Dennis Friel: Marine Life Art, the Connected by Water Movement, and Florida's Shark Debate

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 1018, with guest Dennis Friel of Connected by Water. Lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Meeting at the Star brite SeaSafe Event

Dennis Friel: Hey, I'm artist Dennis Friel from Connected by Water, and I'm on the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Perfect, total pro. Okay, here we go, we've got about an hour. Dennis, what's up, man? I enjoyed spending some time with you recently at the Star brite SeaSafe event. That was really fun.

Dennis Friel: Hey, how's it going? What an incredible event, isn't it? I think this is their sixth annual or something like that, I'm losing track. Derek and Cory and I are pretty good friends, and we've been involved with the Star brite family for quite some time now. Derek and I do a lot of painting together, a lot of creative work together, so it was a natural dovetail for us to get involved in this too.

Tom Rowland: So have you been part of this from the beginning? Can you tell me the origin? How did SeaSafe get started?

Dennis Friel: Well, it all starts with Cory, undoubtedly. She's Star brite's conservation director, and a lot of people who listen to both of our shows probably know her — she's incredible. I've tagged her with this label that she's "boots in the water." Everyone always says boots on the ground, but she's always in the water. She's in the Indian River every day, planting mangroves, working with Blair Wiggins to cultivate the Indian River Lagoon restoration project, along with Alex Gritsky. It really all starts with Cory being there, being in the water, and having this unstoppable love for mangroves. They've been doing it for decades — if you've ever been to their house, you'll see buckets full of mangroves all over the place. Derek has that same huge heart for conservation, and they were just naturally doing this. When they got on board with Star brite, Star brite saw what they were doing and said, we need to do something with this, this is incredible work. They started with Team Do-Gooder, which came out of Cory getting up in front of everyone and saying "we've got to do good, er." That's actually how the name Team Do-Gooder came about, by accident. They started with one small event, their Clean Water Collective, and it's grown exponentially year after year, with Star brite providing the gas in the engine to help it along.

Tom Rowland: It was a great thing to be a part of, and just the type of people it brings together was incredible — people you've heard of and people you haven't, all connected by water, which is literally your phrase. I got to catch my biggest snook ever there. It's funny, because I don't know the last time I caught a fish and sent pictures of it around like that — even my biggest bonefish or biggest permit, I'm not sure would be a clear winner. But this one, it was a 41.5-inch snook, and that to me was just this giant dinosaur. I felt like a kid again. I've fished around Jupiter, which is incredible too, but this was different. Just the way it all happened was super cool, and I'll never forget it.

Dennis Friel: You caught your personal best snook — that's great, that always helps. It's such a magical fishery, especially when you're with guys who fish it all the time and know what they're doing, because the fish in the Indian River Lagoon can be finicky. The larger ones didn't get that big for no reason. I think the rule of thumb is that as you go north up the coast, the fish get bigger but there are fewer of them, and as you wrap around the Keys and up the west coast, they get more plentiful but smaller.

Tom Rowland: I've noticed that about a lot of species — the further north you go in their range, the bigger they are but the less plentiful, and the further south, the more plentiful but smaller. Bonefish are the same way. I wonder what causes that.

Dennis Friel: The only thing I can think of is that the shelf is different, and the way they migrate is probably different. I think there might be a correlation, but I just paint them — I don't biologically study them.

Painting a Mahi With No Plan

Tom Rowland: You and Derek do a lot of painting together, and we all got to witness this. I was standing there with a blank canvas, and Derek just goes up and starts doing something, and you do something, and the next thing I know I come back and it's taking shape, and I come back again and there's this beautiful mahi there. I didn't actually see a lot of other people painting it besides you two, but it was really cool to watch from start to finish with no plan at all. What's your personal creative process? How do you decide what you're going to paint, and how does it take place — do you have a certain place or medium you always use?

Dennis Friel: There's a lot to unpack there. As far as why or what I paint and how I get started, it really depends on the job. When you run a professional studio, it's not always waking up and asking what you want to paint that day — more often than not, to make a living, you do the assignment at hand, whatever the person or company that commissioned you needs. Whether it's an illustration, a painting, a mural, or a digital shirt design, each has its own process. From an inspirational standpoint, when you do it for a living, you kind of have to throw inspiration out the window — you just don't have a choice, you've got to roll your sleeves up and get to work. Some days you wake up ready to charge, some days you don't want to, but you have to. As far as painting with Derek goes, we're pretty good friends, and I think it's an example of what we've got going on — bringing other artists into our fold, like we saw with Jessica there, and we're really tight with Adrian Gray too. Off the Grid John joined us for the first time as well, so it was nice to get a little collective of artists together. There's a bit of a stigma in our industry that artists always have to go off and do their own thing, but we want to flip that narrative and say we can be connected by water together. With Derek, we've painted together enough at this point that we don't even need to talk about it. I did not know he was going to paint that mahi — he just jumped up there, and I said okay, we're doing this. I don't think he even knew what it would be at first.

