Captain Brandon McGraw is a Space Coast fishing guide who runs Space Coast Sport Fishing out of the Melbourne area, working the Mosquito Lagoon, the Indian River, and Sebastian Inlet on Florida's east-central coast. A retired firefighter with 20 years at Orlando Fire Department, he now guides full time for redfish, seatrout, and some of the largest snook in Florida. In this episode he explains how the Mosquito Lagoon clawed back from its seagrass collapse, why the Sebastian area grows oversized snook, and the small details that decide light-tackle tournaments.
Listen now: press play above, or find this conversation with Captain Brandon McGraw by searching 'Tom Rowland Podcast' on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Captain Brandon McGraw is a light-tackle and fly-fishing guide on Florida's Space Coast who runs Space Coast Sport Fishing out of the Melbourne area. He grew up on Merritt Island and spent his career in the fire service, including 20 years with Orlando Fire Department before retiring in 2022 and guiding full time. He is a USCG Master Captain and a member of the IGFA Guide's Program, and has fished the region's waters for more than 40 years.
McGraw fishes east-central Florida, roughly from Ponce Inlet south to Fort Pierce. His two most-used areas are the Mosquito Lagoon for redfish and seatrout and the water around Sebastian Inlet for snook. He also runs the St. Johns River for shad in winter and targets tarpon along the beaches in summer.
The northern Indian River Lagoon system, which includes the Mosquito Lagoon, suffered a nutrient overload that fed algae blooms. Hard freezes around 2009 and 2010 destabilized the system, a brown-algae bloom clouded the water, and the seagrass died off. The dying grass released still more nutrients, compounding the problem, and much of the lagoon went from lush turtle grass to bare sand or dirt bottom. Scientists had warned for years that the system would eventually fall off a cliff, which is what happened.
The water quality and seagrass have recovered strongly, and clear water with grass has returned to areas that had been bare. The fishery has responded well, though more slowly than the grass. Redfish are growing back toward the larger sizes the lagoon was once known for, and trout numbers have rebounded, with plenty of small fish moving through. Restoration work funded by a local half-cent sales tax, along with clam, seagrass, and mangrove projects, drove much of the turnaround.
After statewide water-quality problems peaked around 2016, Brevard County passed a half-cent sales tax to fund lagoon restoration, guided by a civilian oversight committee balancing conservation and business interests. The program's biggest early push was removing muck, the nutrient-loaded sediment locals call black mayonnaise, and helping neighborhoods convert from septic tanks to sewer. It also built large baffle boxes and retention areas along US-1 to keep road runoff out of the water. Projects are prioritized strategically to get the most benefit per dollar.
The Space Coast is near the northernmost range for snook on Florida's east coast, and the fish around Sebastian tend to run larger than in many areas farther south. McGraw believes the small, low-flow Sebastian Inlet keeps these snook behaving more like resident fish, holding around docks and in the Sebastian River rather than running the beaches. There are also reports of very large snook, over 50 inches, caught offshore while anglers were fishing for other species, suggesting big fish that stay on structure well away from the inlet.
Big snook stacked under docks in clear water are often finicky and hard to fool, and some days you simply will not get them to eat. McGraw's approach favors light, natural presentations, such as a live shrimp on a small hook, swept naturally past the fish rather than forced at it. Patience and a well-timed, drag-free drift matter more than heavy tackle, and on many days the fish give nothing in return no matter how good the presentation.
I fished with Brandon at a conservation event on the Space Coast and caught the biggest snook of my life with him, a fish that had my hands shaking in the net. I have done some snook fishing, and we have plenty of them in the Keys, but the fish I saw in his water were a different class. That day only scratched the surface, and I wanted to sit down and understand the place, the fish, and the guide who put me on them. Hear how that day unfolded on the episode.
The first time I ran the Mosquito Lagoon it was lush turtle grass and redfish everywhere, so hearing that the grass had died off was genuinely hard to take. Brandon lived through the whole arc: the biologists warning that the system would fall off a cliff, the freezes and the brown algae, the years of bare bottom, and then the slow, deliberate work that brought clear water and grass back. What surprised me most was which single fix moved the needle first, and how a local tax made it possible. Brandon lays out the recovery step by step on the episode.
