Capt. Scott Moore: Hurricane Recovery and Community on Anna Maria

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 997 with Capt. Scott Moore.

Storm Recovery on Anna Maria Island

Capt. Scott Moore: I'm Captain Scott Moore in Anna Maria, and I'm here with Tom Rowland at the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Scott Moore, how are you, man?

Capt. Scott Moore: I'm doing great, man. Beautiful day outside. Anna Maria — we came through a lot here. We had probably about four feet of water that went over this island last year about this time. My house had about three and a half feet of water. What you're looking at in this room, luckily a lot of this stuff was up on the walls, but we had four feet of water. This house has all been redone.

Tom Rowland: Really? I do know just a little bit about this. We had about the same amount, about four, four and a half feet of water in Wilma in Key West. And I don't know if it really matters if you get four feet of water or two feet of water.

Capt. Scott Moore: It doesn't. You have to read the whole thing. It doesn't matter.

Tom Rowland: What was the vibe like? I've talked to a lot of people that were in that area — this time last year we were talking hurricanes a lot. But what about the recovery and the community? A lot of times hurricanes can really bring out the best in people as you recover — the community really comes together. I don't know if you experienced that.

Capt. Scott Moore: Tom, unbelievable. People don't realize — we've got a community center. Let me explain Anna Maria to you. It's seven miles long. You've got Bradenton Beach as a municipality, you've got Holmes Beach as a municipality, and then you have the city of Anna Maria. In the city of Anna Maria, it's really, really special. We have a community center, and it was unbelievable — after a storm, when you get back on the island, it's hard to get anywhere or get around, but they set up and had everything you needed up there. It was phenomenal. If you needed toilet paper, if you needed water, whatever you needed, it was unbelievable. Most of the people out here could afford it, but people volunteered and brought stuff, and that was the life of the island for two or three months. It was unbelievable.

Tom Rowland: How long were you without power, or was the island —

Capt. Scott Moore: The island actually had power — they have a big line that comes in, and it's just individual after that, depending on how much damage you had. They've got pretty high lines on the island now. I would say we didn't come back here for a while — we only came back to work on the house. I stayed at my son's house. My granddaughter gave me her bedroom until we got things going. It was quite a lot. And then we had the second storm. The first storm surged us, and the second storm brought tornadoes — within a mile or two of where we were staying in Wabasso, they had major tornadoes during the storm. Now understand, on the second storm, we were on the northeast quadrant, so we had inflow winds, which actually drew the water back out. We were lucky on that one. I wasn't here at the time — I was on the East Coast — but I know the schematics of what went on. We've had hurricanes before — I went through Donna back in the sixties. We had just a little quarter of the eye, and by the way, the eye wall in Donna was sixty miles wide. It was almost to Punta Gorda. When you look at some of these other storms — Charley was what, two miles wide? The first storm of last year came up from the Caribbean and pushed water straight at us along the coast, and because Anna Maria sticks out, it piled a lot of water here. The second storm hit Siesta Key south of us — Boca Grande, all the way down to Fort Myers Beach — they got hammered.

Tom Rowland: In all your years in Florida, was that the most difficult stretch?

Capt. Scott Moore: Yeah. And listen, Tom, we haven't even really had it bad as far as wind — we had maybe 100 mile an hour winds here on the second storm, and we've been fortunate. Can you imagine what they went through in the Bahamas on that one storm? They had twenty-four hours of 100 mile an hour winds. We've been very fortunate here — if we ever had a four or five hit this island directly, it would be over. Of course they had it pretty bad down in Fort Myers and Sanibel.

Tom Rowland: It was bad. I went to Fort Myers shortly after that storm and it was very significant — it looked the same as what I saw after Katrina, when we went to Louisiana and shot a show with Anthony Randazzo as soon as we could get in there. That place was incredible, the things we saw. But you see the same type of destruction on a smaller storm in a place like your home, that island.