Tom Rowland: Do you think he knew he was painting a mahi, or did it just start looking like one as it developed? That's what it looked like to me watching.

Dennis Friel: Derek kind of whispers to me, "what do you want to do," and I said I have no idea, we're at the same water — snook or tarpon? The problem is those are scaly fish, so they take more time and detail, and we wanted it to be free and fun so people could come up and paint with us. So he said, what about a mahi, and then just turned around and grabbed a brush. He doesn't need confirmation, he just starts drawing.

Tom Rowland: It's cool to watch — when you're not an artist, you think about all the details and how easily you could mess it up, and you guys were just so free, like if it kind of looks like a mahi, we're going to make it into this mahi, and if somebody makes what looks like a mistake, you just roll with it.

Dennis Friel: That's really one of the biggest reasons people who love art don't become artists — they're afraid to. I think they fear making a mistake, and once you get over that hurdle, you become a better artist.

Tom Rowland: Have you always been interested in collaborating, or were you a lone wolf at some point?

Dennis Friel: At an early age, I was the class artist, winning all the art awards, like most guys in my position — there's always one or two in every class. Then you refine your skills and get to high school and find a few more guys who draw. When I was alone as a kid, I would just draw by myself; my mom would fill me a box of crayons and I'd be off in the corner painting all day. Once I got to high school, I started meeting other kids who could draw, and we did homecoming banners and things like that, and I always loved that group collaboration. It doesn't mean I like to collaborate on every project, but it opened me up to it. Once I got to art school, that can be a humbling place, because you get there and you grew up being the guy everybody focused on, and you get to a school like Ringling where there's a bunch of superstars, and that was the lesson I needed — okay, I'm not the only one here, there are others just as talented doing it in their own style. That helped me look at things differently.

Becoming a Professional Marine Artist

Tom Rowland: What about the decision to go to art school? Did you always know you'd be a professional artist, or was there a moment where you decided this is it?

Dennis Friel: I kind of always knew I was going to do art in some way, shape, or form, and accepting that early on helped me relax about a lot of things. But the funny thing, which I don't talk about much, is that I did leave Ringling College. I went for a year and a half and left, partly because I had a girlfriend back home and my buddies were all still fishing, and I just wanted to be back home. After about a year and a half of doing murals and other things on my own, I went to The Art Institute for a couple of years to get a digital art degree — this was the advent of Photoshop. I remember thinking, what is this, this is incredible. So I went back to school for graphic design instead of illustration, got in and out of there, and took a job in the music business right after. I always painted fish my entire life — even while working in the music business and traveling to New York for record label meetings, I was an art director in the music business for about 17 years. I credit that time with giving me the foundation of professionalism and art direction that carries into my business today. I used to regret it, thinking I should have just kept painting fish, but now that I've been out for about 15 years, I look back and think that time gave me the professional training I needed to make my studio a success today.

Tom Rowland: It's interesting you say that, because there's this idea of the starving or struggling artist — creative people who are really good at photography, painting, drawing, even music, but only a few have the skills to also be professional at it, to run a business, keep bringing in the deals. Was that hard for you, or because of your music background were you able to transition right into it?

Dennis Friel: It was hard — it's been a continual evolution. As far as the art goes, honestly that's the easiest part of what I do. The hardest part is all the glue in between, managing everything, especially as the business grows and grows. We've gone through different phases of that. We used to have a gallery on the beach in Pompano Beach for about five years, and I was trucking out there every day, with a list of employees, two units in that shopping center — it was a hairy mess in my head, even though the business itself was fine. After a while I realized I was losing sight of who I am and what I do, and I'd taken it a little too far. You learn lessons and figure it out from the business side over time. That's probably been the hardest part — balancing everything, and still wanting to go fishing every now and then.

Tom Rowland: When you get that busy doing so many things that you lose track of who you are, tell me — who are you, what do you want to do?

Dennis Friel: You've got to love it — that's why I'm doing this. When you get so busy that you take on all the work, even the wrong clients, you find yourself looking at every job just wanting to get past it, and that's when you start losing your love for it. Every now and then I have to stop and remind myself why I'm here. I remember recently painting a huge mural — sixty feet by thirty-five feet — on the side of the Star brite museum bar at Southeastern University. I was physically stressed out, because painting a wall that big is genuine physical labor, and I had to stop for lunch and tell myself to just enjoy this and forget the other jobs calling me — these are good problems to have, but they get to you after a while. Once I reset my head, I started enjoying the mural again, because that's why I'm here. At the end of the day, I just want to look back on a solid career and be proud of it. Conservation is a big part of what we do too, and being well-rounded — we've set our studio up almost like a diverse portfolio, where if one thing slows down, another picks it up. The real reason is I just enjoy working on everything, which is probably been a bit of a downfall too — I do too many different things because I love them.