Pulling up to those docks near Sebastian, I kept mistaking rows of enormous snook for old pilings until they swam off. I have caught snook for years, and I do not see fish like that where I fish. Brandon has a theory about why this particular stretch grows them so big, tied to the small, low-flow inlet and the way the fish behave more like residents than beach-runners. He also gets into the giant snook that turn up offshore where nobody is fishing for them. His full explanation is worth hearing in his own words on the episode.
The fish that had my hands shaking measured 41 and a half inches, and we hooked it on eight-pound braid, a light leader, and a small hook with a single live shrimp while everyone around us fished heavier tackle. It tried to drag the boat backward toward the mangroves, and everything after the hookset turned into controlled chaos, including a push pole in the water and a ruler underfoot. Whether that fish behaved by luck or was simply too big to bury in the bushes is a question I am still asking. We replay the whole scramble on the episode.
Early in my tournament years, a guide who won constantly told me his edge was not one thing but a stack of one-percent advantages: a sharp hook every cast, a boat that never breaks down, a net he had actually practiced with, a fresh leader after every fish. Do enough of those and you show up with a double-digit head start on the field. Brandon lives the same way, and he ties it to something bigger about controlling only what you can control. The way he frames it lands better in the conversation itself, so give it a listen.
Brandon recently spent time with Chico Fernandez, one of the anglers who pioneered saltwater fly fishing, and what stuck with him was not a cast or a fly but a standard. Not a hair out of place, not a rusty guide, nothing done to a 'good enough' level, and that meticulousness carried straight into the gear and the fishing. It reminded me of my own lessons from mentors in the Keys about tackle that is maintained to a ten out of ten. Brandon tells the Chico stories and what he took from them on the episode.
Keep listening: the full conversation with Captain Brandon McGraw is on the Tom Rowland Podcast — press play above or search 'Tom Rowland Podcast' on your favorite app.
A day after fishing with Brandon, what stays with me is not just the size of that snook but how quiet and unhurried he was while everything around the hookset came apart. That calm is the same thing that lets a guide control the controllables and let the rest fall where it falls.
I also came away more hopeful about the lagoon than I expected to. A place I loved fell off a cliff, and a community decided to fix it. That does not happen often, and it is worth paying attention to when it does.
Listen to the full episode with Captain Brandon McGraw on the Tom Rowland Podcast, available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
Captain Brandon McGraw is a full-time light-tackle and fly-fishing guide on Florida's Space Coast, operating Space Coast Sport Fishing out of the Melbourne area. He grew up on Merritt Island and fished the region from childhood, then served in the fire service — including four years in the Air Force, time as an Army medic, and 20 years with Orlando Fire Department — before retiring in 2022 to guide full time. A USCG Master Captain and member of the IGFA Guide's Program with more than 40 years on these waters, he specializes in sight-fishing redfish and seatrout in the Mosquito Lagoon and targeting the outsized snook of the Sebastian Inlet area. Book at spacecoastsportfishing.com.
Transcript
Tom Rowland Podcast — Episode 1024: Brandon McGraw
In this episode: catching a 41-and-a-half-inch snook on eight-pound braid, how the Mosquito Lagoon came back from its seagrass collapse, why the Sebastian area grows giant snook, and the details that win tournaments.
Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Tom Rowland Podcast, brought to you by Star brite. As always, Star brite is the maker of an awesome line of products to take care of your boat — that's where I use it most, whether it's the Salt Off product or any of the boat-cleaning products. Definitely check them out. They're not only a great company for the products they have, but they also do a tremendous amount in conservation, and that's certainly important to us all. This is Captain Brandon McGraw, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast. Brandon, what's up? How are you?
Brandon McGraw: Not much. I'm good. How about you?
Tom Rowland: I'm great. I caught my biggest snook ever with you not long ago. It had my hands shaking, for sure.
Brandon McGraw: It was a good day.
Tom Rowland: So how'd you get into this — well, first of all, where are you guiding right now?
Brandon McGraw: Where I caught my biggest snook ever, we were fishing out of the Melbourne area — East Central Florida, I'd say from Ponce Inlet down to Fort Pierce. Mainly Mosquito Lagoon, and then the area around Sebastian Inlet. Those are my two most-used areas.
Tom Rowland: That Sebastian Inlet is incredible. I'd heard so many people talk about it, and I knew there were some nice fish there, but what we saw that day — I feel like we only scratched the surface. We'd pull up to these docks and there'd be 30 giant snook laying there.