Capt. Scott Moore: I really do call Anna Maria my home. I grew up in West Bradenton, went to high school, and moved to Anna Maria in 1970. But I fished Charlotte Harbor — I had a lot of sponsors in Boca Grande and kept my boat at Uncle Henry's. When it comes to fishing you have all these different scenarios, whether you're fly fishing or just regular hook-and-line reel fishing. Growing up guiding and making a living, I had a family, I lived in Anna Maria, and it was paying the bills working in Boca Grande too — I called Boca Grande my second home. What's really interesting is that after the storm, I was down in Boca Grande — my son fishes up here and goes down there in the summer and stays on the beach like we used to do with my wife — and I noticed the mangroves that were trimmed were covered with water and didn't get the defoliation that the mangroves that were up in the air and exposed to the wind got. Mother nature kind of takes care of things — if there's a big surge of water that covers the mangroves, those particular mangroves don't get defoliated. You've probably seen the schematics — you'll know which side the wind was blowing the hardest on those mangroves. And if you're a good fisherman, you know where the groceries are going to be — right there where those mangroves are.

Tom Rowland: The mangrove has to be one of the most incredible pieces of vegetation we have on this planet. I don't know a better windbreak than mangroves.

Mangroves: Nature's Storm Buffer

Capt. Scott Moore: Oh, absolutely.

Tom Rowland: It's just an incredible plant, and how they can withstand these hurricanes and complete submersion — after some of our storms we've seen a whole island completely defoliated, these things look dead as dead can get, and they come back.

Capt. Scott Moore: Crazy how they do that. Now what we have here on Perico, up the Manatee River, and that beautiful area on the east shore of Tampa Bay, we've got these beautiful black mangroves — it's a different type of shoreline. You've got your buttonwoods, you've got your blacks, and then your yellows and reds, depending on the area. A lot of people don't realize how important the blacks are — the black mangrove tree, if you look, you'll see the roots sticking up. If a tide came in and covered those root systems for two or three months, it would kill that black mangrove — that water has to recede, come up and recede. The problem was the erosion that happened up there with the northeast wind — it really did some damage to the black mangroves. I was very concerned about that. We had hundred-year-old black mangroves along the very famous area we call Robinson Preserve — it's a preserved area we set aside over the years that goes to the Manatee River — and there was quite a lot of damage. You also had waterspouts and tornadoes doing damage on the shorelines.

Tom Rowland: The tornadoes were surprising to me, how many there were. When we've had storms in the Keys — Irma hit Duck Key real hard, and we went down there shortly after to help our friends — you'd notice straight-line damage because you were approaching from a boat. Driving down the coastline in a car it looks like one house didn't have much damage and the next one had a little more, but when you line it up like trees in an orchard from the water, you'd see the straight-line damage — that house was messed up, and that house, and that house. You couldn't necessarily see it driving, but from a boat you could see that tornado damage is different.

Capt. Scott Moore: Right. Now on the north end of Anna Maria, you had the city pier that was just redone — the whole pier, supposed to be built to last a hundred years — the historic Rod and Reel Pier, the heart of the island. It was completely destroyed, Tom. Gone. So we're thinking a tornado or waterspout came in and then came down that line. I was driving down Gulf Boulevard and observing — there were homes where one had the roof completely off, and the one next to it had a metal roof that wasn't off, but on the lee side, the south side, the trim was buckled back, and I said, they didn't have enough wind from the south to do that. So seeing that metal twisted like that, that's probably a skipping tornado — it changes a lot.

Tom Rowland: How are those buttonwood trees looking today?

Capt. Scott Moore: A lot of them were defoliated in some areas, but on the lee side of the island they're in good shape. There's a restaurant, Mar Vista, on Longboat Key — a hundred-year-old fish camp turned restaurant — with some of the oldest buttonwoods in Florida. You can sit around and have dinner under them. They had a lot of defoliation, but they're coming back — we were very concerned, but they're fine.

Tom Rowland: I'll have to go there — I don't think I've been to that restaurant, though I've certainly been to Longboat Key. Tell me about the mangroves that had been trimmed — you were saying they did better?

Capt. Scott Moore: They actually did better. When I went down to Boca Grande last summer, the mangroves that were trimmed, that were bushed out — which I'm not against — did great. The property owner doesn't realize it helps with erosion, because when they're trimming them the cuttings go back in the water instead of being ripped out. You want to encourage trimming — that way the homeowner gets their view and the mangroves are still there, and it actually makes them healthier.

Tom Rowland: There was a time though that trimming was really discouraged, right?

Capt. Scott Moore: There was a time. Believe it or not, in the legislature, one of the biggest developers on the west coast of Florida asked somebody to write a bill to save the mangroves at the time. Think about it — if you're a developer, would you rather have the mangroves there, or concrete? You're not ripping stuff out and putting stuff in — you're leaving it there. It's all about the view. And that's what's so interesting about the podcast and educating people — the people that have moved here and are moving here don't have a clue what we went through in Florida growing up. They're probably thinking, why are these guys so passionate about saving things? If you educate them, they'll get it.

