Capt. Sergio Atanes: Fishing in Espanol

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 765 with Capt. Sergio Atanes.

Sergio's Studio and TV Show Roots

Tom Rowland: Alright, Sergio, how you doing, man?

Sergio Atanes: I'm doing great, man. Just a little difficulty here trying to get hooked up with you this morning.

Tom Rowland: That's okay, that's technology, that's how it happens sometimes. But you've got a nice studio there.

Sergio Atanes: Oh yeah, it's nice. Before I was trying to use the big computer — this one worked perfect last night. It's my laptop that I use for doing this, and this morning it wouldn't let me in.

Tom Rowland: Well, tell me what you do in that studio. What kind of things do you do there?

Sergio Atanes: Well, in this studio, some of the stuff I do is the Monday night podcast I do on Facebook and YouTube, live. And then I do a lot of photography here for a lot of my sponsors — a lot of pictures that I take to put into websites or into some of the TV shows. It's my way to get away from everybody else. It's totally separate, a separate building from my house, because if I'm in the house, I don't care if I have my own room — people are going to walk in and the dogs will bark. This place is a little over four hundred square feet. I got it insulated with soundproofing to try to keep the noise out, and I kind of get in here and get away from everything.

Tom Rowland: Nice. So you've got your television show — tell me about your television show.

Sergio Atanes: Well, actually, years ago — back in the nineties — I used to do some stuff for Bright House down here, one of the local stations. I was doing an American TV show, and at the same time I was doing radio for ten-forty ESPN. I did the radio show for about ten, twelve, fourteen years. Then about twelve years ago, one of the Spanish stations came to me and said nobody's doing a Spanish TV fishing show — there was somebody in Miami or the Keys who did one for a month or two, ran out of money, and that was it. So I hooked up with a guy who used to do everything for Telemundo in Washington, D.C. He moved down here to start his own company, and we started a Spanish TV show that just grew and grew. Then last year some of my sponsors said streaming is the way to go, and asked why don't I put some of the shows on streaming and do some American stuff with their product. So my first English episode started in January. Actually, I was amazed — a lot of the streaming stations were very interested in the Spanish show, since they didn't have anything in Spanish. If you think about it, the Hispanics here in the United States are pretty affluent, they have a lot of money. You were at the Miami Boat Show — I was there and I sold about seven boats helping my sponsor out. It was amazing.

Tom Rowland: So tell me about the difference — when you first were doing the stuff with Bright House in English, and then when you started thinking about the Spanish TV show, did you change anything, or did you do everything exactly the same, just in Spanish? What was the process?

Sergio Atanes: The big problem when you switch to Spanish is you don't have the availability like you do in English. I've got a hundred and fifty-five captains in my computer that I use for a lot of my corporate stuff, so I've got a lot of captains I can call up to do shows with. In Spanish, there aren't a lot of Spanish captains. You've got some that have Spanish names but can't speak Spanish, and some who say they're Spanish and their Spanish is terrible — not that mine is fantastic — but it makes it tougher to do the Spanish shows than the American shows, because I have such a broad selection on the American side. In Spanish, I have a doctor I do a lot of shows with down around Boca Grande and Pine Island who's a Spanish guy, and I have a local guy who's a great angler — he's not a captain, but he fishes and hunts all the time. When we go to Mississippi or Louisiana, the doctor just goes up there with me, because there ain't no Spanish people up there. Some of my clients will do the trip with me, and some of them can speak Spanish, but it's a lot tougher than on the English side. The other side to that is, in Spanish, we have more fun than we do in English.

Tom Rowland: You do? The language lends itself to more fun conversations — is that what you're saying?

Sergio Atanes: Yeah. When I'm doing the show and, let's say, I've got you on the boat and you're a novice, just an average guy, and you do something that's not right, all I can say in English is, "Tom, we do it this way," and I've got to be nice about it. Where in Spanish, it's the culture — I can just say, "Tom, stop being stupid about it and do it this way," and you'll come back to me with a smart remark, but it's not being rude, it's the culture. I guess that's why a lot of people, even though they're bilingual, love to see the show in Spanish because of the kidding that goes on. You can do that and it's not disrespectful — you just do things in Spanish that normally wouldn't sound right on the American shows.

