Captain Daniel Andrews: Leading the Charge to Save the Everglades with Captains For Clean Water

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 12 with Captain Daniel Andrews.

Tom Rowland: I'm Tom Rowland, and this is the Tom Rowland podcast.

Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I've got a great guest for you, Daniel Andrews from Captains For Clean Water. Daniel and Chris Whitman started Captains For Clean Water, and they're really leading the charge to save the Everglades. And we're gonna get right to that podcast in just a few minutes.

Tom Rowland: I just wanna tell you about a couple of things. I wanna thank everybody for the feedback that I've gotten so far. We've gotten a lot of emails on podcast at saltwaterexperience.com to tell us either that they like the show, which is awesome. I'm really glad that you have, but also to give us some suggestions on guests. And some of those were already on the list that I keep, and others are now on the list.

Tom Rowland: So I wanna thank you for that, and I wanna encourage anybody else who would like to make a suggestion how to make the show better, maybe a different guest, different format. I don't know. Shoot me an email. Podcast@saltwaterexperience.com. I'll get it. I'll read it, and I'll do my best to either get that guest on or do a better job.

Tom Rowland: We also received quite a few new ratings and reviews on iTunes, and I wanna thank you very much for that and especially for the very nice things that were said about the podcast and about me personally. It's flattering, and thank you for that. But the ratings and reviews are not for me. They're actually for other people that might listen to this podcast. They're also for iTunes, which uses that to put it in the algorithm and deliver this to more people as a suggested or related show to other popular podcasts. So if you could just take a second, it won't take but a minute, go to iTunes, give this podcast a rating and a review. That will really help. What will also help is if you find a podcast that you like, share it with one of your friends. Copy the link, send it to one of your friends, or post it on your social media. That will also help greatly.

Tom Rowland: We've also got a brand new website we've been working really hard on, www.saltwaterexperience.com. This is the hub for everything that we're doing, and we're doing more this year than we've ever done before. We have a weekly show. We've got the podcast. We have the television show, full length episodes. You can get to every one of our episodes that we've ever produced from the website for free, and you can be aware of everything that's going on. And if you really wanna be aware of what's going on, drop your email into the newsletter list, and we will make sure that you're the first one that knows about new content and new stuff that's out there. So that would be awesome if you would do that, and we'd look forward to carrying on the conversation with you.

Tom Rowland: Alright. So we just have one more order of business, and it's super easy because it's super awesome, and that is Waypoint TV. Waypoint TV, it has a library of over 2,000 episodes and growing very quickly. More than 60 different producers of short films and full length television episodes. You can go there and check out about 125 episodes of Saltwater Experience, I think, and growing. We're putting the new ones on there right now.

Tom Rowland: We just released one the other day called Doctor Tarpon with Doctor Brian Boxer Wachler, Olympic gold medalist Steven Holcomb, and my son Turner Rowland. This is one of the episodes that I'm most proud of. My son had an eye condition called keratoconus, and so did Steven Holcomb. Steven wrote a book, and I learned about Doctor Boxer Wachler's work through this book. And we went out there and saw him, and long story short, my son's sight was saved. He went from seeing 20/600 to seeing 20/15. It's an amazing story, and I am super grateful and super thankful.

Tom Rowland: And I asked Doctor Brian Boxer Wachler if he would want to come down and bring Steven Holcomb, and I would bring Turner. We could have all three of them in a boat together. And Steven Holcomb had the same procedure that my son had successfully, got his sight back, and then won a gold medal in the Sochi Olympics. So it was an amazing story. It was incredible to have all three of those people on our boat and catch a few tarpon, a few barracuda, and make a really, really good show. So you can go to Waypoint TV. You can see that right away. So many more, so many other producers producing incredible content, and it's all available there for you for free. Waypointtv.com.

Tom Rowland: Alright. Here we go. Daniel Andrews. He came down to The Keys and fished with us for tarpon recently, and we did this podcast the night before. And I had a lot of questions for Daniel because, honestly, I don't fully understand the problem in the Everglades. It's a complex problem, but Daniel has a way of really breaking it down and making it a little simpler to understand. And in making it simpler to understand, he also has some pretty simple solutions for the problem. Not a 100% fix, but a whole lot better than what's happening.

Tom Rowland: And one thing that I was very, very pleased with with Daniel is that he's very positive. He's an optimist. And I think in this line of work of trying to save the Everglades and trying to make maybe what could be considered the most important environmental stand in our lifetime, I think you gotta be an optimist. I think it's really easy to get down about the things that we've lost, and it may never come back. But I think if you're an optimist, I think you look around, you realize how good it is right now, and it gives you even more fuel to fight the fight to protect the Everglades. And I felt like that's what Daniel had. It made me really perk up and listen to him because he's optimistic, and he has a plan.

Tom Rowland: And he and Captain Chris Whitman are leading Captains For Clean Water, and they're leading this charge and spending a lot of their time in Washington, DC, and in senators' offices, and congressmen's offices, and whoever will listen. Whoever is a decision maker that they need to talk to, they're not afraid. So I think Captains For Clean Water is an outstanding organization led by some outstanding individuals. And, really, I think you're gonna enjoy this podcast. So if you have questions about the Everglades, hang on. You're gonna get a lot of answers. Captain Daniel Andrews coming up right now.

Sitting Down in the Florida Keys

Tom Rowland: I'm sitting here with Daniel Andrews from Captains For Clean Water, and we are gonna go fishing tomorrow up in the Everglades, on a Saltwater Experience shoot. We're sitting here at Hawks Cay Resort, kind of where the Everglades all dump out into the Atlantic Ocean. There's tremendous tide flow under Long Key Bridge, which is just up there. And so whether you're in the Florida Keys or whether you are in Flamingo or Naples or Chokoloskee or any of those areas, the Everglades is equally as important to all of us. Right?