Brandon McGraw: I used to pull up and think, 'Oh, those are just some old dock pilings,' and they'd start swimming away. Well, those are just big giant snook — that's what they look like.
Tom Rowland: That's what I thought we were gonna catch. And they can be difficult there — they were not easy to catch. We were in a fishing tournament, a Star brite event, with a lot of other good guides and very good anglers, and not a lot of fish were caught on the day we fished. But I could tell those fish can be very finicky. Is that your experience most of the time?
Brandon McGraw: It is. Like any fishing, sometimes it seems like you should've been here yesterday. You go one day and it's nonstop, and you think, 'We're gonna go tomorrow, it's gonna be great,' and the next day it's 180 degrees different — you've gotta figure out the whole equation all over again. They give you nothing in return.
Tom Rowland: Lefty Kreh used to say, if he had a good day of fishing, 'So good I thought it was yesterday.' That was his kind of dad joke. But I did hear they had some good days after that — Captain Bouncer got a good one on top water. I fished with Adrian a couple days ago and he said a couple days after that was real good as well.
Tom Rowland: So tell me about your path to becoming a guide.
Brandon McGraw: It started through a career in the fire service. I grew up in Merritt Island, Florida — sandwiched between Titusville and Melbourne, right off the Kennedy Space Center. I fished from as far back as I can remember. We didn't live on the water, but we lived across the street from a canal, and my granddad would leave his boat in the canal all the time. As a young kid — those were different times — I was probably way too young to be driving a boat around, but I'd take it and go fish the canals. I went to high school, went to college, and found out they don't really keep attendance, so you can go surfing and fishing and nobody finds out till the end of the semester, when your parents ask why you're failing everything. That led to a career in the military.
Brandon McGraw: That's what got me into the fire department. I thought I wanted to be a cop — a couple friends went in to be cops. You go in open general in the Air Force and go to cop school, and they told me, 'Well, that's full,' which never happens. They said, 'What about the fire department?' I said, 'Okay, that sounds good.' I was 19. It was a very good decision — it got me out of Brevard and pointed in a good direction.
Tom Rowland: And where'd you get stationed?
Brandon McGraw: A place called Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico — about as opposite as the beachfront of Florida as you can get, in the middle of the high desert. I did that for four years. Came back here, and the State of Florida didn't recognize any of my fire-department certificates — that was in '99. The Air Force wasn't taking any prior service, so I went into the Army as a medic, figuring I'd combine the two eventually. I was in the Army a couple years as a medic. By the time I got out, Florida recognized the training, I challenged a test, and became a firefighter EMT, then a medic firefighter, and got hired at Orlando Fire Department. I did that for 20 years, from 2002 to 2022.
Brandon McGraw: When I retired, I tried it out on a guy to make sure I wouldn't be too impatient — I had a guinea pig to take fishing. There's nothing wrong with excited guides, I just wanted to be relaxed and calm and easy, and it worked out that way. I went from fishing three or four times a week for fun to guiding three or four times a month for a little pay, and still going for fun — a way of helping my pension. I was probably six years old at my first fish, on an old Zebco 303 — green and white, a little enclosed-face spinning reel. I caught a trout and I was yelling at my granddad, 'He's gonna break the rod!' He said, 'He's not gonna break the rod.' That's the first fish I remember, and from then on it was off to the races. I just texted my son downstairs, 'You wanna go fishing later?' 'Yeah.' 'Okay, cool.'
Tom Rowland: How old's your son right now?
Brandon McGraw: He's just turned 16, going to be a junior. I have another son who's 17 — he just graduated high school, and we're going on a cruise Sunday for a week, bringing a couple of their friends to celebrate. One last summer with the oldest.
Tom Rowland: When my kids were doing that — I have three kids — on the summers I let each one plan a trip we took, just me and them, individually. They're really special times. Do you have something planned this summer?
Brandon McGraw: I've got something in my back pocket — there's a place we go over in the Bahamas pretty frequently. It's a good spot you can go last minute, since storms are a concern, so you don't have to plan too far out. You can just say, 'Day after tomorrow, you wanna run over to the Bahamas and fish?' They've been fortunate — they love amusement parks, which we've got plenty of, and cruises, which we've got plenty of.
Tom Rowland: It's a really nice area. I hadn't spent much time up there — I've been through Orlando a ton, been on the coast, been around Jupiter a little, but that area between Sebastian and Melbourne I hadn't seen, and it's a lot quieter than I anticipated. It was more my speed. That would be a good place to live.