Tom Rowland: I gotcha. So what about your history with the Spanish language — how did you become so fluent?

A Cuban Childhood in Ybor City

Sergio Atanes: Well, I was born in Cuba, but I came over when I was a year old and grew up in Ybor City. In my household I was not allowed to speak English, because my mother said, "You're going to school to learn the American language — when you come home, we want you to know the Spanish language." So when you walked in the front door of my house, you had to speak Spanish. If you came in with a cut that needed four stitches, bleeding all over the place, and you were screaming in English, my mother wouldn't pay attention to me until I switched over to Spanish. I guess that's what helped me over the years. What got me hooked on fishing was, when I was about four and a half years old, my uncle came from Cuba to live with us. He loved to fish, and he was eighteen. He lived with us for a little over a year before he got drafted into the army — this was back in the fifties — but he got me so hooked on fishing at that age that I never put a rod down.

Learning to Fish at the Phosphate Dock in Boca Grande

Sergio Atanes: Everybody knows Boca Grande, I presume. Back in the fifties, the phosphate dock was actually there — now you see TV shows where they fish around the old pilings and catch Goliath grouper, but when I was growing up, the dock itself was still standing, like a long pier with a covered conveyor belt where ships would dock and load. We would go almost every Friday night after work. My uncle would be ready to go, and one of the best baits in those days, which nobody uses anymore because it's too expensive, was shedder crab — a soft-shell crab inside the hard shell that's getting ready to molt. In Tampa, along Bayshore Boulevard, as homes were being re-roofed, my uncle would collect the old tin roofing, cut it into thirty-inch pieces with tin snips, and bend each one into a half-moon. At low tide at night he'd set maybe a hundred of these tins along the seawall, spaced about ten feet apart for a few blocks, staggered on the way back. We'd walk through at night with a Coleman lantern and two galvanized buckets — a little one tied to me, a big one tied to him — lifting each tin to see if a crab had taken shelter underneath while it molted. If it was soft, it went in my bucket; the hard shedders went in his, and we'd bring them home, where my mother hated it, and layer them in the bottom crisper drawer with damp newspaper between each layer. By Friday night we'd have three or four dozen shedder crabs and a couple dozen soft-shells to eat.

Sergio Atanes: Then somebody in the family gave us an old Nash Rambler, and since there were no fancy coolers like Yeti or Igloo back then, my uncle would take out the back seat, put a cushion on the hump for me to sit on, and load two twenty-gallon galvanized garbage cans with flake ice from the fish market on each side of me. I'd ride in the middle under a blanket while he and his buddy sat up front, with a couple more cars following. We'd catch the last ferry to Boca Grande, since there were no bridges yet. There was a laundry man in Ybor City everyone called Chino Lavandero — even though he was American, nobody knew why they called him that — and he was the biggest drunk you ever saw. Every weekend in the summer he'd come along with a few bottles of rum, play cards and drink with the security guard at the phosphate dock, and that's how we got onto the dock to fish. We'd get there around nine-thirty at night, since the guard's shift and the card game ran until four-thirty in the morning, and in those days, with shedder crab, it was nothing to catch a forty-pound redfish or a thirty-pound grouper off that dock. But the current in Boca Grande Pass is terrible, so they tied a piece of old anchor line around my waist and to the railing, with just enough slack that if I fell in, my feet would dangle in the water until somebody pulled me back up. I never did fall in, but I remember one of my uncle's buddies joking that they'd have to fish me out someday, not realizing my mother was in the next room — she overheard it and chased my uncle out the front door. That's just how I grew up.

Tom Rowland: Tell people what a shotgun house is — we have them in Key West too.