Daniel Andrews: Yep. Absolutely. You know, when we first started Captains For Clean Water, one of the biggest things that we were trying to get across to the public was that these estuaries are all connected. For so long, there'd been division and just misunderstanding that the problems in the Caloosahatchee River, the St. Lucie River, and Florida Bay, those are all the same. And the government and policymakers were treating them like they're all different problems. They all need different solutions. But up in Sanibel, then over on the East Coast and Hobe Sound, you're talking 90, a 100 miles down to Florida Bay. So you don't always think that they're connected, but historically, through the Everglades, they are. The estuaries there, the northern part, they have their own problems. And then the southern end of the system, Florida Bay has its own problems as well.

Growing Up on the Water in Fort Myers

Tom Rowland: So let's back up a little bit, and I wanna know kind of your story and how you end up heading up this group called Captains For Clean Water. Where'd you grow up, and why do you have such passion for this?

Daniel Andrews: So I grew up in Fort Myers. I was born and raised there. I started fishing at a young age. My dad and my uncle got me out on the water, and I loved snook fishing around Sanibel and the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River. I went to high school in Fort Myers, went to college at Florida Gulf Coast in Fort Myers for a couple of years, decided I wanted to be a fishing guide instead of doing that. So I got my captain's license and bailed out of school a couple of years early, and I never really looked back.

Daniel Andrews: We had water quality issues from the get-go. Right when I started guiding, 2011, 2012, we had really bad discharges in 2013. I kind of ignored it. I realized it was a problem, thought it was bigger than anything I'd ever be able to deal with. And it was just kind of a thorn in my side.

What the Discharges Actually Look Like

Tom Rowland: So when you're saying you had big discharges, you know, so many people with the Everglades, I mean, even us in the Florida Keys, we're not familiar with that. What are you seeing when you're seeing big discharges?

Daniel Andrews: So that goes back to changes that were made in the hydrology of the state over the last hundred years. And the Caloosahatchee River, which now runs from Lake Okeechobee to Sanibel Island, there was no historic connection there. That's man made. There was a canal that was dredged from the headwaters of the Caloosahatchee into Lake Okeechobee. So when Okeechobee's water rises high enough, it starts to kill off marsh vegetation. It threatens the Herbert Hoover Dike, so they open the floodgates to the Caloosahatchee and the St. Lucie Rivers. Billions and billions and billions of gallons a day are discharged into the rivers, and it causes an extreme drop in salinity. It puts a lot of nutrients into the water, and it has an incredibly negative impact on the fishery. Short term, right when it's happening, you get nasty brown muddy water. It smells terrible. It discourages tourists from even wanting to get in the water to swim at the beach. But for me, it's the long term effects that are the most troubling.

Tom Rowland: But what you saw the first time that this really became an issue for you was just stinky water, and it affected your fishing. Is that what was happening the first time you saw this?

Daniel Andrews: So I grew up seeing it, unfortunately. But the first time it affected me as a fishing guide, first time it hit my pocketbook, it was really challenging to deal with. But once the water cleared up, looking at some of my favorite grass flats, they were devastated. There's no more grass on them. You couldn't fish them anymore. So that's what bothered me the most. And then in 2016, we got discharges right in the peak of tourist season, January and February. We'd never seen anything like that in my lifetime at least. So that was, I'd say, a major tipping point that spurred us to start Captains For Clean Water. That was February 2016.

Daniel Andrews: It was the first time that I'd seen so many anglers, resort owners, restaurant owners. Everybody wanted to be part of a solution. And it was hitting us right in the middle of tourist season. We usually get these discharges in July, August when nobody's here, but this was right when people are starting to get here. So it was a cause for concern, and it was really time to unify.

Tom Rowland: The reason that those discharges happened that time of the year was because of what? Rainfall or poor decisions or what?

Daniel Andrews: It was rainfall. We just had a very wet winter. Historically, that would have really hydrated the Everglades, but the Everglades are not what they looked like a hundred years ago. They're half the size that they were, half the area. There's a lot of barriers to flow that obstruct that water from flowing to Florida Bay.

The Barriers to Flow

Tom Rowland: Those barriers to flow, what are those and why are they there?

Daniel Andrews: There's a lot of them. Going south from Lake Okeechobee, you have hundreds of thousands of acres of sugarcane fields that were historically the headwaters of the Everglades. Past that, you have canals, levees, roads that are all problems that you can get by. You can build bridges on those roads. You can backfill canals. You can take those levees out. But, currently, they're stopping that flow from going south.

Tom Rowland: And so, like, when I look at this and I'm trying to get my head wrapped around it, and here we are in the Florida Keys and we fish the Everglades all the time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we all have a good grasp of what's going on, because what's affecting you up there with those discharges and stuff, it eventually affects us, but we don't see it immediately like you are. Right? And so I'm trying to get my head wrapped around just exactly what this giant picture of the Everglades health is. And I think that if I know a little bit about the Everglades, and if I'm having a hard time getting my head around exactly what's going on and who's affected and why, and more importantly, what anyone can do about it, so can you kind of paint that picture a little bit? Because in my opinion, I hear that some places are too salty. Some places are too fresh. Some places have way too much discharge and too much water, and some places have none at all that used to have tremendous flows. I mean, the Everglades is nature's greatest filter. It was a 150 miles long, a laminar flow, and all that water is just getting filtered out and coming right down here to the Florida Keys. So paint the picture for us of just how big this problem is and who all it's affecting.