Tom Rowland: This is a good opportunity to walk through what you've seen in Florida, what it used to look like, and why it's so important to try to save these things.

Capt. Scott Moore: When I was in high school there were 60,000 people in Manatee County. Now there's 400,000. But over the years, especially with our preserves, I've worked really hard with developers and legislators. We've got Robinson Preserve, Emerson Point — areas we set aside that are so important. I've been trying for years to get Rattlesnake bought by the state. The state actually came up with the money, and the Department of Environmental Protection lowballed the offer — they said the property wasn't worth it, and let me tell you, that property is worth fifty to a hundred million dollars. It's adjacent to the Skyway — there's a mile of property adjacent to the toll plaza on the south side, and DEP turned it down. Meanwhile, the state of Florida up in North Florida is about to pay $83 million for four acres on the beach. This property goes all the way to Terra Ceia, and Tom, that estuary probably produces close to a third of our fish in Tampa Bay. Even though the uplands can't all be mangrove, there's mitigation rights and bottom rights involved with a lot of these older properties.

Tom Rowland: Bottom rights — they'd actually own the ocean floor?

Capt. Scott Moore: A lot of your huge marinas, a lot of your big developments — that's where that all came from. Down in Boca Grande, the guy who had my marina owned the bottom all the way to the Boca Grande Isles. He set aside a beautiful piece of property and gave it to the Boca Grande Conservancy — he had mitigation rights, and he owned Three Sisters. He was really good for Boca Grande.

A Career on the Water: From Boca Grande to Anna Maria

Tom Rowland: You've really been on the water for fifty years.

Capt. Scott Moore: Yep, I've been guiding since — well, I got my license in '79.

Tom Rowland: So that's a significant amount of time, and a tremendous amount of work with conservation, setting these places aside, educating people on why it's important. So starting from the perspective of a fishing guide — what was it, a threat of some kind, that got you started down this road?

Capt. Scott Moore: Snook. Also, Tom — thank God we've got you and a lot of the new podcasts going on everywhere. Back then we had outdoor writers. We had papers — how could you have a paper in the state of Florida and not have an outdoor section? It's crazy what happened to the evolution of papers; of course now we have the internet. I was fortunate to grow up with a lifetime friend, a very, very good writer, G.B. Knowles. He and Sergeant Franklin — there were a lot of good writers, don't get me wrong, I'm leaving people out. But I was very fortunate — G.B. and I wrote a book together, the Snook Book, and that was a start at that time. Going to the first Snook Symposiums and seeing the science evolve around our fisheries was very important. Everything was up to the legislature back then — whoever had the money. You still had gill netting, which was a gear restriction, no different than you and I not being able to use a treble hook. People don't understand that. Also, there were people moving here from up north who didn't know the history.

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about that so everybody's on the same page — the danger to the snook was the gill nets, is that correct?

Capt. Scott Moore: That was one of them. It goes back farther, actually — they were spraying for mosquitoes. Today they do larvaciding, dropping pellets that kill the larvae. But back then, when they were spraying, they were killing the food — and with fish it's all about the groceries. The immature snook eat the glass minnow, which eats the mosquito larvae. When they sprayed, they'd knock the snook population down pretty well. They sprayed the Everglades, they sprayed up here too, especially Boca Grande — those planes would come over, and if you were outside you better get inside because it was fogging. The mosquitoes were really bad — when I first went to Charlotte Harbor, in the middle of the day you couldn't get within a hundred yards of a lot of mangrove edges, they'd eat you alive. Then they got into larvaciding and were able to control them better. Those are salt marsh mosquitoes, by the way, not the freshwater ones — the aegypti is different, but they're still bad.

Tom Rowland: So when that's going on, where does your involvement start?

Capt. Scott Moore: This is a great story. One of the scientists was named Brugger, and Phil Chapman with the freshwater side was really good with snook — Phil was a very good friend of mine, did a lot with bass, was with the Fish and Wildlife Commission for many years, one of our best biologists, loved to fish, hell of a fly fisherman. At the first Snook Symposium, Brugger got up and showed a picture from a convention my father had attended years earlier as a kid — my father worked for a mowing company that sold mowers, and they had a convention down in Naples. I walked out on the pier as a kid, the water was clear, and there was a football field's worth of snook on that beach that had dropped out of the Everglades to spawn in the summer. Brugger showed the picture of the boat with all those snook in it during the symposium, and I said, that's right next to the Naples Pier. He said, how do you know that? I said, because I saw them there as a kid. Anyway, the science rolled from there because it was all about snook, and back then nobody knew anything about catching them — everybody was closed-mouthed, same as it was with bonefish. If you weren't tight with anybody, you had a hard time catching bonefish — you didn't know Bill Curtis or some of the older guides who taught those techniques.