Tom Rowland: What was the first mural you ever painted, do you remember?

Dennis Friel: It was at my buddy Larry's house in high school — his parents lived on the beach in Pompano, about four houses off the sand. He asked me to paint a mural on his wall for two hundred bucks when we were sophomores. It was a sailfish with the Hillsboro Lighthouse in the background, and the funny thing is I still paint that today — I get that request every now and then, just a little better now.

Tom Rowland: How do you go from something small like that to a giant wall? I'm not an artist, and it's so cool to watch — you go to a gallery and look at something finished and wonder how long it took, all the detail, and then you watch you or Derek create it and it doesn't seem like that's how it was made. People say the same thing about me going out and catching fish on camera — they think it must be hard work, and I'm like, no, that's the easiest part, that's the execution. When I was first starting out, that was the hardest fish I'd ever caught in my life, but somehow you learn to figure it out.

Dennis Friel: Yeah, the execution is the easiest part. On my Connected by Water podcast, we mostly talk about fishing and ocean conservation, not art, because most guests aren't artists and I don't want to just talk about my art every episode. But one thing I try to do is draw a parallel between art and fishing, because there are so many parallels. How do you get from point A to point B? A lot of it comes down to experience — what Malcolm Gladwell talks about with the ten-thousand-hour rule and the tipping point. You can probably relate to that with what you've built. There's a lot of parallels, but you're also in a creative industry, producing shows and podcasts, and a lot of it is just work, staying consistent — I think a very small amount of it is really talent, more of it is just work.

Tom Rowland: I think once you get started, talent might really be desire. If you have the desire to fish, you'll stick with the hard lessons you have to learn to be good at it. But if you have talent without desire, you just don't care enough to stick with it. It's the same with being a fishing guide or a good fisherman — there are parallels to fishing all over, which is probably why it's been written about so much as a parallel to life. You have to learn a lot of lessons, and if you really look at how many fish you actually catch relative to how many times you cast, it's a very low percentage. But you have to have a tremendous amount of desire to keep casting, keep going, and it makes your whole day when you finally connect. I wonder if you were talented as a kid, drawing right away, versus some people who teach themselves.

Dennis Friel: I don't remember not drawing — I really don't. This is something I've done my whole life, which is probably why I assumed I'd do it for a living. It's funny, I draw a parallel immediately between art and fishing on that point — if you don't love it and want to do it for a living, you're in for a long life, because there are so many unaccounted hours that go into just making a painting, not even the business side. So much effort and time goes into an entire body of work, and then you show that painting to someone and maybe they don't respond the way you want. You can tell if a painting is good based on people's response — they don't have to tell you, they let you know without directly telling you. Sometimes you put a hundred or a hundred and fifty hours into something and they look at it for ten, twenty, thirty seconds and move on, and that's your reward, I guess. It can be a very hard-won thing, just like fishing, and once you deal with it professionally you deal with people who aren't always nice — I've dealt with my fair share of people who want to sabotage you for whatever reason. Being a professional artist has not been the easiest road. On the outside looking in, you want to make it look like a shiny new toy every time, but it's drudgery, it's a tough life.

Tom Rowland: You've done really well with it though. How long have you considered yourself a professional artist?

Dennis Friel: Can I tell you a story from when I was seventeen — that might help answer that. All through high school I just painted fish. I went to Cardinal Gibbons High School, a private Catholic school on the beach — my parents demanded I go to one of two Catholic schools in the county, Cardinal Gibbons or St. Thomas, and I chose Gibbons because frankly it was closer to the beach. We didn't grow up rich — I was the youngest kid in a small four-bedroom house — and I remember day one seeing a kid drive up to school in a Porsche, and I'd never seen anything like it. A lot of kids at that school had nice fishing boats and lived on the intracoastal, and I had grown up going down to the Keys every year, fishing offshore, catching mahi and kingfish and wahoo — not on some fancy sport-fisherman, but I knew my way around a boat and around fishing. So I'd tell these kids, hey, I'll paint whatever we catch that day, and that was basically my ticket on board, which is really how I got started painting more fish. Fast forward, and I had this catalog of fish paintings, and someone told me I needed to show it to the IGFA. Before the internet, the IGFA put out this pamphlet every year with artwork prints you could buy to support the organization, and I looked at it as my catalog of heroes — Stanley Meltzoff, Al Barnes, and of course Guy Harvey, who was my favorite. The IGFA at the time was in Pompano Beach off Atlantic Boulevard, so I took my whole portfolio and knocked on the back door, and Mike Leach answered — I've since had Mike on my podcast and we've gone over this story. I said, excuse me Mr. Leach, my name is Dennis Friel, I go to Cardinal Gibbons High School, I paint fish, and I'd love to get involved with the IGFA and show you my work. He didn't turn me away — he brought me in, had me lay all the work out on the table, and some of it ended up in one of their auctions. That's really where I got my feet wet and started thinking I could really do this for a living. I got into some local galleries too, including one called the Wild Fish Collection, where Guy Harvey, Carey Chen, Don Ray, Al Barnes, and John Carroll Doyle all had work hanging — and I had my work hanging as a seventeen-year-old kid right next to theirs. My work back then wasn't nearly as good as theirs, but it was a monumental moment for me, and that's when I really started getting the vision that I could probably do this for a living. I went to art school, got a little confused about direction, eventually worked in the music business, but still painted fish the whole time doing murals and commissions. Eventually I got locked into the tournament circuit, doing shirt designs for tournaments and boat brands — that's really where I got my footing doing this professionally. It was a slow burn over time. Eventually I got so busy, and I was also busy at my day job — I was an art director for a billion-dollar company, the world's largest distributor of CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, with about twenty employees under me, a very intensive job. My wife told me I was stressing myself out, that I had to choose one, and reminded me, isn't this your dream, isn't this what you've always wanted to do? One day I just got the nerve to quit my day job, and that was about fifteen years ago, and here we are.