Two Problems: Plumbing and Water Quality

Daniel Andrews: Sure. The Everglades is a huge ecosystem. It starts north of Lake Okeechobee and goes all the way down here to the Florida Keys and covers both coasts of Florida. Historically, when rainfall would hit the center of the state, it would go down the Kissimmee chain of lakes into Lake Okeechobee, and then it would flow down through the Everglades, all the way down here to the Florida Keys. And now we have essentially two problems. We have a plumbing problem, and we have a water quality problem. The plumbing problem is that there are barriers to flow, physical obstructions, roads, dikes, ditches that prevent that water from coming out of Lake Okeechobee and returning in its historic path. The water quality problem we have is, to a large degree, an accumulation of nutrient pollution over the last hundred years that's ended up in Lake Okeechobee and the Kissimmee River. The simple solution to this, the easiest way to explain it, is you have to treat the water quality problem and remove the barriers to flow.

Daniel Andrews: So you can tackle them pretty much both at the same time, and that was outlined in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which passed in the year 2000. I was in fourth grade then, and it was a series of 68 projects that was supposed to occur over a thirty year time frame. And we're eighteen years into it, and they haven't even completed one of the projects. Now there's one project that they're close to completing now, the Picayune Strand, but it really doesn't have any benefits to the estuary. It has some ecological benefits to that part of the Everglades, but it's not gonna stop the discharges or get more water down here to Florida Bay.

Daniel Andrews: So going back to the discharges, when we have a lot of rainfall, there's nowhere to store that water. So it's just discharged to tide. It's essentially wasted. It's shot down the Caloosahatchee and the St. Lucie Rivers. When there's not enough rain, historically, the Everglades is like a sponge. Even during periods of drought, the glades would remain hydrated, and that water would still flow slowly into Florida Bay. We don't have that anymore. When we don't get rain for even a short period of time, the Everglades dries out, and there is no flow into Florida Bay.

Hypersalinity and the Seagrass Die-Off in Florida Bay

Daniel Andrews: And Florida Bay is a really unique area. It's kinda like a big ice cube tray. There's a bunch of compartments, lots of sandbars, very shallow water, not many deep troughs that go in, especially up in Snake Bight, Rankin Bight, Garfield Bight. It's all shallow, very shallow grass flats. So when there's no freshwater flowing in there to push that water out, you know how little tidal flow is up in there. You get what's called hypersalinity. The evaporation occurs faster than any tidal exchange or freshwater inputs. So the water just gets saltier and saltier. It's just evaporating. It'd be like if you fill a cup with saltwater and just left it; eventually, it's gonna dry out.

Daniel Andrews: So in 2015, which is right before we started Captains For Clean Water, there was a massive seagrass die-off in Florida Bay. Over 40,000 acres. And that was brought to our attention, really, this is three months before we had these discharges. It really showed how in just a couple months, the system can go from drought to an abundance of water, and it didn't used to be like that. That water used to be able to soak into the ground, to stay in the river of grass, the Everglades, and slowly flow out into Florida Bay.

Daniel Andrews: So simply put, we need more storage reservoirs, which are deep water ponds, essentially, that can hold water for drought. We need more stormwater treatment areas, which are filter marshes. They're very shallow. They remove a lot of the phosphorus and some of the nitrogen from the water. And then we also need to take out those barriers to flow. There's currently some bridges being built on Tamiami Trail. The Central Everglades Plan, which was just authorized in 2016, that will take out a lot of the dams and dikes and ditches so that water can flow more freely through the Central Everglades, which is from just south of the sugarcane fields to about US 41.

Captains For Clean Water's Plan and the EAA Reservoir

Tom Rowland: That's interesting. And so, Captains For Clean Water, have you guys formulated a plan, like a written plan of what you would like to see happen?

Daniel Andrews: So what we do at Captains For Clean Water is we try to analyze all the projects that are on the table and bring solutions to the lawmakers. We know there's a road map already to fix this, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. It's not gonna fix the problem entirely, but it points us in the right direction. We've gone in and looked at which ones of those projects will provide the most benefit, not to ecological stuff throughout the Everglades, but to the actual estuaries. Which ones are gonna stop the discharges the most and get the most water down to Florida Bay? And in 2016, we actually met down here in The Keys with about eight different organizations that all had the same goal. We wanted to see an Everglades project. It's really the heart of Everglades restoration, the EAA Reservoir. That's a project that's gonna be built south of Lake Okeechobee that can store, treat, and move water south. That project, if properly designed, could give us roughly a 50% reduction of discharges and provide a lot more water for Florida Bay. So that's what we put our sights on. That's what we wanna see built first, and that's really where we focused all of our efforts.

Tom Rowland: And so how is that going now?

Fishing Guides Take On Tallahassee

Daniel Andrews: Well, it's been an interesting experience for all of us involved. We didn't know what we were getting into when we first started. We just knew we wanted to try to move the needle a little bit. So the Everglades restoration plan is a cost share between the state and the federal government. So not only do we have to get support in Tallahassee, legislation passed there, we also have to do the same in Washington, DC. We first started working with the state to try to get them to do something, and we worked with senate president Joe Negron. He's out of Stuart. So this was all happening in his backyard. Fourth of July, there's toxic algae blooms all over his district. So he was motivated to do something, and he put a proposal forward to the Florida legislature, and it was his number one priority last session, 2017, to get this passed, to get some land, to build a reservoir, build the marshes, and get this project sent off to DC, authorized, funded, and most importantly, bulldozers on the ground.

Daniel Andrews: And it was quite an experience. I hadn't had any government involvement before. I was used to trolling motors.

Tom Rowland: You're a fishing guide. But you are probably used to talking to powerful people. I mean, that is one thing about a fishing guide.

Daniel Andrews: You do develop good communication skills. And that was really crucial because we're new to Tallahassee, and we're bringing up hundreds of fishing guides, recreational anglers, CEOs of fishing companies to work with the Florida legislature to try to get this project passed, get this bill passed, and get it built as best as we possibly could. So it was an ambitious goal that the senate president put forward. He wanted to buy 60,000 acres of sugarcane land.