Tom Rowland: So was that because they were protective of their knowledge, or —

Capt. Scott Moore: Very protective. The only way you were going to find out how to catch a bonefish was to buy a day with them. Some of the best at the time — you look at Huff, some of the fly fishermen — I had so much respect for a guide pulling a boat with a fly fisherman on the front, it's a lot of work, a lot of patience, it takes a certain person. I went a little different — I could have gone offshore, but I had a tower built for a 24-foot boat, one of the first ever built.

Tom Rowland: Did you drive from the top?

Capt. Scott Moore: Yeah, one of the first commercial ones. Van Hubbard had one in St. Pete — he was a guide there, I was a guide in Manatee County, and Johnny Walker was in Sarasota. There were a few before that, but that was about it for inshore at the time. One time Bill Miller asked me if I thought I could make it as an inshore guide. It was all still evolving then.

Tom Rowland: Why did you choose that direction, to build the tower on your boat?

Capt. Scott Moore: A lot of it was bait. When I tarpon fished back then, I fished the bay or along the beach, focused on the high tides and the crab flushes — the reason tarpon are there in the first place is the crabs. Everything's connected in that estuary, and there should be so much science protecting those mackerel crabs, brown crabs, and the crabs coming out of the estuaries — more than there is on the tarpon itself. Aaron Adams is a great scientist, and I told him to his face — there isn't enough science on that. We're all worried about the tarpon, we're not worried about the groceries, because the tarpon aren't going to be here if you don't have the groceries. But getting back to the snook — there was a lot of mystique, it was closed-mouth. A warden actually took me snook fishing the first time — we waded and pothole fished, and he took me to Port Manatee, my first time in a boat going after snook. Back then nobody knew how to throw a cast net — only a few of us did — and there was no monofilament cast nets, they were nylon, and we had to dip them in Timbertox to keep them from rotting, same stuff they'd soak pilings in. We caught bait at the Rod and Reel Pier and put it in a well — back then a livewell was just holes drilled in the bottom of the boat, no pumps. I thought I was hotshot when I had baitwells put on the back of my nineteen-foot Aquasport — one of the first in Florida, built in Texas. All you had was holes where the water came in and holes where it went out, and you'd better drill them right or you could sink your boat. We caught more snook than our limit that day — I was allowed to keep four, and the warden gave the rest away to people at the pier. That was back in the sixties, under the old Department of Natural Resources.

Evolution of Tackle and Boats

Tom Rowland: When you're doing this back then, what horsepower motor were you running on that boat?

Capt. Scott Moore: On that first one, I had a 100 horse Johnson.

Tom Rowland: Was that a tiller?

Capt. Scott Moore: No — on the Aquasport I ran a Johnson, didn't change over until my lifetime friend Dave Miller at Cannons Marina moved me over to Yamaha. Van Hubbard had the first Yamaha on a commercial kicker boat, and my buddy Jim O'Neil bought one the first year Yamaha came out at Cannons Marina in Longboat Key. I asked him, did you change any power packs this year? He said he didn't even change the plugs — I was still running the Johnson and had to change plugs regularly because of the oil. The next year I bought a Yamaha at Cannons and I've been with them since — that was around '83, '84. Today there's a 300 on that same hull — it's been redone three times.

Tom Rowland: The same Aquasport?

Capt. Scott Moore: No — I had the Aquasport, then I bought a Privateer, and the Privateer has been redone three times. My good buddy Scott Shoaf with T-Craft Boats — he doesn't do custom work on other boats, just builds his own — made an exception for me during COVID and redid my boat completely. I guess the kids are going to bury me in it.

Tom Rowland: Let's walk through the boats you had. When you first started guiding, what did you start with?

Capt. Scott Moore: A sixteen-foot Orlando Clipper — a tri-hull. A guy named Russ Mitchell made these in Bradenton, Mitchell Boats, and a bunch of people around here had them. They were tri-hulls with a center livewell where you could carry bait. By the way, very few people fished out of the boat when snook fishing back then — it was all wade fishing. They'd get out and wade, other than around the passes or the Skyway or the docks.