Brandon McGraw: Coming down A1A you take a series of right turns, and once you get through that it just slows down and gets relaxed — more people riding bikes and beach cruisers than driving cars. Some places, like Miami and Orlando, are definitely not quiet, and even some places that used to be quiet aren't anymore. But that's a nice area.
Tom Rowland: We were there for the Star brite event they have, Project Sea Safe. Can you tell us — from a guy who's lived in and around that area a long time and fished the Mosquito Lagoon — about the challenges that have gone on over the years, and where we are today?
Brandon McGraw: Sure. Sometimes they get intertwined. The Indian River Lagoon runs a long way, and there are a number of problems. To our south there's the Lake Okeechobee runoff, but that doesn't really affect us up here because it doesn't flow this way. You'll hear 'Indian River Lagoon' and think that must be it, but up here, in the northern range, we've had a problem with too many nutrients in the water. Around 2009 and 2010 we had a couple bad freezes, and I heard that offset a stabilizing force in the lagoon. Then we had brown algae, and then all the grass died. That fueled the problem even more, because all that dead sea grass raised the nutrients as well.
Tom Rowland: For people who don't know the Mosquito Lagoon — the first time I went there it was lush turtle grass everywhere, beautiful, redfish all over the place. My first stop there was on a professional redfish tournament, and it was awesome — very similar to what we do in the Florida Keys, like Flamingo redfishing. So it was sad and devastating for so many people who'd had that experience to see the grass die like that.
Brandon McGraw: The biologists had been telling us for a while, 'We're headed for a problem.' We didn't see it — we were still fishing okay. They said, 'When it happens, it's gonna fall off a cliff.' All these things maintain and then they fall off a cliff, and that's exactly what happened.
Tom Rowland: What were they warning would cause that steep decline?
Brandon McGraw: Algae blooms — algal blooms that cloud the water and kill the sea grass. They were measuring things in the water, and it kept increasing, and once it gets to a certain level it just blacks out the sun from getting to the bottom.
Tom Rowland: I think a similar thing happened in Chesapeake Bay and Tampa Bay.
Brandon McGraw: They kind of knew, watching it, and that's exactly what happened. For a number of years it was just dirt bottom — you were fishing sand or dirt. If the wind blew, it stirred up turbidity and made the fish hard to see. And unfortunately it happened around 2016, when there were water-quality issues all around the state.
Brandon McGraw: The Lake Okeechobee discharges had it, and they were having huge red tides off the West Coast — it was national news that Florida had water trouble everywhere. We weren't exclusive to it. So Brevard County came up with a proposal for a half-cent sales tax for a Save the Lagoon restoration project. I remember going to one of the hearings, and there were people from hotels there in support of the tax. Usually a hotel owner isn't saying, 'Let's get a tax going,' but they were getting cancellations. Some cities down on the southwest coast — the red tide was so bad it wasn't even inhabitable; people went to the mainland because it was irritating their airways.
Brandon McGraw: The half-cent sales tax got started and we got the ball rolling — it takes a disaster to suddenly see, 'Hey, we need to fix this.' It was a number of years of just sand while they did their work. It started slowly and then snowballed into a lot of good projects — people like Derek and Corey, a lot of good people doing good work all over the place. It's made a big difference in the resurgence of the area. About five years ago, people were fishing around and you'd hear, 'Have you been to the Lagoon lately? You should go.' I remember running up there and seeing crystal-clear water and grass like it had never happened.
Tom Rowland: Did the fishery respond as quickly?
Brandon McGraw: Not as quickly, but it has responded well. We used to fish skinny water and catch slot-sized fish, but we were also known for oversized fish out in deeper water. Those have been a little harder to nail down — I think when the grass died a lot of them moved into deeper water, and there's a man-made canal between Mosquito Lagoon and the Indian River that a lot of them moved into. Once redfish get large they typically go to deeper, offshore environments anyway. But our typical 27-inchers were getting to be 30-inchers, and now they're getting a little bigger, so hopefully they'll get to spawner size. It'll be more like the big schools of 100-plus fish you used to hear about. And the trout are coming back — I take my son to a spot that's just loaded, some nice trout and a lot of little ones.
Brandon McGraw: Snook typically aren't as far north as we are. We lost a lot from Titusville north — we had a couple freezes this winter — but they're not typically this far up anyway. From there south, it's wide open for snook.