Up Against the Sugar Industry

Daniel Andrews: The sugarcane farmers didn't like that a whole lot. There's two companies, and they're one of the largest political contributors in the state. So they have a lot of influence up there. And what we saw was this bill went from 60,000 acres of land. It's cut in half, and then it was cut down to just using about seventeen, eighteen thousand acres of state land that was being leased to the sugarcane companies. We bought the land for restoration when I was a toddler, and it's just been leased back to them. And they've continually produced sugarcane on the land. That lease was broken. Again, this is all just political power. We're a handful of fishing guides and a lot of supporters back home. We didn't have the 70-plus lobbyists that the sugarcane companies had. None of us are even registered lobbyists. We're just going up there to talk.

Daniel Andrews: So what we ended up with was $800,000,000 of funding from the state government. And when I say we, it was a collective effort. It wasn't just Captains For Clean Water. We were working with over 60 different organizations that all had the same goal. But we brought something unique to the table. Most of the environmental groups are traditional environmental groups. They're not anglers. They're not hunters. They're not resource users like we are. So it was a really good voice to have up there in the legislature. They like to hear numbers and quality of life. They don't really care about birds.

Putting a Dollar Figure on the Fishery

Tom Rowland: So when you say numbers and quality of life, are you putting a financial number on what you're talking about that really gets these people's ear? Like the impact of the fishing and the fishing industry in the state of Florida and really South Florida.

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. And fishing in the state of Florida is a $9,300,000,000 industry. And the Everglades, there's about 8,000,000 people who live in the greater Everglades. So by the time you look at the tourism numbers, which is our number one industry, almost a $10,000,000,000 fishing industry. And just down here in the Southern Everglades, The Keys and Florida Bay, that's 15% of it. That's about a billion and a half dollars of economic impact just from fishing The Keys and Florida Bay. And those are numbers that resonate with policymakers. That's real business to them. So they can justify spending a couple hundred million dollars over the course of a decade to get this project completed when they see the potential benefits.

Tom Rowland: And so, are we on our way to that? Are you feeling confident that we're on our way to seeing this be completed?

Daniel Andrews: We're off to a good start. Talking to people that have been involved with this fight for the last twenty years, this is the most progress they've seen ever. But the fact of the matter is we have a lot of work to do still. This reservoir project, if it would have been bigger, it would have been better. So that means we have to work on accelerating other projects and getting more out of other projects and, hopefully, being able to expand upon the project that we're working on, to make it larger, get to more STAs. That way, we can get more flow going south. But we're off to a really good start. A lot of work to do.

From Full-Time Guide to Full-Time Advocate

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So I find it really interesting that you are a fishing guide. One day, you're using a push pole and guiding someone, and you find an issue that's close to your heart, so close to your heart that you basically have changed your entire life to focus on this. So what has that transition been like for you?

Daniel Andrews: It's been interesting. Certainly wasn't planned. Right when we first got started, nobody was fishing. The discharges were so bad, you couldn't even put bait in your livewell. There was nowhere to fish. It was all freshwater in our whole estuary. So I had a couple weeks head start there. I just didn't even wanna take the client's money. So that gave us an opportunity to get people together. From that, we started getting support from some of the larger fishing companies, a year into it, and everybody wanted to put their name on it. They wanted to be more involved. And that provided an opportunity for us to increase the size of our organization, bring on a few more people. Now for the last six months or so, it's pretty much been full time, six, seven days a week, traveling a lot, a lot of miles on the truck.

Tom Rowland: Man, it seems like you're traveling. I mean, just trying to get this together, just making a few phone calls to you and texting here and there, you are going all over the place. You're in DC one day, down here the next. You're in Miami. So first of all, who is Captains For Clean Water? You and who else?

Who Makes Up Captains For Clean Water

Daniel Andrews: So we have a board of directors, five individuals on the board. They've been with us mostly since the start, and then we have a staff of currently four people. Our board, we have a couple of attorneys, PJ Shiner and Leland Garvin. A good friend of mine, Chauncey Goss, has a lot of DC experience. He worked budgeting up there. Bob Bevel, he's got a lot of media experience. He's with a large broadcasting company in Southwest Florida. And then Reid McKinstry is our board president. He's with Mustad Hooks. So we have the board that points us in the right direction, makes sure that we're on the right track, and then our staff that's carrying out the day to day stuff.

Daniel Andrews: It's myself and Chris Whitman, Captain Chris Whitman, that founded the organization. We brought an administrative assistant on, Kayla Maguire. She's been a long time friend of mine. Her husband is one of my best friends. So we brought Kayla on to handle all the office stuff that we weren't used to doing. So she's a huge help, and we also have a full time volunteer that puts about forty hours a week in. He's Bob Brooks. He's a retired sporting goods rep. He built a beautiful house in Sanibel and was really frustrated with this problem, wanted to get involved, and he's provided a lot of insight. He's got forty years of business experience.

Getting an Audience with Policymakers

Tom Rowland: I mean, you have to have had a lot of guidance because you guys have made incredible strides, and you're finding yourself in Washington, DC talking to, I don't know who, policymakers?

Daniel Andrews: Representatives, senators, policy people.

Tom Rowland: So who helped you to understand that, or did you just say this is so important to me that I'm just gonna show up on this guy's doorstep and sit there and wait until he talks to me?

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. That was pretty much it. We used the media a lot at first. We used local news stations. And when you're an angry constituent in somebody's district and they see you on the news a couple nights a week, they're gonna call you. Because they want you to be quiet. They don't want people complaining about problems that they have the ability to fix. So our strategy was, we didn't wanna point fingers. We just wanted to acknowledge that there was a problem and acknowledge that there was a solution. And it worked pretty well. We had a lot of representatives, state reps and state senators that reached out that wanted to support Senator Negron's legislation. They kind of held our hand through it and made sure we were doing the right things. I had a lot of help from elected officials, people that have been in government for a while. And we have so many volunteers that help out with strategy stuff, with just showing up to Tallahassee. There were days in Tallahassee where we had hundreds of fishing guides, a lot of them here from the Florida Keys that showed up.