Tom Rowland: What was the philosophy — was it so you could feel the potholes in the bottom, or —

Capt. Scott Moore: No. You could wade, and if fish were dropping out you could move the boat with them, chum a little, wait, and when the fish popped you could move to them. We have great wading bottom up here — it's not like Boca Grande, where you go out to Turtle Bay and try wading the first shell bar outside the mouth with a fly rod — it's worse than the Keys, your ankles will be sucking mud. In tarpon or redfish areas the bottom is completely different.

Tom Rowland: So what changed, to give people the confidence to fish out of the boat?

Capt. Scott Moore: Guides, mainly. A good friend of mine, Frank Botnick, in Charlotte Harbor — his family included Harold LeMaster, the inventor of the MirrOlure — Frank would get out of the boat and actually walk it like he was wade fishing, and he's caught millions of fish; he's probably one of the best guides in Boca Grande to this day. That let him sneak up on fish, and other guys started doing it too. I did it a little back then myself. But we were still using monofilament, and braid changed everything — it changed the whole fishery. Snook would work into the mangroves, and if you knew some tricks you could still put pressure on a fish without losing it. With monofilament, if you were fishing anything under ten pounds — when I started, eight-pound test was unheard of, we did it anyway, got more bites, but that snook running across the grass in summer would cut your line, so you had to use longer poles, eight-foot rods, to keep the line up.

Tom Rowland: Tell me about the tackle when you were first starting out.

Capt. Scott Moore: Back then, most snook fishing used bait-casting reels, period — smoother drag for casting. A spinning rod at the time was like a new invention that evolved along with the customers. Most people used nine-foot rods with monofilament — Lamiglas rods mostly, custom made, and if you were lucky you could get a Hurricane rod. Later G. Loomis came in, and for a long time all my rods on the boat were G. Loomis.

What Has Changed — and What Hasn't — in Fifty Years of Guiding

Tom Rowland: We've had major changes — rod materials, braid, the reels getting smaller and better, the boats and livewells getting better. What, in your opinion, over a fifty-year career, has stayed the same?

Capt. Scott Moore: I think the fact that they're just fish — it depends on how much energy and work you want to put in to catch them. A recreational fisherman sits on the bank and throws a line out. Tournament fishing really evolved our fishery, the actual technique of doing things really changed a lot — even dead-bait fishing evolved out of the redfish tournaments. We never dead-baited for snook; we knew about it, but how easy is it to catch snook with dead bait on the bottom? What hasn't changed is that the people who are going to catch fish are the ones who work the hardest at it, who are passionate about it — a lot of tournament fishermen really are. I never did tournament fishing myself, and I'll tell you why — I had to fish a tournament every day with my clients. And number two, I'm in the entertainment business. When you have a client who books you many days a year and brings a guest, I don't care who it is — I've had people on my boat who never caught a snook before, never caught a redfish before, and you're teaching them how to cast that same day, helping them without embarrassing them. It's really appreciated. The final line is catching the fish, not yelling and screaming at them — only when it's not safe. That was part of the whole scenario with my customers, though I had hardcore clients too who didn't bring anybody else, who just wanted to fish, and a lot of times the reason I'd fish myself was to show them what I was doing — I'd ask if they minded if I fished, and when I did, they'd pay attention. Most people's biggest problem is they don't truly know how to cast, don't know where to position the reel to open the bail — not knowing you could break the bail doing it wrong.

Tom Rowland: That's right, you see it very often. I like what you said about being in the entertainment business — that's what I always said about guiding too. I had some chief responsibilities: one, keep people safe; two, teach them something; and way down the list, fish for them. But at the end of the day, if they had such a good time that they wanted to go again, and everybody came home safe, and if we caught fish, that was a bonus.

Capt. Scott Moore: Yes sir — though catching fish is hugely important too, don't get me wrong.

Tom Rowland: Right, it's a responsibility, but it comes after safety, entertainment, and treating people with respect, being on time, having your gear clean and perfect. That's your general mode of operation, so you can then concentrate on catching fish. I wonder, with how much has changed in how we acquire customers with the internet and social media, have those core tenets of guiding changed, or stayed the same?