Tom Rowland: What you have up there is really amazing. I don't know why they're so much bigger in your area. Maybe they're that big in the Everglades and I just don't know where to find them, but there are a lot of really big fish up there.
Brandon McGraw: I saw on Facebook, scrolling through, a guy caught one like 52 inches the other day — standing on a mangrove shoreline, maybe he'd been wading.
Tom Rowland: Imagine catching that wading. That would be so awesome.
Tom Rowland: This is one reason it was so important to educate people about what's going on in Florida — even someone who's lived here a long time hears about these water issues and assumes it's Okeechobee, but you're upstream of that. Do you think the success up there with clear water and grass has a lot to do with the work so many people are doing — the clam restoration project, Blair Wiggins and others? Does that directly filter the water?
Brandon McGraw: A hundred percent — every little bit helps. They're doing clams mainly, plus some sea grass and mangroves. And the half-cent sales tax has done a lot in removing muck. A lot of these residential canals have what they call muck, or 'black mayonnaise.' These houses were built 50 years ago — lawn clippings, yard runoff, fertilizers run in there, and they call it a savings account for nutrients. A storm comes along, stirs all that muck up, and it goes out onto the flats and smothers everything. It's been 10 years now. The heaviest they started on was muck removal, and getting people switched from septic to sewer — our water column is so high, and we have limestone, porous ground, so septic tanks don't work like they do elsewhere. It's not quite flushing your toilet into the water, but it's kind of close.
Tom Rowland: To compound that, the area we fish — that whole swath — there's not a lot of tide in there, right?
Brandon McGraw: No, not much at all. It's very close to Sebastian Inlet, but Sebastian was never a natural inlet. Down at Fort Pierce it's much larger, much more flow. Sebastian and Canaveral were always shifting, shallow inlets — the sand would shift around. They stabilized it and dug it out, but it still doesn't have a large flow of water. A lot of people argue you should dig another inlet to dilute the water and let more ocean water in. The problem is, one, where would you build an inlet as big or bigger than Sebastian on the barrier island? And two, it doesn't flow enough water — sometimes in the summer, just inside Sebastian Inlet is some of the dirtiest water around. We camp at a campground a couple miles north of the inlet, and there's a three-inch tidal difference there. When you're in there and the tide's ripping it seems like a lot of water, but in the scheme of the whole lagoon it's a very small amount.
Tom Rowland: So it makes it even more difficult to get rid of that muck — you have to come in and dredge it out.
Tom Rowland: When they did this half-cent sales tax, was there a rule for where the money would go?
Brandon McGraw: They set up guidelines and a civilian oversight committee with people from conservation groups and business groups, balanced out so it's not all one or the other, to find the best, most equitable use of the money. Muck was a big thing — they hit it hard right off the bat. Now they're big on helping people get on sewer, whether it's coming into whole neighborhoods or grants for a single house here and there. They realize they can't do everybody, so they've made strategic maps of where there are a lot of septic tanks. The lady who runs it, Virginia Barker, has always been very strategic — she prioritizes the projects, hitting the top ones at all times. They've built huge baffle boxes coming off US-1 and big retention areas to keep road grease and runoff out of the river, where it used to run straight in.
Brandon McGraw: The great thing about living here is we're so close to the water, and the hard thing about living here is we're so close to the water — so anything you do, you have to think about.
Tom Rowland: At least people are thinking about it now. For a long time people didn't think about it at all — 'It's the ocean, what's a gallon of oil gonna do?' And in some cases they're right, one gallon probably won't do much. But if 25,000 people do that regularly, it absolutely does bad things. We all have to be more careful about what we put on our lawns and what goes down the drain, because if it goes down the drain, it's going into the ocean.
Brandon McGraw: Just the whole idea of conservation across the board. When I was a kid, every fish we caught we brought home — we didn't even eat fish, we'd give them to the neighbors. If you let a fish go, somebody'd say, 'What'd you do that for?' Now if you keep a fish, people say, 'What's wrong with you?'
Tom Rowland: That has gone a long way. It started in bass fishing with catch and release, and now marlin, sailfish, everything is catch and release — it all started from bass fishing. That's probably one of the least-rewarded conservation things of our time. You hear about banning the mullet nets, which was obviously good, but just starting catch-and-release fishing may have done more for fish populations than anything, because it spread way past largemouth bass.