Sergio Atanes: I lived in a shotgun house on the corner of 9th Avenue and 21st Street, which is all bars and nightclubs now, but back then it had Walgreens, a five-and-dime, a shoe store. A shotgun house has a wall down the middle and two front doors — you go in one side and there's a living room, then a bedroom, then another bedroom, then a kitchen with a bathroom door and a door out to the backyard, all lined up so you could theoretically fire a shotgun through the front door and it would go straight out the back. It was a duplex, and it was cheap to build — that's why they were so popular, and why you still see them in Key West. We had aluminum floors that got worn out and replaced every few years, and kerosene "perfection" heaters with a wick and a glass chimney that doubled as light, one in my room and one in my parents' room. There was no central heat or air — if you moved to another room, you took the heater with you. I wouldn't trade any of it.

Cigars, Fish, and Nickels — Hustling as a Kid

Sergio Atanes: The school I went to was Most Holy Name, a little Catholic school about four blocks from the house. Those nuns and my parents didn't put up with any nonsense — you did something wrong in the classroom, the nun crooked her finger, you went outside, and you got the living daylights slapped out of you. You didn't dare go home and tell your mother the nun hit you, because then she'd beat the tar out of you for whatever you'd done. Every Saturday morning one grade at a time would go help the nuns work in the convent yard. One year I skipped my turn, and Sister Mary walked four blocks to my house to ask my mother if everything was okay, since I hadn't shown up. My mother grabbed my ear, walked me the four blocks to the convent, and handed my ear to the nun, who kept hold of it the rest of the way while my buddies watched. I never skipped another Saturday in my life. My mother's rule was: the nun's always right, because the nun's not going to do something to you unless you didn't do what you were supposed to do. In my house, my mother was the law.

Tom Rowland: Do you think that helped build your work ethic?

Sergio Atanes: People back then were maybe getting paid forty or fifty cents an hour, so everything felt expensive — fifteen cents to get into the Ritz Theater on the corner of 15th Street and 7th Avenue was real money. Between the nuns, my mother, and God, I met an old man near the Habitampa cigar factory, which was right across from us. Every Friday on the way home from school, he'd tell me to go to the third truck door, knock four times, and a box would get pushed out with ten to twenty-five broken cigars that had come off the machines. I'd take them home, straighten out the ones that were just bent, and roll fresh leaf around the ones that were worse. Cigars sold for a nickel back then, so I'd stand on the corner of 7th Avenue and 21st Street Friday afternoons and sell mine for a penny — I could sell eight, ten, twelve, sometimes fifteen. My mother would give me fifty cents so I'd have money for the movies and popcorn.

Sergio Atanes: When my uncle came back from the army he lived with us another year before he got married, and by then I was closer to ten. We'd fish all night at Gandy Bridge for black drum, redfish, and trout — people are limited on black drum now, but back then people ate them. The next morning I'd load a wagon with ice and fish and walk the neighborhood selling maybe three dollars' worth, which was a day's pay in those days. He'd give me a quarter, and that was my movie money for the week. I guess that's how I grew up appreciating what a dollar, or a nickel, was worth. My mother's philosophy was you don't take anything unless you earn it — if somebody gives you something, you work for it, because you can make it on your own, but you've got to do it. And she used to tell me, you're not going to catch any fish, you're not going to make any money sitting on the sofa. That's true.

From the Corporate World to Full-Time Fishing

Sergio Atanes: After I grew up and went into the business world, I had one of the best breaks when I got my first full-time job at a wholesale company, working in the warehouse and then at the counter. Eventually I became a salesman, and eventually vice president of the company. The chairman of the board — this was around 1968, '69 — took a liking to me because I was always busting my chops helping clients who came in needing something in a hurry, and he'd call me down to his office just to send me out for a hamburger, hand me five dollars and the keys to his brand-new Pontiac Bonneville, and tell me to buy myself one too. That was his way of saying thank you. He also had a huge picture on his wall of a ship sinking, like the Titanic, and one day he told me what it meant: a small leak can sink a big ship — watch your expenses, watch how you move money, because that can cost you your business, your life. That stuck with me for the rest of my career. I only ever had three jobs — that first company eventually sold, and I moved to two others, becoming vice president of two different companies without a college education, because I had no money to go to college. All I had was hard knocks from the street, but I could motivate people and increase sales, and back in the eighties and nineties, companies could still see that in you, even without the degree.