Tom Rowland: Two questions. Do you remember, when you had that bag over your shoulder walking up to the IGFA, a moment where you thought "I don't know about this" before you actually did it?

Dennis Friel: No, I was ready to roll. The only time I really felt that was when I checked into The Art Institute on my first day — I think I sat in my car for an hour wondering if this was really the direction I wanted to go. In hindsight I'm glad I did, but that was the only time professionally I was leery about something. With the IGFA, I always had confidence — I have no problem talking to people or introducing myself, I've just always been that way.

Tom Rowland: And the second question — when you decided to quit the music business and go full time, after talking to your wife, was there a moment where you thought, is this really the right way to go?

Dennis Friel: I stayed in that job probably three years too long. There were economy things going on, we'd just gotten married and had our first child, and while professionally I should have left, personally I wanted to be more secure for the family. Remember, the music industry was being hit by streaming — we were in physical media, and that industry was going down. But we were the world's largest at what we did, so we absorbed a lot of the smaller companies' accounts as they went under, which let us weather the storm a little longer than everyone else. But Napster really opened up a can of worms, and then Spotify came along with Amazon Music and Apple Music, and that really started affecting CD sales.

Tom Rowland: To the point that — do you even have a CD player anymore? I don't have one in my car or my house. My daughter had an MRI recently and they gave me a CD, and I thought, cool, thanks, but how am I even going to play this?

Dennis Friel: No, I don't have one either — you'd have to go to a pawn shop or a thrift store.

Photoshop, Napster, and Whether AI Is the Next Disruption

Tom Rowland: That's an interesting parallel, because twice now you've described being at the front of a disruptive technology — first Photoshop, where you were a pioneer figuring out what it was, and then Napster and streaming, which was disruptive to the music industry in a way that threatened your job. I feel like we're going through that right now with AI. I wonder what similarities you see, having gone through it twice. The first time you were proactive — this is Photoshop, I can make something cool with this. The second time it was disrupting and threatening to take away your job. So where do you see AI going? I don't think anybody really knows, but what's your opinion?

Dennis Friel: I can tell you how it's affected us. When the music companies I worked for merged, I told my wife they were going to come to me as head of my department and I was going to just tell them to let me go, and that's how I arranged my own layoff — that Photoshop advantage early on let me work faster and create cleaner designs. I only use Photoshop from a digital illustration standpoint — I draw all the fish by hand, scan them, and airbrush them digitally using the airbrush tool, so I don't have to get anything shot or scanned separately, I can move things around and digitally design shirt designs, which gave us an edge early on. A lot of people don't understand digital illustration — they think the old way is what AI does now, but it's not close. Digital illustration is just using Photoshop as a tool with the same illustration techniques you'd use on paper, just going directly to the screen with an airbrush — the computer isn't really doing anything for you if you're doing it right. But you fast forward to AI, and in some ways it's helpful, but in a lot of ways it's hurtful, probably more hurtful than helpful for artists. You can't really pull the wool over people's eyes — even with an AI video of a person, the human mannerisms give it away, you just know it. As far as our studio goes, it's affected the digital side because now people think everything I do digitally must be AI. I put twenty-five hours into something and people assume I just typed a prompt. Worse, customers will pre-generate work in AI and ask me to just tweak it up a little, which isn't the process and actually makes things harder for artists. Are we losing some business because of it? Maybe, but I think at the end of the day people who want quality work will still need a quality artist. I don't know where it's going to evolve, it may get tougher, but we'll see.

Tom Rowland: Right now you can tell the difference, but I don't know if we'll be able to in two years. I believe that the further the pendulum swings to one side, the further it swings back to the other — the more AI there is, the more people will want something else.