Capt. Scott Moore: It's definitely changed — it depends on the area, depends on the tourism. It happened in the Keys, and it's happened here in Anna Maria — we have on an average day thirty guides running here, and with tourism, as many as seventy every day during the spring, peak time being February through April. It could be close to a hundred with the tour boats too — we have a lot of tour boats. What's really important that I want to get across is, years ago, people would walk up to me and ask why I was teaching people how to snook fish. Some guys weren't happy about it. But my philosophy was: if you taught people how to fish, you could then go to them for help protecting that fishery. And it worked — there were times I could call and say, hey, we've got this in the legislature, we need you, and it worked.

Tom Rowland: If people aren't aware of what's out there, they have no reason to protect it.

A Legacy of Conservation Advocacy

Capt. Scott Moore: That's right. And we're at that point again today with the younger generation — you've got to get out there, and when you get new people in it fighting hard, that's where organizations matter. We have an organization here called the Waterkeepers, and they're great — it's like Captains For Clean Water, Coastal Conservation Association — you need all these different organizations, each doing their part. The reason we have banquets is because it takes money. I've heard people say all they do is banquets — well, how are you going to be in the legislature? You've got to hire consultants, it takes money, that's why you have that.

Tom Rowland: It takes money, and it takes political and economic pull — influential people who attend those banquets, and they're only going to be on your side if they enjoy what's important to you.

Capt. Scott Moore: There's an environmental side too. I had a young legislator here a while back, Will Lawson, who's been really good for us in Manatee County — when he first started running I told him, are you sure you want this job, because there's going to be a lot of environmental issues. He grew up here and has done a really good job. Once you connect with people, don't embarrass them, treat them with respect, you can have a great conversation and show them the difference — it works.

Tom Rowland: Well, it certainly worked for you, to the degree that you just had a boat ramp named after you.

Capt. Scott Moore: The county surprised me with that. I guess it all evolved from what I've done over the years — I fished Bill Mote, the founder of Mote Marine Lab, for years, and I fished Carol Jenkins Barnett of Publix, and her family still fishes with me. A lot of people who were influential and cared about our seas, and our county commissioners evolved too. When I first started guiding, they wanted to put condos where De Soto National Memorial is now, and across the river what's now Emerson Point Preserve — a beautiful county park. I called one of the biggest realtors in the state and asked her who'd even want to build there, since the road floods anyway. We were able to acquire that through the legislature, with help from some of the biggest developers in the county. Manatee County has been very fortunate with parks and recreation — we've had people who did a tremendous job acquiring wetlands, both state and county, and getting Robinson Preserve and Emerson Point protected. I was also inducted into the Manatee County Aquaculture Hall of Fame, because aquaculture was very important to Bill Mote before he passed — it's not sustainable to keep taking everything from the wild. If it's done right, you can have aquaculture — look at clams and oysters today; Apalachicola's oyster supply would be wiped out without it. There's a huge new Mote Aquarium that just opened at UTC Mall — I encourage everybody to go. That's Bill's vision: we've taken so much from the sea over the years, so let's give something back. It's a completely closed system with no pollution. They're doing snook research there, some redfish research, and there may be farm-raised redfish coming out of Pine Island. I'm excited about the idea of raising mullet too — think about it, all the aquariums in the United States need a food source, and do you want them out catching our food fish and game fish, our pilchards and scale sardines, to feed birds and aquariums? We've got enough water quality problems already without that pressure.

Fisheries Law Enforcement and Funding

Tom Rowland: Tell me about the mullet net ban — how could that have been handled better in hindsight?