Brandon McGraw: Maybe it was Lee Wulff, or some famous fly fisherman, who said, 'A fish is too important to only be caught one time.'
Tom Rowland: I want you to talk us through — Jake, pull up one of those pictures of this fish. I've done some snook fishing, and we have a lot of snook in the Keys and catch them regularly, but our fish are smaller. There are people who catch big ones at the bridges, and some who've spent a lot of time and catch big ones in the Keys, but they're few and far between compared to what I saw in your area. You took us to this little bay and we started fishing the shoreline. Talk through what you thought we might find and how it developed.
Brandon McGraw: We'd initially gone in there with a strategy — they had a prize for the first slam. We were fishing against guys who could use bait, a bunch of croakers, all that. So we thought, 'If we can get that first slam...' And any size counted on the slam.
Tom Rowland: By the way — it's a fun tournament, not a money tournament, just a bunch of people getting together having fun. There was one prize for the largest snook, which is what people were gunning for, and another for the first slam — you'd text in that you caught the redfish, the trout, the snook, and any size counted.
Brandon McGraw: We'd already caught a couple snook around the corner. There's a little pocket where I'd seen redfish before, so we went to check it out, pulling down the edge, and it was like somebody turned on a switch — we were catching little snook on every single cast off that point. I thought, 'We've got the snook taken care of, we're having fun.' There was a dead tree out in the water, so I said, 'Let's pull down to it, fish it out, and figure out our next move.'
Brandon McGraw: It had been cloudy, overcast, even a little rain. We pulled down and got just a second of light, looked down, and could see all these huge fish in the water. Then the light went away and they went away. We were like, 'Oh my gosh.'
Tom Rowland: So you pitched right there to it. We were kind of past them by the time the light came back to my hands, but your shrimp was sweeping perfectly in front of that fish's face — as we were moving, it swung right in his face, and he came up twice and ate it. I knew he was big, and then he started fighting and I was sure he was big, because he was trying to pull us backwards to keep us out of the mangroves. I was so worked up, so worried he was gonna get off.
Tom Rowland: We caught that fish on eight-pound braid and a 30-pound bite — and a two-aught hook with a live shrimp. That's it. And everybody else was using live croakers and tackle designed for these fish. That thing took off to the bushes and I said, 'Brandon, if it goes in the bushes, we're done — I've got eight-pound test.' But it went perfectly down the edge of those bushes and never made an attempt to get in. He behaved.
Brandon McGraw: I tried to get us perpendicular to it so I could apply pressure and keep it pulled out. The next thing I know there's a lot of noise in the back of the boat — you tripped over the ruler and the push pole. I'm like, 'Where's your push pole?' It was pandemonium. The pole flopped off the platform into the water, and I got the net out. That fish might have been too big to go underneath those bushes anyway.
Tom Rowland: I kept kicking that stupid metal ruler and the push pole — it's got a weird spot on the boat where it springs off the holder and shoots into the water. I said, 'We'll get it later, gotta get this fish.'
Brandon McGraw: It's funny — they make a ruler for flats fishing, where everything's designed to be so quiet, and it's the loudest thing you can have in a boat. Kick it and you might as well have rung a church bell. But we got our shot and made it. I remember it going in the net — 41 and a half inches.
Tom Rowland: I've caught some 40s, but not anywhere near as big as this — they may have been almost as long, but this fish was bigger in every way. When we got it in the net, I knew it was the biggest one I've ever caught. It was a tank — the proportions, its head and shoulders. Somebody listening who catches a lot of big snook might not be impressed, but where I fish we don't see a lot of them this big. It was a really special fish for me. I know there are bigger ones out there, though.
Brandon McGraw: When we got back, Blair Wiggins said he caught a 50-something when he was snapper fishing offshore — he pulls up a fish and it's the biggest snook he's ever caught. Blair does that a lot, catches the biggest one when he's not even fishing for them.
Tom Rowland: I've done some scuba diving and seen big groups offshore — usually bigger groups of smaller fish — but it makes me wonder if there are reef-bound snook out there that grow to giant lengths and stay offshore. All I know about fishing is, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn. He didn't catch that giant fish by accident — it may have been an accident he wasn't fishing for them, but it was no accident that fish was there.
Tom Rowland: After I left, you were gonna take a very famous fly fisherman and a friend of mine, Chico Fernandez, fishing. How'd that trip go?