Daniel Andrews: So the work that we've done, Chris and I have just kind of been a conduit for it, but the turnout that we've been able to have, that's what really makes the difference. It's pretty easy to ignore me, but it's kinda hard to ignore 200 fishing guides that are standing outside the state capitol. Not protesting, not screaming, but just out there.

Don't Underestimate a Fishing Guide

Tom Rowland: Well, do you think that sometimes maybe these policymakers are surprised at the logical arguments that these fishing guides make? I don't know what they expect when a bunch of fishing guides come in, but fishing guides I know are really smart people, and they know a lot about the ecology. They know a lot about the environment. I mean, they make their living here, and a lot of them have college degrees, and a lot of them are eloquent speakers because that's what they do in the boat for ten or twelve hours is entertain people often that are CEOs of a giant company, and these people have great communication skills. Do you think that you've gotten an audience with some of these people because of the quality of people that you're bringing up there?

Daniel Andrews: Absolutely. People underestimate fishing guides. They think, oh, fishing guide, this is somebody that's got a canoe and he's picking a banjo and goes out there with a dozen crickets and gets $50 a day in his overalls. They're not thinking the average fishing guide's got $80,000 to $150,000 in their boat and tackle and equipment. Their fishing charter operations aren't big companies. If you're the guide, you're also the marketing officer, the finance officer. You're everything.

Tom Rowland: And the boat scrubber.

Daniel Andrews: The fish cleaner and everything else too. Yep. So I think guides in general are very resourceful people. And when there's a problem, we tend to figure out how to come up with solutions. And as far as communication, we've dealt with everybody from a boat mechanic all the way up to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. So we're able to utilize these guides to go in and use their skill set the best they can, whether they're dealing with a policymaker or their sponsor companies, trying to get them involved with this issue. So it's really a good network, really good organization.

The Biggest Challenges

Tom Rowland: That's great. What do you think has been the biggest challenge?

Daniel Andrews: It's a David and Goliath battle. That's the biggest challenge. There's special interest groups that can spend $20,000,000 in a year to essentially undermine the work that we're trying to do, political contributions, which we're a 501(c)(3). We can't do that. That's challenging. The time on the road is also pretty stressful. When you're putting your schedule together, it looks easy. You have to be all these different places. But when you're trying to drive all the way around the state, and I'm down here in The Keys now. Actually, it's one of the benefits. I'm down here about once a week now, and just trying to manage all of our resources is a lot different skill set than you'd use as a fishing guide.

Tom Rowland: But you're managing to do that. And I guess, at some point, you feel kinda like, man, I gotta step up into this position because who else is going to?

Daniel Andrews: At first, it was like that, but now I really enjoy doing this. There's a lot of fishing guides, and there's not a lot of people looking out for the resources. So it's kinda filling a niche that wasn't really filled before.

How People Can Help

Tom Rowland: Yeah. But it requires leadership, and that's one thing that I wanna applaud you guys for. It's one thing for everybody to sit around and say, man, we need to do something. But it's another thing to have a group or an organization of people that are your peers to lead the way and say, look, this is what's important right now, and then to formulate that plan. And that's what kinda seems like you guys have been able to do. So the next question is, how do people help? Like, not just fishing guides, not just people in the Florida Keys, but how do you get this message, and obviously talking on podcasts like this and other things. How do you get this message to Middle America, and how do you get it to a larger group of people that has a potential to help? But how do you get them to understand something when they've never seen the Everglades and understand the importance and understand how that could affect them in Middle America?

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. So that's a great question. And Chris Whitman, who's our program director and cofounder of Captains, he had some TV experience, video production experience. That was right off the get-go. We realized that you can tell a story very well, especially this story, with video. And we spent a lot of our resources initially into creating videos, everything from thirty second spots, which PJ Shiner, one of our founding board members, donated, and we had a ton of airtime in Southwest Florida. So we had that. We realized that was a very good tool. We have a lot of videos on our website now that can explain the problem in five minutes.

Daniel Andrews: So that's number one. Educate yourself on the issue. Watch those videos. Go on and read about the problem. The website is captainsforcleanwater.org. So if you go to captainsforcleanwater.org, you'll be able to watch videos, read some bullet points about the problem, and, hopefully, educate yourself enough. Sign up for our newsletter. We don't do a monthly thing. We just send out a call to action when there's a problem and we need your help. So we're not the every single day email crowd. When there's a problem, we're gonna be emailing and calling you then. So if you understand the problem and you're on our email list ready for the next call to action that we have, that's a huge step.

Daniel Andrews: We've always said that if everybody knew about this problem, knew about the solution, it would have been fixed twenty years ago. It's such a common sense solution to put the Everglades back, as best you can, to the way it was. You'll significantly reduce the discharges. You'll get more water in Florida Bay. So that's number one. Number two is help us spread our brand, the Captains For Clean Water hats. Every day, I'm scrolling through Facebook and Instagram. I see a ton of people wearing them. That's something that we see it, but so do a lot of other people. The policymakers, senators, and representatives, they're on there too, and they see that. They know what we stand for. When I walk into a policymaker's office, state senator or whoever, they know what I'm in there for. They know what I want. And the more people that they know are involved with the organization, the more attention that they have to pay to us. So the hats are huge, sharing our brand. And we also, in our organization, we run entirely off donations. If you're in a position to where you can help financially, we very much appreciate that.

The Restore Gala and Community Events

Tom Rowland: And so there are a lot of ways that people can help financially. Like, you just had this gala recently. What is that about?