Capt. Scott Moore: I think they could have given restricted licenses across the board, even for cast netting, because that got out of hand too — they found you could catch as many with a cast net as with a gill net. The difference is bycatch; gill nets weren't sustainable because of it. It's a gear restriction, and ninety percent of the problem in Florida, from day one to this day, is law enforcement. The legislature has never funded enough of it. If everybody who fishes paid for a saltwater license, the state could get matching federal funds. I started the Florida Guides Association, and one of the things we pushed for was going to the legislature to enact some of these laws. Back then I was all for the recreational license on my boat covering everybody aboard — but thinking about it now, the people who fish with a guide should still be counted, even though the license is paid for. If you had three, four, or six people on a boat, or double trips, those anglers should be accounted for in our fishery statistics and the money that comes with it — but the legislature has always dropped the ball on funding enough officers. The state of Florida really only needs one law enforcement agency — think about what it costs every year to have different tags, belts, and uniforms for all these different agencies. If the Highway Patrol, FWC, and everybody else were all under one Florida Department of Law Enforcement, they'd all have the same pay scale and the same radio system, instead of different agencies unable to talk to each other. Down at Charlotte Harbor, some officers didn't even have radios years ago — the Coastal Conservation Association bought them radios. It's better now, but they're still way behind. The Florida legislature actually pulled the FWC off the water on this coast unless someone calls — you almost never see an FWC officer unless people complain. It's sad, and it has nothing to do with the officers themselves — they're stretched thin for the amount of boats on the water. We do have sheriff's departments, and any officer can enforce a state statute law even outside their own municipality — if there's a closed snook season and a guy's walking across a bridge with one in hand, a sheriff's deputy could detain him, because it's a state law. There was a Game and Fish Commission funding transfer years ago, a constitutional amendment where a share of the money was supposed to go to research, education, and law enforcement — and I'll bet if we put pressure on it today, we'd find that money simply isn't reaching those things. It's a joke to most people who grew up here, and it's not FWC's fault — it's the legislature.

Tom Rowland: In your career being involved in so many conservation efforts, you've had frustrations, but you've also had big successes. As we wrap up, what advice would you give yourself twenty or thirty years ago, looking back with hindsight?

Capt. Scott Moore: Make sure you treat people with respect, even when you disagree with them. I've had run-ins with scientists over the years, disagreed with them, but stayed really good friends — we learned from each other, even when we butted heads. Same with law enforcement — I had meetings with some of the biggest law enforcement leaders in the state, and you just have to treat them with respect. I was a little too passionate at times, got a bit heated in a meeting once, and I learned from it — some people who work in government simply aren't going to listen to you, and that's the way it is. But there's still a lot to get involved in today, and you encourage people by how you treat them. There's plenty of free content out there on how to fish, but almost none of it includes a little conservation message. Tell people something new to them — it's not new to us, but it is to them.

Tom Rowland: The infighting amongst conservation groups, and amongst certain fishing groups, is frustrating. With your experience, how do we avoid getting splintered into small groups fighting each other when we all want the same thing — to protect this place and keep fishing?

Capt. Scott Moore: You're always going to have that, from day one. I have a radical term I use — I call them bunny huggers, people who don't understand and just hit a wall. All you can do is explain it to them. It's just like the issue with hunting bears — nothing's going to happen with bear management unless there's science behind it, because that constitutional amendment requires science to back it up. It goes for hunting and fishing both. We just had the trout symposium, and there was talk of raising the minimum size from fifteen to sixteen inches. Do you know how many fish that would actually kill? Trout are not a catch-and-release fish — one of the hardest fish to release successfully; you have to be very technical about it. Raising the minimum size would mean more handling, more targeting to hit that exact legal length, and more waste through mortality — probably pushing fish into another year class in the process.

Tom Rowland: Just so everybody's clear, it's a very fragile fish that doesn't allow a lot of handling — the more you have to put it on a ruler and measure it, the more of those fish you're going to kill. Is that what you're getting at?

Capt. Scott Moore: That's right. Right now, at nineteen inches, it's working — don't change things that are already working. That's a fisherman's perspective, having caught a lot of fish over a lot of years, more than a purely scientific one — though redfish can handle that kind of measurement and handling much better than a trout can.

Water Quality and the Future of Florida's Estuaries

Tom Rowland: To bring your expertise and experience to bear, you have to treat people — scientists, politicians, law enforcement — with respect so you can have the conversation and explain your perspective, even if they don't always come around.

Capt. Scott Moore: When you have these people fishing with you, you don't want to wear them out. I've had governors on my boat — at the time of the redfish gamefish debate, Bob Martinez was governor of Florida, and I took him out with outdoor writer Frank Sargent in my boat, which had one of the original towers. We were showing him how many different species we could catch, while at the same time gill netters were catching redfish along with everything else — that's why we wanted redfish management, made them a gamefish like we did snook. He was one of the votes that changed things, and I saw him years later in Tampa and thanked him again for that vote, because that's what nailed it. Here's another example — we had a horrible red tide in Sarasota Bay, the worst I ever saw, nothing left down there. I asked Brian with CCA if they had any trout, and they brought down ten thousand trout and stocked that bay off City Island a year after the red tide, and that helped it repopulate. Now you've got Captains For Clean Water up in Congress and in Tallahassee — CCA was there too, but you need all of it: the Keys Guides Association, Boca Grande Guides Association, Florida Guides Association. It's hard, because with as many guides as there are fishing today, they could have a huge organization if they got behind it together, but a lot of them don't get involved until there's an impending disaster.