Dennis Friel: Derek and I were just talking about that with Adrian — we think it's going to bring back greater value to original artwork, hand-painted murals, where the artist's touch shows. I think it's going to make that stuff more valuable.

Tom Rowland: I think it will too, and I think that always happens — like with short-form content, once it goes from thirty-second videos to five-second videos to two-second videos, it makes people want longer-form, real conversations again, a real book, a real movie, something. I have a one-year-old grandchild now, and I had this realization — my kids were born when there were no cell phones, so we can say "that was before cell phones." But my grandson is never going to live in a world where there wasn't AI. It's a wild time.

Dennis Friel: The cat's out of the bag, and I don't think it's going away. But I think it's going to create a desire to be more human, to have more human experiences. There are areas where AI has been helpful for me — you can throw a podcast into an app and it'll break it up into thirty-second clips for you, which saves a bunch of time versus fishing through an episode yourself. ChatGPT has been a big one too, though now you can tell when it's written something because of the style — my advice is to use it to structure a piece and then go back and rewrite it in your own voice. It doesn't help writers, though — you and I probably share friends who are writers, and we've seen the effects on their industry, and it hasn't been helpful. I'm interested to see where it goes, but I'm almost not sure I'm a fan, being honest — as someone who gets things done manually with his hands, I don't know if I like it.

Tom Rowland: I don't think either of us has to like it or not — I just think it's interesting that people our age have seen a couple of similar disruptions, the birth of the internet, tools like Photoshop, then cell phones, and now this crossroads with AI. I was interested in computers late — we had a computer lab at my high school, and I wasn't interested until later when I was fishing and realized I could type my journal entries into a computer and search them, look up every time I'd written "bonefish." That's how I got started on a computer, then I found out about websites and built one of the early ones for booking fishing trips, and it paid off huge. I remember the first trip I ever booked off the website, without ever talking to the person on the phone — I told my wife, I'm going to the Marquesas today, I'll be back by four, and if I'm not, here's who to call, because I don't even know who I'm going out with. It was so weird at the time, but I got in early and it paid off — I booked a lot of trips over my career through that website. I see that now as kind of like AI, but bigger.

Dennis Friel: Yeah, there are a lot of positives to it, but the tough part is you don't want it to turn into the Wild West with no regulation — what are the good parts, the bad parts, what do we follow, what do we allow. It's so new, I don't know what's going to take over.

Tom Rowland: That's the danger, I think, and what's on some people's minds. I think it's a time we'll remember for the rest of our lives, what's about to happen in the next couple of years and what's already happened in the last year.

Dennis Friel: Look at social media — for better or worse, it's part of our lives, it's not going away. Has it benefited us? Yes. Has it hurt us? Yes. Politically, it's making people think things they probably shouldn't be thinking, and I think it's done more to divide us than connect us — although it does connect people too, like you and me. I remember the first time I got on Facebook, wondering why I even needed it, and then I started posting my paintings and designs and business blew up because people were contacting me about work. It's probably a big reason I was able to quit my day job, to be honest. It's also been great for catching up with old friends and relatives. So it's that same balance — until you take it a little too far. I think it'll be the same with AI. Hopefully we use our powers for good, but we'll see.

How the Connected by Water Podcast and Brand Began

Tom Rowland: Tell me about your podcast — what was the reason you started it?

Dennis Friel: Before we opened the gallery on the beach, we had a small studio here in Coral Springs, because I didn't want to work out of the house with young kids around. I'd be in there alone for long hours, and you can only play music so much before you want to listen to something else, so I started listening to podcasts — Rogan being a big one, among others. Coral Springs in Broward County is a bit out west, closer to the Everglades, and I can throw a rock and hit the Sawgrass Expressway. Most of my clients are ocean-based, out in Palm Beach or East Palm Island, and people would come to the studio to drop things off or pick up shirts, and I think they wanted to get their money's worth for the drive, so they'd stick around and we'd have these great conversations — someone would come by and let their talk go for two hours. Eventually I got the idea that I should bottle that up, put it out to the world, and I don't think any other marine life artist had a podcast at the time — this was 2019. At the same time we were creating the Connected by Water brand as a whole. I have a silent business partner, and we wanted to create something platform-based with a real purpose — I didn't want to just be a freelance painter, so before it was "Dennis Friel Art Studios" we didn't even have a name yet, but one thing I wanted to include was the podcast, even though people would ask, what's a podcast, in 2019 there weren't a lot of them out there. I told my partner I just wanted to do it for fun, that I've always loved talking to people, and we kicked around names — lines on the water, the live well, but nothing stuck, and there was already another "Live Well" out there. I didn't want it too fishing-based because I was going to have surfers and all kinds of people on. My wife asked me, how is everybody who comes on the show connected to you, and I said, connected by water, and she said, that's cool, why don't you name it that. It stuck and grew from there. I called my business partner and he loved it, and I said, but that's also going to be the name of our whole company. In the weeks after, we kept coming up with deeper meanings for "connected by water" — like the idea of two boats passing on the water and waving at each other, something you'd never do in a car. What's that energy, and what does being a surfer or part of that community bring to your life that transcends politics or the other ugly things in the world — once you're on the water with someone, connected by water takes over. We fell in love with all these layers and used it in our branding and message. At the end of the day, we feel like Connected by Water is a community, an unspoken bond — you're connected by water, we're bonding over that shared passion. That's how we named the show, and as we went on we kept defining it further, having these great conversations with really no script, just like we're having right now.