Sergio Atanes: I got my captain's license in 1975, but I didn't want to do charters — my buddies forced me into it. In those days it was all grouper fishing offshore, no light tackle. I'd tell everybody we're leaving my house at five-thirty, and when one guy kept showing up late, and another couple always wanted to stay out an extra hour even though I had to get home to my wife and clean the boat, I finally sat them down and did the math — gas, bait, the truck, fifty dollars a trip split four ways, twelve-fifty a piece — and they still complained. So one day I just told them the going rate was now three hundred dollars a day, same as the other captains were charging, and that thinned out the friends who just wanted a free ride and kept the ones who actually wanted to fish with me.

Tom Rowland: So is that how you transitioned into fishing full time?

Sergio Atanes: No — I always kept the two jobs going in parallel and did the guiding on the side for years, because I wanted to make sure that when I retired I could really enjoy it. Eighteen years ago I finally quit and walked away. It's tough giving up a company car every couple years, an expense account, paid insurance, good money, just to go fishing full time. But my cardiologist, who's also my Spanish TV co-host and a friend of twenty-five years, kept telling me the stress of running the business was going to give me a heart attack, and I needed to do something different. What made the transition easy was that I didn't owe any money — I'd already paid everything off, so the day I retired, everything I had was mine, and I didn't have to wonder how I was going to make a mortgage or boat payment.

Tom Rowland: Did you already have a boat?

Sergio Atanes: I did. I'd been hooked up with Mako back in the seventies through the local dealer, swapping out a new one every three years or so. Later I hooked up with Remax in their heyday, before the 2008 crash — I helped them with tournaments and boat shows, and in return they gave me a Boston Whaler to use every year, no pay, just a free boat. By the time I retired I already had the money to buy a brand-new boat, and after that I hooked up with a big sponsor and I've had a new one every year since.

What It Takes to Guide for a Living

Sergio Atanes: At these boat shows, I get a lot of young guys who come up and say, "Hey, I want to retire, Captain, I want to quit my job, I've got my license." I tell them not to do that — first make sure you're settled, that things are the way you want them, that you've got money put away. You need fifty thousand in the bank, because you're going to use it. Everybody thinks, "I'm a captain, I'll charge six or seven hundred a day, I'm going to get rich." No, you're not. In the Tampa Bay area alone, because of the school here, there are over three hundred and sixty captains with a license — maybe eighty or ninety full time. When I got my license in 1975, there were only four of us in Tampa Bay total. It's a lot tougher to get started now. You've got to build your client base, and any time there's an economic crunch, I see guys lose their boats, lose their trucks — I've seen some get divorced because their wife won't put up with the lifestyle. It's a wonderful life, but you've got to be prepared for it. It also helps to have a loving, trusting wife — mine put in forty-two years at the VA before retiring, and she's the one who told me eighteen years ago, quit now while you're young enough to really enjoy it, don't wait.

Sergio Atanes: The secret is making sure this is really what you want to do, because a lot of young guys love to fish, and think, "fishing, fishing," but running charters is totally different — you're not fishing anymore, you're catering. To be a good captain, you're not just a captain, you've got to be an entertainer.

Tom Rowland: That's such an important point. When people ask me about getting into guiding, the first thing I ask is whether they enjoy teaching and entertaining people, because that's really what it is. If you're looking to fish, becoming a charter captain is the best way to stop fishing as much as you currently do — a good guide fishes very little. Even if you're on the water three hundred days a year, you might get a few days to actually fish yourself, and on charters you're mostly not fishing at all, maybe hooking one for somebody occasionally. A lot of people get discouraged with guiding because they thought they'd be out there fishing and realize they haven't touched a rod in weeks. But what you're describing — being an entertainer, being there for the customer in a bigger way than just catching fish — that's exactly it.