Daniel Andrews: So we started the Restore Gala in 2017. Our goal was to get some of the key influencers in the Southwest Florida community together. We were trying to have a dinner for about 200 people where we could talk about the problem and ask for some help, and we had an incredible response. We sold out the venue. We had over 300 people there, packed in this little tiny pavilion that we were way over capacity for. But we raised over a quarter million dollars that night. Then we did a repeat this year, 2018. We sold out in about three weeks. We had 400 people there. Again, we raised well over a quarter million dollars. So that's a significant part of our budget for the organization. So it was great to see that all come together again.

Tom Rowland: That's great. And do you have other events that people could be part of or other plans for them?

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. We have a lot of small events around the state. We get involved with a lot of existing events, and we also, from time to time, do events at breweries and stuff like that. We had an event at Fort Myers Brewing Company in our hometown there, and we had five or 600 people show up to that. And those are great because a lot of people come out, give them a flyer, and they learn a lot more about the organization. It kinda rejuvenates them, gets them pumped about helping out. And it also sends a message to the community when they see there's 500 people that took the day to come out there and learn a little bit about the problem, have a beer. That's something that can't be ignored by policymakers.

Staying Positive in a David and Goliath Fight

Tom Rowland: So as you're looking at this issue and you're dealing with it every single day, how are you able to stay so positive?

Daniel Andrews: That's a good question. A lot of it comes from our supporters. We have some really frustrating days in the office. I mean, just normal office stuff. It gets frustrating, but when you couple that with the battle that we're in, again, it's a David and Goliath problem. It can be really frustrating, but you have to kinda step back and realize we're not trying to do something small here. We're trying to do something huge. And it's the calls and the texts from people that we get that we've touched who knows where, all across the country, some outside the country. I'd say that's probably the biggest motivating factor.

Tom Rowland: What about the progress? I mean, when you're in the daily, you're mired in this thing. Are you able to see where you came from and where you are today? And do you see the needle move? I mean, I would imagine that there's times when you just feel like you're just not making any progress.

Daniel Andrews: It's a lot more fast paced than you'd think. I mean, every day, we have more people reaching out to us with different opportunities. And it's to the point now where all of our schedules are completely full, and we have more people that wanna get involved, have more events, and we just don't have the capacity to do it.

Tom Rowland: You don't have the capacity because of space or time or money or what?

Daniel Andrews: All of the above. The organization is just growing so fast, and we have so many opportunities. Now we kinda have to sit back and say, okay, this is worth doing, this is not. Although progress in the big picture can be kind of a slow pace, the building of the organization and the outpouring of support is very rapid. That, I think, keeps all of our heads up.

Working with Other Organizations

Tom Rowland: Yeah. That's awesome. How about the other organizations that are fighting a fight in this issue? Like, do you get along well with some of these? Are there some that have other interests that you don't particularly care for?

Daniel Andrews: No. We all get along very well. We definitely are not a traditional environmental group.

Tom Rowland: How would you classify a traditional environmental group?

Daniel Andrews: They're organizations that have been around for a fair amount of time. They all essentially operate the same way, very structured. We were an organization that was thrown together out of necessity. So just kind of a little bit different structure.

Tom Rowland: Like more guerrilla style, and faster moving, get things done, I would imagine. Is that what you're alluding to a little bit?

Daniel Andrews: You know, we all have job titles at Captains For Clean Water, but at the end of the day, we're mostly all doing the same work. The work's coming out so fast, and we're trying to get our hands over all of it. We're really more of a team that just kinda tackles everything. But the environmental groups, most of them are not made up of anglers and hunters. A couple of our partners, Bonefish and Tarpon Trust and TRCP, they're sportsman based. They were established for different reasons. They've taken on this fight. And before we got involved with it, they took on this fight. But when our organization started, it was a sole purpose: fix the Everglades. It's kinda where we're at now, is figuring out how we can finish that, how we can keep moving the needle with the Everglades.

Water Quality Problems Beyond the Everglades

Daniel Andrews: At the same time, I've got some weeks, I'll get 50 or 60 calls from anglers and guides across the state and outside of the state with severe water quality problems. Right now, the Indian River Lagoon, it's a mess. They've had fish kills. Just last week, I was getting pictures on my phone of big bull redfish that were dying due to an algae bloom up there. Totally different problem, but it's the same cause. Same reason. Government inaction.

Tom Rowland: There hasn't been enough action. They've laid out the plan. They've done studies. They've done more studies, done more studies, and now that's what they wanna do again is more studies. Is it obvious that it's a discharge issue? And when you're saying they're in the Indian River Lagoon, what's going on up there right now? They're having massive algae blooms. And what's causing that? Like, over-nutrients in the water?

Daniel Andrews: Exactly. Yeah. They don't have the freshwater flow problem that we have across the Everglades, but they do have a significant nutrient problem. They're gonna have to find some pretty creative ways to fix it because the sewage infrastructure, all that, it's very expensive, very time consuming. It's not something that's gonna be fixed in the next five or ten years. It's longer term than that, and that lagoon can't wait that long.

Spreading Too Thin Across a Statewide Crisis

Tom Rowland: So when you see a pressing issue like that, obviously, everyone needs to be aware of that and do something about that. But at some point, if you have that problem over here and this problem on the other side of the coast and this problem down in The Keys, and Rankin Bight is having a problem, and all of these different places are having a problem, it's almost like divide and conquer as far as the group that you've put together of anglers and sportsmen. Because now there's so many different issues that are all kind of associated with the same major issue, but they all are requiring these urgent actions. How does that affect the overall mission?