Brandon McGraw: It turned out okay. He wanted to go for shad — we have a run up the St. Johns River of a freshwater fish called shad, kind of like a salmon, that come up in our winter. But we had a bad year — really low water, not a good run. He fished with the gentleman I consider the shad master and they didn't catch many, so I figured you and I don't stand a chance. We went down to the canals off Alligator Alley — coming back from the Keys or camping at Flamingo, I'll stop there to give the boat a little fresh water and fish for the invasive fish. There are Mayan cichlids, Oscars, a jaguar guapote, clown knifefish. I told him about the spot — usually when the water's low, in April or May, there's tons of fish. We caught 50 or 60 small panfish on four- and five-weight fly rods. I'd forgotten about the freeze — it affected them down there too, killed off some of the invasive fish since they can't withstand those low temperatures. But we had a good time. We've got another trip planned in a week or so — I told him, 'Everybody's chasing tarpon; let's go catch a bonefish while everybody's out tarpon fishing.' He wrote back that he'd really like to catch another permit on fly. I said, 'All right, let's do it — you tell me where to push the boat.'
Brandon McGraw: It's been really cool talking with him — I get a kick out of tapping into the history of fishing, why things are the way they are, especially with the IGFA and the regulations. You can read books, but when you hear a story in person from somebody who was there, it's a whole different level.
Tom Rowland: He was certainly there — Chico Fernandez, Flip Pallot, Lefty Kreh, Mark Sosin, and many others really pioneered saltwater fishing, and it wasn't that long ago. Today we have all these fancy fly reels, but if you could've seen what those guys used — everything was freshwater tackle adapted for saltwater, and most of it exploded. Some reels had no drag, so they'd cut a hole and push a piece of leather against the side. And they caught a lot of big fish back then. They didn't have fly lines like we have today — in a lot of cases they made their own by sanding down monofilament. I've been fortunate to take Chico fishing before — a couple really nice days. He's a beautiful caster with a really nice stroke. We were on the Scott Fly Rods pro staff together and did some Scott events. What did you learn from him?
Brandon McGraw: Attention to detail. He showed up and there was not a hair out of place — his mustache perfectly groomed, his clothes perfect.
Tom Rowland: Does that help you catch fish?
Brandon McGraw: It transfers into his equipment. It's not a rod with a rusty guide that's 'good enough' — there's no 'good enough,' it's all maintained to a 10-out-of-10 level. That's what I picked up from that brief interaction — everything done the way it's supposed to be. It reminds me of a friend, Captain Joe Rodriguez down in the Keys. I'm kind of lazy — I like the loop in the end of the fly line, but he hates it and cuts it off before I can stop him. Every morning he trims yesterday's leader off and ties a whole new tarpon leader on. That's how he was taught, and that's how meticulous they were — so you don't break a fish off on a bad knot.
Tom Rowland: I learned an important lesson like that in one of my early tournaments — a Redbone tournament. There was a fishing guide who fished with Andy Mill a lot, Tim Hoover, and he won a lot of tournaments. He was from Marathon, I was from Key West, and we fished a lot of the same spots. He had a very identifiable boat — a black Dolphin Super Skiff. Back then everybody had a white boat, and you could see his from a million miles away, like a billboard. I was young and asking him questions — and when you're young you don't realize that if you ask people, a lot of times they'll just tell you. Some people are secretive, but Tim was very competitive and also very generous. I basically asked, 'How do you win all these tournaments?' He said, 'I go into the tournament with a major advantage.' I said, 'What's the major advantage?' He said, 'It's not just one thing. I pay attention to all the details. If I make sure my client never casts a hook that isn't sharp — every time we catch a fish I check the hooks and change them if I need to — maybe that's a one-percent advantage. I make sure my boat is maintained and I'm never gonna break down — maybe that's a one-percent advantage. I have a net with an extension handle, I've practiced with it and can get it out fast — maybe that's a one-percent advantage.' He kept going, and he said, 'If you do all that, you show up with a 15-to-20-percent advantage over the field, if that's just your MO.'
Tom Rowland: Just like Joe with a new leader every day — every time you catch a fish, do you tie a new leader, cut back the braid, make everything perfect? That could be a 10-percent advantage. You're basically controlling the controllables, because there's so much in fishing you can't control — the weather, whether a cloud comes over, whether another boat cuts you off, whether the fish just doesn't eat a perfect presentation. But there are things within your control: how you maintain your boat and tackle, whether you retie the knot after every fish, what time you get to a place, what time you meet your client so you're the first one out. At these Redbone tournaments there used to be this giant scoreboard — must've been 10 sheets of plywood screwed together, with every guide and angler, what they caught, whether it was fly, lure, or bait, and how many points. Every time, it was the same people at the top — pretty much the same top six or seven guys.