Sergio Atanes: Right, because the average guy who goes out on his own every Saturday, sometimes he does great, sometimes he does slow, and that's fine. But when you're taking somebody out and charging them money, you've got to try to give them the best time you can, and you can't make fish bite. I've had days where people think I can walk on water because we sat on a snook spot for an hour and a half and caught thirty-five snook, and I've had days where an hour and a half in, I've got one fish. When things slow down, you've got to start thinking about how you're going to entertain these people.

Tom Rowland: How do you entertain people? When I think about guided trips, I've got a hierarchy — safety first, everybody comes back safe, nobody gets hurt. Second, everybody has a good time. And way down the list somewhere is that we actually catch fish. If you take care of the first two, you end up catching more fish anyway, because as soon as somebody gets hurt you've got to go back to the dock, and as soon as somebody's not having a good time, they're never coming back to you.

Reading Clients on the Mangroves and Under the Docks

Sergio Atanes: The first thing I do when people get in my boat is tell them, look, this boat isn't going to sink — but here's where the life preservers are, just in case. I'm not really into offshore charters; I stick to the backcountry and the flats, though I'll go offshore myself to film snapper shows, but I love snook, redfish, and some nearshore kingfish. I always point out the life preservers and walk them through how to start the motor, just in case something happens to me, and then we get going.

Sergio Atanes: Out on the mangroves, when it's windy, you can tell a client's type right away — the guy who lies and says he knows how to fish, and then can't cast straight; the guy who's honest and says he barely fishes; or the guy who says he doesn't saltwater fish but does a lot of freshwater bass fishing. However they come in, you learn how to treat them. When we get to the mangroves I tell them, from all my years of experience, I've never caught a snook on top of the mangroves — they're always underneath, in the water. They laugh, but what I'm really telling them is: don't cast high, don't cast hard, in a way that sticks with them because it's funny instead of a correction. Same thing dock fishing this time of year, when we get negative tides and catch a lot of redfish under residential docks — most captains fish the outside of the dock, but I know that in the older neighborhoods, before there was an EPA, builders dumped rubble under where they built the docks, and that rubble holds snook, redfish, flounder, and sheepshead. So I drop anchor between two docks, back the boat in about ten feet from shore with the power poles down, and tell people the same thing — I've never caught a fish on top of a dock, they're all underneath. Sometimes a guy gets his line stuck and feels like he messed up; instead of getting frustrated with him, I'll offer to work the rod under the dock myself until he gets the hang of it, so he gets more efficient fishing time instead of untangling time. Most of them pick it up watching me. After they've been on the boat an hour, you start to read their personalities — some are more serious, some like to joke around — and you adjust to that, like a comedian reading the room. I won't pretend every trip is fantastic; I've had bad trips. At that point you try to get people talking a little, ask what they're doing on vacation, which buys you time to figure out what to do differently, or sometimes you just move — I've moved twenty-five feet down the shoreline and gone from nothing to fish biting like crazy.

What Makes the TV Show Work

Tom Rowland: On your TV show, what's the format — is it educational, or more of an adventure show?

Sergio Atanes: It's a little bit of everything. We try to educate a bit about the tackle we're using and why, and talk about water temperature and time of year. It gets boring watching somebody just pull one fish after another, so in between catching fish we talk about methods and baits — we're trying to educate while also showing us catch fish. We've aired shows where it was a genuinely slow day and we said so on camera — we got six fish instead of twenty-five, but we worked hard for it, and we'd explain why: a cold front came through, we had a blue sky and high pressure, so we'd talk about negative tides and the barometer and how that affects the fishing. You try to educate people on why it was a bad day, not just that the fish didn't want to bite — the weather played a factor too.