Tom Rowland: It's a great name, and you've brought conservation into it a lot too — it's basically all about the water, because whether you're a surfer, a realtor, or a restaurant owner, if the water isn't clean and healthy, nobody wants to be around it. When I think about my own podcast, I've learned so much just by doing it — it's been a huge tool for me to talk to people I might never have talked to otherwise. When you're having all these conservation conversations, what have you learned that you think is most important right now?

Dennis Friel: We didn't start out talking about conservation right off the bat — I wanted to talk about people and character, the layers underneath, because actually catching the fish is a very small part of the day. I wanted to give people a window into the stories behind what you might see as a highlight on Facebook or Instagram, what makes the industry or lifestyle tick. We eased into conservation because it became unavoidable. Early on, one of the first topics we really explored was the shark issue — there was a moment when a shark long-liner named Toma got his nets cut in Jupiter, and Patrick Rice was one of the big voices on it. I reached out to Art Sapp and Skip Dana, who are regulars on my show, and we brought Patrick on — God rest his soul, he passed during COVID — and that episode helped bring sharks into the forefront on a podcast platform, back around 2020 or so. Since then it's been an aspect we've really tried to explore. One thing we always try to do is remind people that with conservation, we should all want the same thing at the end of the day, even though I've found not everybody actually does — some people are in it for the wrong reasons. I've tried not to take a political stance, and instead just bring on the right people and create a platform for them to talk, rather than being like Fox News or CNN giving a hardline opinion. I've learned a lot from bringing on people from a lot of different areas, but I always wanted to create a fair and balanced platform, because at the end of the day we should all want a clean, healthy water system for Florida, which means a clean, healthy fishery. The organizations we back — primarily Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, CCA, the IGFA, and the Billfish Foundation — really have their heart in the right place, which is why we support them the most. But we always want to give people a platform to discuss things, because the truth is the only thing that matters.

Florida's Shark Debate

Tom Rowland: When you first started talking about sharks back in 2020, were people saying there were too many or too few?

Dennis Friel: Too many. There were a lot of problems with tuna getting bit, especially in the Bahamas, and then the Jupiter issue, and things slowly migrated further down the Florida coast into the Keys. People were losing their catches and getting upset, to the point where you'd learn the sharks' behavior and just have to pick up and move.

Tom Rowland: With everything you've learned from all the different opinions on your show, where do you personally stand on sharks — is there a solution?

Dennis Friel: I think there is, and it's an unpopular opinion — I think bringing back some longlining would help cull the herd, though not the way people imagine it's done in Asia, where you see videos of finning and discarding. That's not what's happening here — it's a completely different regulatory system, and there's a real livelihood and blue economy tied to it. When regulations on harvesting sharks were lifted, we immediately saw the shark population boom. People think that because I'm a marine life artist I must be a tree hugger about it, and it's not the case at all — I'm just realistic. There's a right way and a wrong way to do things, and fisheries management done right is beneficial to a lot of people, even to the ocean itself.

Tom Rowland: That's the intent behind the limits and regulations — a healthy ocean. But sometimes they either don't have the data to make the right decision, or they don't have the law enforcement to actually enforce the rules. What I don't like is when a rule gets put in place with no ability to enforce it, and then years later somebody gets in trouble for something they didn't even know was a law, when they weren't intentionally doing anything wrong. I'd rather have fewer rules with heavy enforcement than more and more rules with none. I've noticed less enforcement on the water today — I used to see more Marine Patrol and FWC officers out on boats, and now I see the trucks but not the boats like I used to.

Dennis Friel: It's a convoluted thing to understand — you almost have to study it daily to keep up, because it changes so much.

Tom Rowland: Every year I've been doing this, it's gotten more difficult to fish in places without getting attacked almost immediately. I had Chris Fischer on, and he's very against the idea that there are too many sharks — he thinks a healthy ocean includes a lot of sharks, and the one thing I do see is that sharks are predators, so for there to be this many of them, there has to be a lot for them to eat, which tells me the fishery is healthy enough to support that shark population. I don't see sharks starving to death. But where I think there needs to be education rather than regulation is this: a good fishing guide, with lots of spots, will move on if every fish he hooks is getting eaten. A weekend angler with maybe three spots, who's never had fishing like that before, might not know to move on, and every fish he hooks gets eaten — that's the same as keeping every fish and filling a cooler. I worry about groups saying you just can't fish somewhere anymore — access is the hill I'll die on. If you restrict access to a place, you're probably not getting it back for a very long time, if ever. There are plenty of examples in the Florida Keys, like Boca Chica Beach, which was shut down twenty-some years ago supposedly for fish studies and has never reopened, even though you can run jet skis all over the place out there — you just can't take your kid in to catch a snapper off a coral head. I feel like shutting down access is the easy answer to the shark problem, but I don't think it's the right one.

