high school, he worked on charter boats and head boats until March 1976, when he moved to Islamorada and went to work at Bud and Mary's as a flats guide. That dream he had at 15 became a reality.
The culture at Bud and Mary's in the 1970s was not welcoming to outsiders. Bouncer made two key friends: Sonny Fisher, the marine store manager and booking agent, and Sonny Eslinger, who became his mentor and helped him figure out where and when to fish. The senior guide at Bud and Mary's got first shot at every charter that came into the office every single day. A lot of the established guides were booked a year in advance, but Bouncer had to wait until all of them were booked before the store would book him. So he sat around the marina in the evenings catching crabs with a long hand line, and when people drove in at 6:00 or 7:00 or 8:00 PM looking to book a trip for the next day, Bouncer was there. He booked charters after the store closed and ran more night trips than anybody.
After about a year, most of the guides recognized that Bouncer knew how to fish and was catching plenty of fish. Some never changed their attitude. But Bouncer went out of his way not to step on people's toes, and eventually, he earned the respect of legends like Cecil Keith. The story of how he navigated that world and what it took to earn that respect is one of my favorite parts of this episode. You have to hear him tell it.
Bouncer has fished out of a Dusky for decades. The story of how he acquired his first Dusky is one he has told on the boat hundreds of times to entertain customers when the fish are not biting, and it is a perfect example of how Bouncer built relationships that lasted for decades. A man from New York called Bouncer after seeing his ads in tackle shops. The man was taking delivery of a boat on December 22nd and wanted Bouncer to run it on the 23rd, 26th, 28th, 30th, and then again in January. Bouncer asked how he would recognize the man. The man said he would be driving a yellow Rolls Royce. Bouncer said he would be the biggest guy in the parking lot.
They took delivery of a 25-and-a-half-foot Dusky that afternoon. The next day, they caught a big blackfin tuna in six-foot seas by 10:00 in the morning. The man asked Bouncer how he liked the boat. Bouncer said, "I want right of first refusal to buy it if you ever want to sell it." Eighteen months later, the man called and said he had to sell the boat for business reasons. Bouncer said he did not have any money saved up. The man said, "Give me $400 and take over my payments." Bouncer bought an 18-month-old Dusky with an Evinrude for $400 and made payments for over 20 years.
That boat had been fished probably six weeks total when Bouncer bought it, and Bouncer had been on it for all six weeks. The way he tells that story — the exact dates, the yellow Rolls Royce, the $400 down payment — is Bouncer's voice at its best. Listen to the episode.
Bouncer grew up in a time when there was no such thing as throwing back fish. If he caught 100 Spanish mackerel from a fishing pier, he threw them in a burlap bag, kept the bag wet all day, and brought home the ones on top that were still suitable for dinner. His father would make him dig trenches along the hibiscus hedge and use the rest as fertilizer. Bouncer has a photograph from that era — himself, his little brother, his little sister, his father, and a neighbor standing in front of a 12-foot conduit pipe covered with sea trout, another pipe covered with redfish, a tarpon, shark jaws, and jack crevalle laid out on the grass. That photograph is in the slideshow at Camp Harry's Fishing Supply, and Bouncer is relatively proud of it because it exemplifies where we came from and legitimizes how much we need fishery conservation today.
We went from "keep them all" to "catch your limit" to "limit your catch." Today, Bouncer says, you cannot just arbitrarily keep anything that is legal if you want to see fish in the future. The future will not sustain it. We need to fish with harvest more in line with hunting — only keep this kind of fish two months of the year, only caught by these methods. Bouncer is a strong advocate for marine reserves, pointing to the documented success of the Dry Tortugas Marine Reserve, where mutton snapper and black grouper populations have exploded. He believes we need to pick a few spots where a black grouper can grow to 50 pounds without having 20 hooks hanging from its lower jaw.
On the subject of goliath grouper, Bouncer has a nuanced view. He explains that goliath grouper in nature eat crabs and lobsters — sedentary, easy prey. When they are cut open, they are full of crabs and lobsters. The goliath grouper that fishermen interact with are reclaiming fish off the angler's line because it is their wreck and their fish population. Bouncer believes goliath grouper need to be controlled, but the question is how. Do you take all of them off wreck A and make wreck B protected? Do you set up a harvest quota? Do you use individual tags like the tarpon kill tags? Scientists had determined the population was healthy around 2010, but then a horrendous freeze wiped out all the juvenile fish in the Ten Thousand Islands and up the west coast of Florida. Because it takes five years for goliath grouper to reach spawning maturity, scientists said there would be no talk of harvesting goliath grouper for five years. That five-year window is up now, and the discussion is heating up again.
Bouncer's position is informed by 52 years of watching fisheries change. The way he explains the nuance of goliath grouper behavior, the freeze, the science, and the politics is something I have not heard anywhere else. It is worth hearing in full in the episode.
One of the most remarkable fisheries Bouncer targets is cubera snappers at night on offshore wrecks using live lobsters as bait. Cubera snappers look almost exactly like 50-pound mangrove snappers, and if you know how smart and hard-fighting a big mangrove snapper is, you understand how impressive a 70-pound cubera snapper is. The technique was pioneered by Bob Lewis in the 1950s and 1960s. Bob was targeting groupers and did not want to be bothered by amberjacks, so he started using lobsters. He ended up catching boatloads of cubera snappers. The stories from that era are that Bob would pull up to a lobster trap, pull the trap, and take the lobsters out. His customers would ask if it was his trap. Bob would say, "No, but I know the owner. I can help myself."