Tom Rowland: Does it take an impending disaster to break through?

Capt. Scott Moore: Yes — that's usually what it takes to bring people out, though some folks have been in it from day one. You want a sustainable fishery and to keep it that way. Now, I will say this — snook dock lights have ruined the fishery in some areas, period, because the lighting offsets the fish's natural patterns completely. You don't see that class of fish out on the flats like you used to, because they're up the rivers now — you go up the Manatee River and there are probably a thousand snook lights, and that's where they're going to hang out. It's easy groceries, just like the bridges and the piers. It's changed the snook fishery a lot. I don't think it can be regulated, honestly — it's just something you have to realize; those fish, trout and reds included, aren't going to move far from a lit dock even in the daytime. Ask any diver — I've sent divers to different docks just to look and come back and tell me what they saw. The snook pattern has changed in other ways too — with warmer water temperatures, a lot of the immature snook are dropping offshore to the reefs more than they always did. And you're seeing snook migrate further north now, up into Homosassa and Crystal River — they always had some there thanks to the springs, but historically the gill net fishery for mullet up there kept the snook population in check, since you can't gill net mullet in a river without also catching snook. Now that pressure is gone and the water's warmer, so they've spread out more.

Tom Rowland: So what does the future look like?

Capt. Scott Moore: It's not grim, if we teach people the right things — homeowners on canals putting in artificial turf buffers instead of fertilized lawns against the seawalls, getting sewer hookups instead of leaving people on septic tanks like a lot of areas still are, and aerating the canal systems so the water keeps moving. Look what the Keys did — they put in central sewer and aerate their canals. If blue-green algae comes out of Lake Okeechobee and those molecules float into a canal system loaded with nitrogen, it's like an explosion, and the byproduct of that blue-green algae hitting salt water becomes lyngbya, which attaches to seagrass, pulls it up, and suffocates it — one problem causing the next. And think about all the golf courses on the Indian River Lagoon — where's that water going? Not just to Okeechobee, but directly into the lagoon. That retention water should be hooked up to municipal systems instead. More than anything, that runoff is toxic, and it didn't help the Indian River Lagoon either — there were decades of thirty-year-old leaching septic tanks. My local legislator tried to run a bill through requiring septic tank inspections, and something came of it, but it got left up to the counties, because too many people were afraid of losing votes over it. And beyond septic tanks, there's the phosphate mining pits close to the water up north of here — we need that mining to grow food, we always have, but they'd better have deep well injection capacity ready in case a major hurricane ever hits Tampa Bay and those retention ponds break, because if that happens there'd be no fishing for sixty miles. Deep well injection, putting it back in the ground in an emergency to lower those pond levels, is the lesser of two evils, but it's necessary. That's actually what they did with the wastewater at Piney Point — the county ran it through their central sewer system and put it in the ground; people fought it, but it's the least of two evils compared to dumping it in the bay. And that fertilizer, by the way, gets barged up to the Midwest to grow corn for ethanol, after all that mining tore up Florida.

Tom Rowland: There are a lot of issues, and there are some solutions. There are a few leaders like yourself who've dedicated their lives to standing up for what they believe in, effectively. I want to congratulate you — you've made a tremendous impact on a lot of people and the entire state of Florida.

Capt. Scott Moore: Absolutely, Tom.

Tom Rowland: I'd love to have you on again — congratulations on the boat ramp. That's really something. It'd be pretty cool to put in there with you one day.

Capt. Scott Moore: This is the nicest boat ramp in Manatee County — we've got a fish cleaning table and an ice machine.

Tom Rowland: Free to use?

Capt. Scott Moore: The ice machine isn't, but you can put in for free — all our boat ramps in this county are free. We're very fortunate here. And by the way, I want to thank you for your podcast, for educating people, and for what you're doing. I appreciate it so much.

Tom Rowland: We all have to do something — getting involved is better than sitting on the sidelines. Choose how you want to do it, pick your fight, because there's plenty of them out there. Thanks so much for this, and we'll stop today, but I do want to have you on again to go over a lot of these other issues one by one. I'd love to know what you think about so many things. Thanks so much for coming on today, I appreciate it.

Capt. Scott Moore: And good fishing, everybody.