Dennis Friel: There's been recent progress for sportsman's rights, though — the constitutional amendment we just passed for the right to hunt and fish is a positive step. A group recently went up to Washington, D.C. — my friend Jeff Parkery was part of it — and they got bipartisan support from Rick Scott's office to open up a shark study to look into the issue. It's not a full answer, but it's a step in the right direction.

Tom Rowland: I've had Rob Whitman on the podcast twice — he's funding that bill — and I kept asking him if it would restrict access. He said no, but that may just be his intention; once other people get hold of the bill, I don't know what happens after that, and that worries me.

Dennis Friel: I hadn't thought about that part of it — that is worrisome.

Tom Rowland: That's the easiest way to do it, especially without enough law enforcement on the water — one person with a pair of binoculars, or even a drone, can spot people out there and tell them to leave, with very little manpower needed. That's an easy way to reduce shark-human interactions, which is literally the stated intent of that bill — reduce interactions. And the easiest way to reduce interactions is to just not let the humans go in there, because you're not going to stop the sharks. So I don't really have an opinion on whether it's good or bad that there are so many sharks. What's not good is when fishermen keep fishing a spot until they land one to keep, having lost thirty or fifty to sharks along the way — that's wasteful, though I'm not accusing every weekend angler of that. For a while, back around 2020 when I started talking about this too, I'd get people on who wouldn't even acknowledge there were more sharks than ever, saying the global shark population was in decline. It could be declining globally, but twenty miles off the coast of Florida, around the entire state, it is not — it's more than ever, and if you haven't seen that you just haven't gone fishing with pretty much anybody who leaves the dock. I think that opinion has shifted since then.

Dennis Friel: That was always obvious to me, living in the epicenter of it. You've got people who dive with great whites in other regions talking about issues there, and sure, there might be shark issues in those places, but you have to look at it regionally — what's happening in California isn't the same as Florida, and Florida isn't the same as the Atlantic or Japan. Each region is different biologically, and you have to manage it that way — almost like why the United States has individual states rather than being ruled entirely from one place. You take care of what's happening locally first, and you can still have federal oversight, but you shouldn't have someone far away waving a magic wand and making decisions for you.

Tom Rowland: I feel like FWC is doing a good job overall — I've had lawmakers and officers on, and they've explained that data has to support their decisions, except in the case of Goliath grouper, where they opened a very restricted, limited-take season without the kind of hard data they'd normally require. They used data from fishermen and divers saying there were more Goliath grouper than ever, took people at their word, and opened a season. That gave me confidence in the process — that they'd accept other types of data, like a video of a wreck with a hundred Goliath grouper on it, which to me should count the same as a diver survey.

Dennis Friel: If you're getting honest feedback, that's citizen science, and that was the issue with sharks too — we're getting sharked during sailfish season fishing in a hundred fifty to two hundred feet of water, and their scientists are surveying out at four hundred feet and saying there are no sharks. There are, because we're all fishing at two hundred feet, and the sharks have learned that's where the food is. That's where some of the controversy came from with shark-diving groups making noise and drawing sharks in, allegedly causing problems for fisheries — that was debatable, but at least that's the theory. On the citizen-science point, Robert Spottswood Jr. came on with Travis Thompson to talk about the hunting-and-fishing amendment, and Robert mentioned a program where captains could get a license to fish a certain number of days a year specifically to help collect data — catching red snapper, for instance, just to gather numbers. I lost track of what happened with that program, or whether people bought into it.

Tom Rowland: I never even heard about that. We've been working with the Nature Conservancy, which wants people to log through an app how many red snapper they descend, providing the descending equipment and having you return it. Their idea is that you'll never get a season opened if regulators think every caught fish is dead, or if they don't even know how many fish are being caught — you have to provide data. But so many fishermen are afraid to provide data because they think it'll be used against them, so the Nature Conservancy is trying to educate people on what the data is actually used for.

Dennis Friel: That might be a valid feeling too, given people have been burned before — you report seeing a sawfish somewhere, and suddenly there are buoys all around and you can't fish there anymore. Next time you see a sawfish, are you going to report it?

