Emily & Amanda Gale: D1 Pole Vaulters to Florida Keys Charter Captains

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 348, Emily & Amanda Gale...

Meet the Gale Force Twins

Emily Gale: My name is Emily.

Amanda Gale: My name's Amanda.

Gale Twins: We're the Gale Force Twins, and welcome to the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show today. Today's show is with some very impressive young ladies named the Gale Force Twins. Emily and Amanda are former D1 athletes, and we talk about how they used the discipline and dedication that made them high-level pole vaulters at the national and D1 college level to become charter fishing guides, and how they're transitioning into the YouTube space. There's a lot of great information here, and these young ladies are really getting after it. They are legit, so I hope you enjoy this conversation with the Gale Force Twins, Emily and Amanda.

Tom Rowland: Alright, I'm here with Emily and Amanda, the Gale Force Twins. How are you girls doing today?

Gale Twins: We're good. How are you?

Tom Rowland: Everything's going great. How's the fishing?

Gale Twins: It's good. Fishing's really good. It's pretty windy right now — we've got a hurricane coming our way, but that's okay.

Tom Rowland: I know. So you're in the Keys right now?

Gale Twins: Yes, we're in Big Pine Key.

Bouncing Between the Keys and Fort Lauderdale

Tom Rowland: That's interesting — you've kind of moved around. At one point I saw you were moving your charter business north, and now you're back in the Keys. What's the status?

Gale Twins: It's been pretty fluid, I'd say. We grew up originally in Weston, Florida, about forty-five minutes west of Fort Lauderdale. We ran, and still run, charters out of Pompano, but we have our business licenses in both Monroe County and Broward County. When COVID started happening, we came down to the Keys to get away from everything and focus more on filming, and with that we've been able to run charters down here too. Basically, we started in the Keys, moved back up to Fort Lauderdale, tried it out there, and once COVID happened, we just came back.

Tom Rowland: Why did you think the Keys were better? The Keys were actually closed for a long time because of COVID.

Gale Twins: Once COVID happened we lost almost all of our charters for the summer. So we asked each other, what's the next step for our business? That's when we decided to really commit full-time to YouTube and Facebook videos, and we figured the Keys was probably the best place to do that. So honestly, coming here was a filming decision, not a charter decision.

Tom Rowland: That's an interesting distinction — making videos to promote your charter business is a different strategy than making videos to entertain people on YouTube.

Gale Twins: Oh, definitely.

Building an Audience on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok

Tom Rowland: How's the YouTube going? I see you've got a lot of subscribers and loyal fans. Has that grown a lot since you started diving into it during COVID?

Gale Twins: We like to be busy, so we decided we were going to give ourselves full-time jobs no matter what. Since we didn't have charters, we did videos instead. When COVID started we had a thousand subscribers on YouTube. Just over three months later we were at thirteen thousand. Facebook now offers the same ten-minute upload feature YouTube does, so we've been posting the same videos there too, and we went from twenty thousand to forty thousand followers on Facebook in a short amount of time. The growth is definitely there.

Tom Rowland: Why do you think Facebook is doing better for you? Can you tell from the comments who the audience is on one platform versus the other?

Gale Twins: That's a good question. Facebook just came out with Facebook Watch, so it's trying to compete with YouTube. We've always had a big following on Facebook, partly because our first charter boat job — the captain we worked for had a big Facebook page and showed us the ins and outs of it, so that's where we started our social media, even before Instagram. For some reason you get more likes and followers on Facebook, but we've noticed you don't get the same watch time you get on YouTube — maybe a minute or two on Facebook versus several minutes on YouTube. Since Facebook is just starting with this format, we want to get in on the ground floor early.

Tom Rowland: That's super important. Every success we've had with social media has come from getting in early on whatever wave is happening — Instagram Live, IGTV, and now you see the biggest YouTubers and TikTokers who all kind of got in at the same time, especially in the fishing business. It was much easier to build an audience quickly when everyone was just getting onto a platform and looking for people to subscribe to. So it sounds like as soon as something new shows up, you jump on it, and if it takes off, great — if it doesn't, you move on to the next one.

Gale Twins: Yeah. We did get on TikTok — I don't really understand TikTok, but we do it anyway.

Tom Rowland: I don't either. My daughter told me I can't be on TikTok.

Gale Twins: It's funny — we got a message from a girl on TikTok who said her dad follows us on Instagram, and she was so glad she found us on TikTok. That aged us. On TikTok we upload sixty-second versions of our YouTube videos or fun little snippets. We haven't gotten too deep into the whole TikTok thing — we mostly use it as a feeder account to promote our YouTube channel, and it's doing well even though we don't put much effort into it.

Elite Athletes: D1 Pole Vaulting

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about your backstory and how you got into the charter business. I did some research between when we first started talking and today, and I learned all kinds of stuff about you. First of all, both of you are elite athletes — pole vaulters, right? You took that to the national level at the D1 college level?