Getting Kids Off the Computer and Onto the Water

Sergio Atanes: For about the last twenty years, my goal has been getting kids involved, and last year I pushed it hard and it worked out well. I manage a lot of seminars, and we do sessions geared toward parents and kids together. Last June at Picnic Island, a little beach and boat ramp area inside Tampa Bay, I ran a five-hour, hands-on fishing class. A lot of sponsors donated product, the mayor of Tampa came out, FWC and CCA set up booths, and I gave away a hundred and fifty-three rods and reels to kids, and fed them and their parents. It was all free, but you had to be there with your child — I didn't want a parent dropping off a nine or ten year old for three or four hours. The idea was to get kids away from computers and expose them to the outdoors. I got so many nice emails the following month, especially from mothers whose daughters got hooked on fishing and kept asking to go again. That's exactly what I wanted — to get kids off those games and doing something with their time, the same way fishing kept me out of trouble growing up in Ybor City, when a lot of my friends got into trouble because there was nothing else to do. When kids have too much free time, and some of these games are all about killing and war, and if a kid's borderline, it can push him the wrong way. Get them into something healthy instead.

Tom Rowland: Outdoors is incredible — it's a tool, it's medicine, it's quality time, whatever you want to call it. The way we both grew up, people over forty basically grew up outside without a phone, with no communication with their parents all day — I'd ride my bike everywhere and just be back by dinner. I don't know if it was better exactly, but I was a lot more in touch with the natural world than kids are today, and fishing is a great way to get people outside and exposed to so much — the bait, the fish, the plants, the water. Even if little kids just sit and play in the bait well, that's fine — as long as you're out there together, that's what matters.

Sergio Atanes: What I tell parents is, not every kid is born to be a baseball player, a football player, or a soccer player — they don't all have that talent. But any kid can be an angler. You don't need talent to fish, it's natural, and it's lifelong — you can keep fishing well into your nineties.

Where to Find Sergio's Show

Tom Rowland: You've got so many great stories, and such an interesting childhood, all rooted in fishing. How would people find your show or listen to your podcast?

Sergio Atanes: They can find me on YouTube under Fishing Adventures Florida. My live show on Monday nights is called Florida West Coast Fishing Report, on Facebook and YouTube, and it stays up on YouTube afterward. I've got about six or seven captains who send in videos of what's going on up and down the West Coast, plus a guest each week — you'll be on with us next month, and we've got Flip Pallot coming up, and we've had Bouncer Smith on too. It's the same idea as what you're doing, bringing in experience from outside our immediate area, while also covering what's happening locally so people know what's biting and what to expect that weekend. I don't do as many charters anymore — I've got my corporate accounts, and I'm spending more time trying to get the kids' program going again. The biggest hurdle is the paperwork — getting the city to let you use a space like Picnic Island, then a bond that cost me around four hundred dollars, though the mayor waived the usage fee for me. I had eighteen captains helping last year, so groups never got bigger than six or seven kids, and each captain walked them through casting a net, basic tackle, and information about the fish. The FWC came out with their officers and an inflatable boat, which got the kids excited, and having the mayor there helped bring more parents and kids out. I'm working on doing it again this summer, because if I can get even ten or twenty percent of those kids turned on to the outdoors, it makes me feel good.

Sergio Atanes: And it's not all about catching fish. Some of the things I enjoyed most were taking kids out to catch fiddler crabs for sheepshead bait — watching them chase the little crabs and put them in a bucket. It's not just handing them a rod and reel with bait already on it; it's the little things, like catching their own bait with a small net, that get them even more excited, because now they caught the bait and caught a fish with the bait they caught themselves. I always keep a little three-foot and four-foot cast net here so if I've got a bunch of kids, I can teach them to throw it. It's just the expression on a kid's face — they're so happy, and it's a different kind of smile than what you see when they're behind a computer playing a game.

Tom Rowland: There's no doubt about it, man. Sergio, thanks for coming on today, I really appreciate it. It's great to get to know you a little bit, and I look forward to checking out your show. If anybody wants to check it out, go to YouTube, Fishing Adventures Florida. What about social media?

Sergio Atanes: Yeah, I'm on Facebook, Twitter, everything, just under Sergio Atanes, or go through the website — it's easy to remember, Realfishy.com, and that'll take you everywhere.

Tom Rowland: Realfishy.com, that's a good name. Alright, so thank you very much.