Daniel Andrews: We're at kind of a growing pain with that right now. It breaks my heart to get all these phone calls from all these guys that are begging for help. They're losing their businesses in certain parts of the Indian River Lagoon. Apalachicola has got its own issues. And it's tough because we're so busy with what we're doing here now. We don't, at this point, have all the resources we need to take on another issue. But that's something that's very much on our radar, and we're working diligently now to figure out how we can keep making progress with the Everglades and also get involved and hopefully move the needle on some of these other issues.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. I would think that has to be one of the biggest challenges, is to see these urgent issues and, I mean, at some point, you have to say, that's not what we're doing right now. Like, we have to focus on this, and you almost get accused of turning your back on somebody or a certain region or area. But when you do, then you take your eye off the ball of what's happening and what you've worked so hard for. And guys, just like you say, man, breaking your heart. I mean, to see fish kills and to see people losing their business and real estate dropping because of water quality issues, nobody wants to see that.

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. And I think that from the average person's perspective, they don't understand all the hours that go into getting a lot of that fixed. We don't post stuff on Facebook when we're in the office at 7:00 in the evening on a Saturday. There's a lot of administrative work. There's a lot of stuff that's done behind the scenes just to get to where we can have a big event and, hopefully, move the needle or a lobby day where we're meeting with everyone. It's just a lot of work. So I think a lot of these people that are calling and reaching out to us, their hope is that we can just go set our flag there and it's gonna be fixed. Because we have made progress with the Everglades. We've made a lot of policy progress. So people think it's easy, but the reality is we're gonna be very strategic with our next moves. We're watching now, keeping our eye on everything, and trying to figure out, just like with the Everglades, we tried to figure out which project we should push forward first.

Daniel Andrews: Which is gonna give us the most bang for our buck, kinda looking at the rest of the state with the same approach. Which one can we be most effective at?

Tom Rowland: And you're trying to be effective. You're not trying to spread yourself too thin, and you just said you're a very small organization. You're making huge waves with a few people, but there's only so much time. There's only so much energy, but, man, nobody likes to see that. But I really maybe I know just enough to realize this is not simple. There's nothing simple about this problem. It's a very complex problem that has moving parts, and moving parts that are highly financial, associated with it. Like, the sugar guys aren't just gonna roll over because they have an entire industry that they're supporting with what they've done. And the politicians, they're getting pressured to release the water, and they're getting pressured to also build these tanks. And it's, I guess, the squeaky wheel or the bigger donor or something.

Learning How Washington Really Works

Tom Rowland: But I would think that that's something that you've come to realize a little bit different about how the world works. Like, as you just read the newspaper and watch television and stuff like that, you may not have the same understanding of how Washington works, and how has that changed for you?

Daniel Andrews: I can tell you that I look at every press release and media spot and everything like that totally differently because now I'm the person that's making a lot of those. So everything, all wording is done for a reason. You see a lot of stuff with this Everglades issue where either politicians or organizations will put out a statement that is just really there to appease people. It reads good, but there's no meat to it. It's just kinda fluff. So, not even just limited to this issue, but now when I read statements or anything like that, I kinda dissect it a little bit more. There's usually a lot more to it.

Tom Rowland: Or nothing to it at all. Like, this is just a piece of paper with some words on it, and somebody's gonna read it. And some people are gonna think, well, okay, I guess they're doing something about it. When in fact, that statement said nothing.

Trading 280 Days of Fishing for the Cause

Tom Rowland: So as a fishing guide, you were fishing how many days a year?

Daniel Andrews: About two hundred and eighty.

Tom Rowland: Two hundred and eighty days a year. So full on working daily every single day. How much are you fishing these days?

Daniel Andrews: Not anywhere near as much as I was. We're kinda right in the busy season now in the springtime. If I can get out a couple times a month, that's good for me. But, hopefully, I'll have a lot more time.

Tom Rowland: Wow. That is a massive change. I mean, that is really a massive change. Plus you told me you got married. So, man, your life has really taken a turn. Getting married, that's taken a turn for the better. But all of a sudden going from fishing two hundred and eighty days a year to fishing a couple times a month, are you handling that mentally okay?

Daniel Andrews: Mentally okay? It definitely makes you appreciate it a lot more. When I was charter fishing full time in the spring, I wouldn't have a day off from February through June. So by June, I was usually pretty cranky. You don't really appreciate each jump that a tarpon gives you. But now when I spend time on the water, even if I don't catch a fish, just seeing everything, watching nature wake up in the morning, it goes from silence in the morning, you see the birds, fish, all of it, it just means a lot more. It's been a lot of changes, but I'd say it's pretty much all been for the better.

Optimism for the Everglades

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Do you see, if you were to look at your projected lifetime, are you optimistic about the health of the Everglades in your lifetime?

Daniel Andrews: Yes.

Tom Rowland: Okay. And what would you think, if you could blue sky it, what do you think you could accomplish in your lifetime?

Daniel Andrews: I have no idea. I mean, two and a half years ago, I didn't think I'd be sitting here doing a podcast about the Everglades. So, yeah, I don't know. But just with the amount of support and the increase of support we're continually getting, there's a lot of problems to fix here in the Everglades, and there's a lot outside. So the sky's the limit. And the more support and the more people we get involved, the better chance we have.

Tom Rowland: Man, I just love that. I just love it that you can be mired in this problem that, I know a lot of people that are just really down. I mean, incredibly down, and they're not much fun to be around. And I honestly don't think that they're helping the issue by being so sour about it. Now I get it. You've lost half the seagrass in Florida Bay, or I don't know. Is that an accurate number? You've lost a ton of seagrass in Florida Bay. What would you say the percentage of?

Daniel Andrews: I'm not sure of the percentage, but over 40,000 acres. That's a lot of grass.

Tom Rowland: Those numbers are so big to me. I don't even know what it means. But I know I go up in there, and you're coming across these flats, and there are massive areas of die-off, and it's sad. You can be fishing up there and think, man, it's over. Like, this is not good. There used to be fish here and there aren't fish here anymore. The water used to be clear here. It's not clear anymore. And you can get really down about that. But what I love about talking to you right now is that you're incredibly positive, and I think that's because you see a much bigger picture than a lot of people do. And you see that, yeah, it might not be so good right now, but we are moving in a positive direction. I think that to me is maybe one of the most important messages out there, is that there is hope. Because I think that a lot of people hear Indian River Lagoon is having a problem, you got a problem over here in Sanibel, you got a problem down here, the grass is dying in Flamingo, you got this and this and this, and people just throw their hands up and go, well, I guess it's over. And I don't know that that's the right attitude.