Tom Rowland: Probably not, if it's a spot you run through all the time and never see a sawfish otherwise — why would you report the one and lose access. With the shark issue, that was the one thing lacking when we had a group of guys trying to move things forward — Rufus, Fly Navarro, Doug Cameron up in Jupiter, Art Sapp — we kept getting pushback from politicians saying we had no data, that it was just hearsay from videos on social media. When we asked what kind of data they would accept beyond video, they never really had an answer — it felt like a stalling technique until they could pass a law that put more regulations on sharks. It was smoke and mirrors, and the scientists they sent out to collect data just weren't fishing in the right areas. We had a group of professional offshore captains offer to take them out and show them, and they never took us up on it.

Dennis Friel: Maybe they didn't have the personnel, or it was an insurance issue, I don't know. I'd like to see more fishermen getting involved on these councils — Ed Walker is pretty high up on one, and he's as much a fisherman as you'll ever find, with fishermen's interests at heart. Seeing someone like that on a council is big for the future of getting scientists and captains to actually work together and collect data together, rather than scientists seeing something different from what captains see on the water every day. It's a tough thing, and I think it goes back to whether we all even want the same thing — maybe we don't.

Tom Rowland: We definitely don't always, and that's where infighting comes in among different groups of fishermen — bait fishermen, fly fishermen, divers, spearfishermen, sail fishermen, tournament fishermen — each a small group with almost no voice alone, but together a huge voice. I don't think that infighting is healthy at all.

Dennis Friel: It's not healthy, and it's important for organizations themselves to reach across the aisle and work with other organizations toward a common goal — that's why CCA, IGFA, and Bonefish & Tarpon Trust often work together, which is probably my favorite thing about those three. Other organizations won't, because they want to protect their own funding under their own umbrella and achieve something just for themselves, and I don't think that's the way to move forward. The goal should be a healthy Florida, healthy water, a healthy system — connected by water, which is basically our whole company philosophy. If you're a Floridian, you're connected by water, because this entire state is one big weave of water, and it transcends beyond that too. At the end of the day we should all want the same thing, but people have different opinions on how to get there, and unfortunately there's a corruption layer to it as well.

Tom Rowland: There's always going to be different opinions and people who want to be the hero. I don't know exactly where we're headed, but it does seem like we're making tremendous progress — I think education about Florida's overall water issues and what causes them is way more mainstream than it once was, and people understand it better.

Sprawl and the Future of Florida's Water

Dennis Friel: The way water flows through South Florida is better now than it was five years ago as a whole, but does that turn into solutions? I don't know, I hope so. To me, the biggest trouble we face in the state of Florida is sprawl, building inward toward the state. I'm not against progress or construction, but it has to be done the right way, because at the end of the day, if you don't have the middle of the state, you don't have water — and that's a human standpoint, not even a fisheries standpoint. Maintaining the center of the state, particularly the Everglades and even areas like Kissimmee, has to be the chief concern. The Florida Wildlife Corridor was a huge achievement that I don't think gets enough credit — basically a free corridor all the way up into the Appalachians for nature and animals to thrive in. It protects a lot of things and keeps Florida wild, which is really important.

Tom Rowland: If you could snap your fingers and make one change, what would you do?

Dennis Friel: That's a tough one, because you get lost in the minutiae of everything going on. The first line of defense is really just controlling the sprawl — I don't think there's one single change, there are too many moving parts, and Florida is such a complex ecosystem. The more you build on it, the worse it's going to be. I'm not against construction and moving the economy forward, but you have to provide a solid balance and keep the center protected — that's probably the best single thing I could point to.

Tom Rowland: Makes sense. Florida's been very dry lately with the natural rainfall — I don't know what's going to happen, but hopefully we'll get some relief.

Dennis Friel: I think that goes in cycles too — it's important to have a dry season and a wet season in the Everglades. You can't keep it flooded all the time or the nutrients can't grow properly; it has to dry out so things can build up and grow, then get wet again so those things stay alive. That's basically how the Everglades works — it can't just be about running water south and keeping things wet, there has to be both a dry season and a wet season. We had some rain this week, which is a good sign, hopefully it continues through the summer.

Closing

Tom Rowland: Well, Dennis, it's been great to catch up with you — I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and I'm a big fan of your work. We should get together again and do it again.

Dennis Friel: Yeah, come into the studio one day when you're off from Broward and we can hang out at the table and keep the conversation going.

Tom Rowland: For sure. How do people find you and your work?

Dennis Friel: We just launched a brand new Connected by Water website, which is primarily to promote our brand — you can shop in our art gallery and apparel there. Connectedbywater.com is probably the best way, or you can find me on Instagram at Connected by Water or at Dennis Friel Art, we've got two accounts.

Tom Rowland: And where can people find your podcast?

Dennis Friel: Our podcast, Connected by Water, is on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify — you should be able to search and find it pretty easily.

Tom Rowland: All right, my friend, we'll talk soon, and thanks for coming on — that's Dennis Friel. That's it for today, we'll see you next week.

Dennis Friel: Tom, it's been an honor, sir. Thank you.