Gale Twins: Yes. We won medals, and we won indoor ACC titles — two of the years we were there, and the program kept winning after we left, for four years in a row.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. D1 athletics is really challenging — talk about wanting a full-time job. What was your daily schedule like as a D1 track athlete?

Gale Twins: It was pretty intense. We practiced six days a week, and four of those six days it was twice a day. We'd have weights at six in the morning, so we'd get up around 4:30 or 4:45 even though we only lived two miles from campus, because we liked to have a full breakfast and be really ready and awake. Then we had class, then afternoon practice around two or three o'clock, which was more event-focused work on the track. Because our majors were pre-med, a lot of our teachers were doctors who came over at night from the medical campus, so we'd have night class too — sometimes until nine or ten. So you'd start your day at four in the morning, go to weights for an hour or two, go to class from eight to three, go to practice from three to six, and then go to class from seven to nine. It was one of the craziest schedules of our lives. We drank a lot of coffee back then — we don't anymore — but we loved how rigorous it was. We thrived on that intensity.

Tom Rowland: That's a perfect training ground to become a professional charter captain, because those are similar hours in my experience — four in the morning until about ten at night is about the day of a charter guide.

Gale Twins: Yeah, definitely.

How the Pole Vaulting Started

Tom Rowland: So how did you get into pole vaulting originally?

Gale Twins: That's actually kind of a funny story. Our dad was a distance runner for a long time, and in middle school we said we wanted to be runners, so we started running on the middle school track team. High school is typically when pole vault events show up at track meets, and we saw pole vaulters — one of our cheerleader friends was a pole vaulter, and we thought that was so cool. She told us it was really hard and we probably couldn't do it, which of course made us more determined, since we knew we were competitive and athletic. On the first day of track tryouts in high school we told the coach we wanted to pole vault, and he said we had to wait and prove ourselves first. So we kept showing up and running whatever they asked until they finally let us start.

Gale Twins: What's interesting is that in the first three months, the coach told one of us she probably shouldn't do it — she wasn't very good at all. She's left-handed but jumps off her right foot, which is unusual, and she struggled in the beginning, jumping off the wrong foot and doing weird things. The coach eventually told her he really thought she should try something else, which was really upsetting. Right after that we found a club team, and within about a week on the club team it was obvious she was going to go somewhere with it.

Tom Rowland: What was the difference between that first coach who saw no possibility and the second coach who believed in her? Did he just have more skill as a coach, or did he spend more time with her?

Gale Twins: I think it was all of it. He became like a mentor to us — a really good person and a skillful teacher. At a track meet, when she was struggling and jumped off two feet instead of one — which you're never supposed to do — she still cleared eight feet, which is a great height for a beginner. The high school coach said he didn't know how to coach a kid who jumps off two feet. The club coach looked at the same thing and said that a kid who jumped off two feet and still cleared eight feet was incredible — he could see exactly what needed fixing, she just had to learn the technique.

Tom Rowland: That's the difference — an experienced coach can see raw ability and knows it isn't a problem, while a less experienced coach just sees a disaster and tells you to quit. And that's the one who eventually became state champion, right, Emily?

Gale Twins: Yeah. My freshman year of high school I wasn't that great at pole vaulting, but sophomore year I met the club coach, and within three months he took me from clearing eight feet and finishing last at every meet to winning the state title. Junior year is when my sister caught up — she went from eight feet to twelve feet fast, and I was the one grinding up bar by bar. We had different techniques: I was more of a speed jumper, fast and explosive, and she was more technique-oriented, focused on every detail of her takeoff spot and grip. By senior year I got first at states again, and she got second — a really cool experience for both of us.

An Upper-Body-Strength Sport

Tom Rowland: I was a pole vaulter for two years myself — the track coach recruited me because I had good upper-body strength from wrestling. In your athletic background, what gave you the upper-body strength to excel at it? Were you gymnasts?

Gale Twins: Yes — we were gymnasts our whole lives up until middle school, and even in middle school we did both gymnastics and track, since our dad was a marathon runner and we wanted to run too. Our mom would pick us up from track practice with dinner and a change of clothes in the car so we could go straight to gymnastics practice. By eighth grade, our mom told us we had to choose either in-school sports or out-of-school sports — she couldn't manage driving us to both anymore. A lot of pole vaulters come from backgrounds like gymnastics or wrestling that build that combination of strength and body awareness.

Tom Rowland: Right — you have the body awareness of where you are in space, plus the strength and skill to move your body the way you want, which a lot of people just don't have naturally. It's making a lot more sense to me now why you've had success as charter captains too — that's a demanding schedule as well. A lot of people get into fishing and have no idea it's going to be this much work, four in the morning until ten at night, and then the bilge pump breaks and you're out there with a flashlight in your teeth fixing it so you're ready for the next day. That takes real dedication.

A Health Battle: Diagnosed with CVID

Tom Rowland: Along the way you also had some other challenges — a health issue. Do you feel like talking about that?