Brandon McGraw: A lot of those guys who control the controllables also don't get spun up on the stuff they can't control — clouds, weather, other people. If you let that creep into your mind, especially in a tournament, it changes everything. If you just worry about what you can control, the rest falls in place wherever it does. The wind is always the big one — it'd be nice if we could control that.
Tom Rowland: That seems like an uncontrollable.
Brandon McGraw: But I'm like, 'We're gonna go — the fish chew in the wind, and there'll be fewer boats out.' There are days where it's too nice — the fish don't like it either, they're spooky. In the wind you pay for it, but it can be good, especially for permit fishing.
Tom Rowland: In my perspective, permit fishing is way better in the wind than slick — not even close.
Tom Rowland: What about your schedule for the rest of the year? Do you fish certain areas and species at certain times?
Brandon McGraw: Mainly. The shad is a little seasonal offshoot. Most of the year the foundation is redfish, seatrout, and Mosquito Lagoon. In January and February we can get those shad and even do a half-day salt, half-day fresh. Now we're starting to get big tarpon coming through, like many parts of the state — on windy days we've been more isolated to redfishing, but when the wind's down they're still hard to see here. You need some things in your favor — a little slickness in the morning, a little water clarity; fishing them off the beach is nice. In summer we'll try to mess with big tarpon as often as we can, then it's back to redfish, seatrout, and snook. I leave snook off Mosquito Lagoon unintentionally — they're up there, I don't know why, just old habit. But the snook around Sebastian are basically year-round; as long as it's not a super cold day, 90 percent of the time they're doing the things you saw them doing.
Brandon McGraw: They seem different — maybe because we have such a small inlet, they act a little like our redfish and don't go to the ocean as much. Farther south they'll go into the inlets, spawn, swim down the beach, and you can sight-fish them in crystal-clear water. Ours just stay in the docks, the Sebastian River, the inlet, and torment anglers.
Tom Rowland: You said they're usually sitting around doing the same things I saw — which, for the most part, was sitting there letting us cast at them and not eating. We did catch one big one, but for the most part they weren't eating.
Brandon McGraw: They don't care. The year before, at the Sea Safe event, they had a place on the Sebastian River where the water was real clear. I had a gentleman out in the morning and a couple in the afternoon, and three or four docks down there were snook — not as big as your fish, but 36- to 38-inchers, probably 50 of them stuffed under this dock in clear water. My morning guy was a fly guy, so I said, 'Just throw a minnow out.' I told him they probably wouldn't eat, but how often do you get a fly in the same water as a fish that big? A couple eyeballed it. We flew a drone down there and watched them — it was mesmerizing, those fish snug in the pilings, no idea anybody was there, just living under that dock. I've always been fascinated with fish — any time there's a body of water around, I've got to look in it and see if there's anything in there.
Tom Rowland: That's what makes you a good fishing guide.
Tom Rowland: If you're looking for a fishing guide in the Mosquito Lagoon, Indian River, or Sebastian area, Brandon McGraw — I can give you a great recommendation. I had a fantastic day with you, and occasionally you catch some really big fish, which was fantastic for me. Tell people how to get in touch with you.
Brandon McGraw: My website is spacecoastsportfishing.com — it's a tongue twister. Or you can text me at 321-258-8193, which is the best way to reach me. The website's got prices, pictures, and email, but texting me is a curse and a blessing — it's got my whole schedule on it. Just text me what you're looking to do and we'll make it happen and have some fun.
Tom Rowland: So spacecoastsportfishing.com, and 321-258-8193. You're also online — what's your social handle?
Brandon McGraw: On Facebook it's Brandon McGraw, and on Instagram it's IRLYRISER — 'early riser.' Everybody says I need to change it to my name, but it's so far along, I'll just leave it.
Tom Rowland: 'Early riser' sounds pretty good to me. I appreciate you coming on — we'll do it again, get back on the boat sometime. We gotta defend our title next year.
Brandon McGraw: That's right. Thanks for having me.
Tom Rowland: All right, Brandon. Get your son out there fishing, okay? See ya.
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