Bouncer's first cubera trip was in the early 1980s with a guide from Tavernier named Lee Robinson. They fished a wreck off Ocean Reef and caught several fish after midnight. The next night, the customer caught five or six, then handed the rod to Bouncer and said, "Here, now you catch one." Bouncer went four hours without a bite. The customer caught one more just as the sun was coming up, and it was over. Bouncer has been running cubera trips ever since, though he has taken breaks because the fishing is expensive — live bait, long runs, heavy tackle, lots of lost hooks and sinkers. When the fish do not bite, Bouncer takes a lot of responsibility for that.
This year, the fishing has been good, but the pressure is intense. On a recent Friday night, there were 15 boats fishing one wreck that is maybe 150 feet long and 50 feet wide. Bouncer remembers going night after night and being the only boat there. He worries about the fish surviving when 15 boats are fishing the same spawning aggregation. On one trip this year, they kept two fish they estimated at 20 to 25 pounds. When they weighed them on the Boga Grip, one was 37 pounds and the other was 33 pounds. If they were that far off on the smaller fish, Bouncer says he has no idea what the 70-pounders actually weighed, much less the fish he estimated at 100 pounds.
The way Bouncer describes the history of this fishery, the ethics of targeting spawning aggregations, and the weight estimates that were so far off is fascinating. Listen to the full section in the episode.
Bouncer was the captain when angler Marty Arostegui caught a 46-inch swordfish on fly at night off Miami. Marty has over 450 world records, more than twice as many as anyone else in the world. His grandfather was a swordfish fisherman in Cuba. One night, Marty and his son Martini went out with Bouncer to try to catch a swordfish. They caught one, and on the way home, Marty observed the setup — the HydroGlow light in the water, the baits on floats — and said, "We should be able to catch one on fly."
The next time they went, Marty brought his fly rod but never took it out of the rack. His brother caught one, Marty caught one, and they went home. Marty said, "We blew it. We should have tried the fly." The third time, Marty said, "This time we are going to catch one on fly." Marty rigged his own rod, tied his own leader, tied his own fly. Bouncer suggested tying a small Silo Lunker Light inside the fly, so they cleared away the feathers and tied the glow stick between the two hooks of the fly.
Marty cast the fly with a sinking fly line. Under IGFA rules, you are only allowed to have 120 feet of line off the reel when fly fishing. Marty had a knot of wax thread tied around his line at the 120-foot mark so he could feel when he reached the maximum. He would let the fly sink, float it out to 120 feet, strip the fly, float it back, strip the fly, float it back, then strip it all the way into the boat and cast again. He did this for about an hour. He got one good solid strike that came off — probably a barracuda or a shark or a dolphin. He went back to fishing. His son fell asleep. Marty kept working the fly.
About an hour later, Marty hooked up again. The fish ran toward the bow of his 35-foot Cabo. Bouncer ran up to the helm to reposition the boat, but Marty said, "Hold on. Don't do anything." The fish turned away from the boat and back toward it, so Marty stayed in position. Bouncer walked back down to the cockpit. He never went back up to the helm. He never touched the helm the whole fight. Marty fought the fish for about an hour from a dead-drifting boat. When Bouncer saw it, all he could think to say was, "It's got a bill!" They pulled a 46-inch swordfish into the boat, measured it, photographed it, and released it because it had to be 47 inches to keep. They tried over and over to wake Marty's son, but he was completely out. Then his son woke up, caught one on the bait, and they went home.
Bouncer is adamant that he had very little to do with it. All he did was take Marty to where they always swordfished and suggest putting the Lunker Light in the fly. Marty rigged his own rod, tied his own leader, tied his own fly, did all the casting, and caught the fish from a dead boat. Bouncer calls it the greatest angling accomplishment in the history of fishing, and he was privileged enough to watch. The way he tells that story — with humility and awe and respect for Marty's skill — is something you have to hear. Listen to the episode.
Bouncer Smith is one of the true legends of this sport. Fifty-two years guiding full-time. Seventy world records as captain. Still fishing six days a week at age 70. Still getting butterflies when a fish bites. Bouncer has lived through the best and worst of South Florida fishing, from the days when sand covered the roads in Hallandale to the days when 15 boats fish a single wreck for cubera snappers. He has seen snook populations collapse and recover. He has seen the rise of marine reserves and the Goliath grouper debate. He was at Bud and Mary's in the 1970s when nighttime swordfishing was discovered, and he was there when Marty Arostegui caught a swordfish on fly from a dead-drifting boat.
I loved sitting down with Bouncer. He is a storyteller, and he is generous with his time and his knowledge. This will not be the last time I sit down with him. The article gives you the topics. Bouncer gives you the timing, the Miami accent, the way he laughs when he tells the story about the Fruit of the Loom guy. None of that translates to text.
Press play in the YouTube player at the top of this page.
Steve Huff · Harry Spear · Robert Trusset · Ralph Delph · Sonny Fisher · Sonny Eslinger · Ken Doubles · Alex Adler · Lee Robinson · Cecil Keith · Bob Lewis · Marty Arostegui · Martini Arostegui · Dennis Roerjoni · Sandy · Don · Jack · Bob Branham · Nick Stanczyk · Tony de Julian · Abby Raymond
Captain Bouncer Smith is a Miami-based charter captain with 52 years of full-time guiding experience. He has 70 world records as captain, was inducted into the IGFA Legendary Captains and Crew, and received the Billfish Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He has won numerous tournaments including the Guy Harvey Outpost Bonfire Tournament and the Yamaha Contender Miami Billfish series. Bouncer started his career at age 14 working on fishing piers, worked as a flats guide at Bud and Mary's in Islamorada starting in 1976, and has run his 33-foot Dusky out of Miami Beach Marina for decades. At age 70, he still fishes six days a week.
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