Showing What's Worth Saving

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. No. First of all, doing what we do at Captains, you have to have a positive attitude. If you have a bad attitude, you're not gonna last long on our team. But I rely on the people that are on the water every day to advertise, essentially, how great what we do have left is. Because it's really hard to convince a policymaker they need to essentially stroke an $800,000,000 check to fix something if there's not anything left to save. So we rely on guides and anglers to show the positive, to show why we have something worth protecting. I mean, if I continually bring up pictures of brown water to Tallahassee and DC, it doesn't really tell the full story. What tells the full story is in between all those pictures, there's also pictures of 40-inch snook and kids holding their first tarpon in the water and permit and bonefish and all that. That's a big selling point.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So is the financial impact.

Daniel Andrews: Absolutely.

Tom Rowland: And I'm sure that you keep coming back to the financial impact because the numbers are huge. And in the Florida Keys here, the hurricane, you take, and that's another reason why a lot of people can be kind of down right now, is because there's Hurricane Irma. There's a lot of things that are still closed. A lot of people are having trouble with insurance. A lot of people have had just a really, really rough year. Plus, combine that with the fact that you're having a lot of seagrass dying off, and that's a recipe for kind of having a pessimistic view on what's going on around you and what the future is. But, man, I really think that keeping that message super positive is how you send the message to Middle America like we were talking about before. Like, people who may never see the Everglades in their entire life still need to be aware of this and understand that, man, if you just throw up your hands and let it all just go, it will affect the entire country.

Daniel Andrews: Oh, absolutely.

Looking Ahead to Tomorrow's Fishing

Tom Rowland: But I see that you guys are staying super positive. So I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. We have had not that great fishing this week while we've been filming. We had a cold front that came through, a late April cold front, and that's never good because all the fish, as you're quite aware, they get very happy and very much looking forward to the springtime, and everything's looking good. And then, wow, man, you get some 20 mile an hour winds, and the temperature drops about 15 degrees, and it takes them a couple of days to recover from that.

Tom Rowland: So we've been struggling a little bit this week, but we are planning on going, leaving my favorite time of the day. My partner's favorite time of the day is in the afternoon, and we usually get in about this time of the evening. My favorite time is morning, like you were talking about. I like seeing everything waking up. I like to wake up myself. I like to see the sunrise, prefer the sunrise over the sunset if I were to have my druthers. So we're gonna get up super early and take a ride back into the Everglades, and I'm hoping that you can kind of show us a few things and tell us even more because, you know, my partner, Rich, and I, we talk about this a lot. We're like, now what's the problem? And why is this happening? And why is it too salty over here, but not salty enough over here? And I just enjoy learning about the entire thing, and the videos on your website are excellent, by the way.

Tom Rowland: So tomorrow, we're gonna go to that Sandy Key area, which I don't know how much you've fished that. You're a little further north, quite a bit further north. But have you been in that area much?

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. I've fished it a little bit growing up. Spent a lot more time about 10 miles, 15 miles northeast of there up in Florida Bay, but I'm familiar with the area.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Sure. Well, there's just tremendous birdlife, and you can't have a bad day. The area where we're going is probably Predator Central. We see everything in there from sawfish and giant goliath groupers to every kind of shark that lives in the Everglades. And I mean, it's definitely off limits for swimming for me ever and ever. Even if the water was clear, I wouldn't swim in there, and the water's not clear. So there's no possible way that I'm going swimming in that channel. But, hopefully, there'll be a few tarpon up there, and maybe we can put a few in the air.

How to Get Involved

Tom Rowland: So before we end this, why don't you tell everybody how they can get in touch with you if they need you for an urgent issue like we were talking about in the Indian River, or if they want to make a donation, or if they want to get involved as a volunteer. How does somebody go about that?

Daniel Andrews: Yep. So we've got a pretty good site built, captainsforcleanwater.org. If you go to the website, there's contact forms to get in touch. There's a web store with hats. There's all kinds of educational materials on there. So pretty much everything you can do from there. We're also on Instagram and Facebook, Captains For Clean Water. So you can stay up to date with us there. We put a lot more content up on social media than we do on our blog. When there's an important issue, we try to save the blog for that.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, I would say also, and you're not making this request, I am, I'm saying, if you're not able to or in some way not going to make a financial contribution, man, if you could just follow these guys on Instagram and Facebook and get on their newsletter and be on their mailing list, it's another name. It's another number, and it's another person who is interested in this organization. And I promise you, if you watch their stuff for a month, you will want to get more involved because those social accounts are really good, and you can see the progress that they're making. And this progress is important for all of us, not just fishing guides and not just fishing clients, but business owners, and virtually, it starts with everyone that lives in South Florida, and it ends up with somebody that lives in Washington or Oregon. It has an economic and cultural impact on everybody that's in our country. So, man, I just wanna applaud you for the work that you're doing and honor you for that. I mean, you took time out of your life, dedicated it to this. I know that I, for one, thank you for it, but I know that everybody in the fishing community and everyone in the guiding community is really proud of what you guys are doing and fully in support. So, if you got any other ways that people can help, let us know.

Daniel Andrews: Yeah. We really appreciate the support. That's what keeps us going.

Tom Rowland: Awesome. Anything else you wanna add?

Daniel Andrews: I think that's pretty much it.

Tom Rowland: Alright. Well, go to captainsforcleanwater.org, and watch for this episode with Daniel Andrews on Saltwater Experience, and we'll keep you up to date.

Daniel Andrews: Alright. Thank you. Thank you.