Gale Twins: Yeah, of course. It's been a while since I've told this story. It started when I was a sophomore in high school and began feeling very weak and fatigued on the track. Being as athletic as we are, that was odd — I clearly wasn't just dehydrated or lazy, something was off. Our pediatrician decided to run some blood work, including a test for immunoglobulins, and it came back very severely low.

Tom Rowland: What does that mean?

Gale Twins: Immunoglobulins — IgG, IgA, and the rest of that family of antibodies — are what help your body fight off infections and disease. Normally, if you get the flu, your body builds antibodies so you don't get it again. My body didn't have the ability to build those antibodies, so I'd get sick again and again. It started to make sense in hindsight — I'd had my tonsils removed in fourth grade from so many strep infections. We went to see a specialist at the University of Miami Health System, an immunologist and allergist, who explained everything. Since we're identical twins, they checked my sister too, and at the time she was a little more asymptomatic. My diagnosis, the proper name, is CVID — common variable immune deficiency, also known as hypogammaglobulinemia. In simple terms, my body lacks the ability to make antibodies at all, so I need donated blood plasma to survive.

Tom Rowland: On a regular basis, or just once?

Gale Twins: On a regular basis — to this day, every single week I rely on donated blood plasma, which sounds scary, but it's just become a normal part of my life. When it started I was fifteen, and it was hard to wrap my brain around, because I felt healthy — I was running track, going to school, and didn't feel like I needed donated plasma. Blood plasma has the consistency of molasses, not just water going through an IV, so it's infused either subcutaneously through the fat or intravenously, over a three-to-six-hour window — you can't just get a quick shot. My first treatment caused a severe reaction, and I ended up with meningitis afterward. It was very traumatic being fifteen and otherwise feeling healthy. My parents talked with the doctors about waiting a year to see how things progressed before committing to regular infusions, since my body wasn't accepting it well initially.

Gale Twins: The following year, my condition really started to deteriorate — constant muscle fatigue, even when I wasn't getting sick very often. It was hard to even get to practice. We requested an elevator pass at school because our building had four floors and I had class on the top floor, but the school wouldn't approve one unless you were on crutches or in a wheelchair — to them I looked like a perfectly healthy kid on the track team. I kept going to practice every day because I was so committed to the sport, but I had to explain that the fatigue was what made it hard to even get around campus. That was the year doctors finally said it was time to commit to regular infusions.

Gale Twins: What we've settled on is a routine of small weekly infusions, rather than one larger monthly dose, so my body doesn't react as strongly. Even small, each one takes around four hours. At first I'd go to a hospital, to the section where they also handle things like cancer treatment. In high school my mom started doing my infusions for me at home, and she kept doing it through my first year of college. Then one night as a freshman she was out with friends and I was alone in the dorm, so I decided I was tired of relying on other people and did it myself for the first time — bit my lip and just did the needles. It sounds scary, but it's become completely normal: every week I infuse myself with donated blood plasma, usually in my stomach or legs, with a couple of small needles, and I just sit on the couch, edit videos, and watch Netflix through it.

Tom Rowland: After you do that, do you feel a lot different?

Gale Twins: You're usually sore and a little in pain for a couple of days afterward. But the best way to explain the overall effect is like a sink filling with water while the drain is left unplugged — if I don't do my infusions, the level just keeps draining down. If I do them regularly and stay on top of it, I can live a pretty normal life, I just have to be careful about things like COVID and travel. My sister has the same underlying condition, but her natural antibody levels run a bit higher, so she doesn't need weekly infusions — she just monitors her blood levels and infuses if they get low. It's blood work through the doctor's office that shows the trend over a few weeks, not something that swings suddenly day to day.

Tom Rowland: Did these conditions influence what you planned to study in college?

Gale Twins: I'd say so. We always loved science and scored well on it in our state testing, so part of it was natural, but part of it was also everything we'd been through medically. Funnily enough, I actually hated going to doctors' offices after that first year of constant testing, and I remember thinking I never wanted to be a doctor myself. Either way, we both ended up choosing biology as pre-med majors — we made that decision somewhat independently, even though we ended up doing almost everything the same. About two years into college we both started to say we weren't sure medical school was for us. It wasn't that we were afraid of the commitment, it was that we weren't sure it was the right one to make if we weren't fully certain.

Choosing a Different Path

Tom Rowland: As a D1 athlete in an incredibly demanding major, going to graduate school without being a D1 athlete anymore might almost feel like a vacation. But you're smart to question whether it's the right path just because you could technically do it. I knew someone who went all the way through nursing school, became a nurse, and only then realized she didn't actually like the job because she'd never interned or seen what the work really involved. That's a big commitment to make blind.

Gale Twins: Because we were so intense with school, track, and managing our health, we finally had a summer where it was basically time to get an internship or a job. We knew a captain in the Keys we'd fished with a number of times, and he offered us a summer job. It was such an easy yes — we'd always done everything by the book, the shadowing, the research, all of it, and this just felt like a fun summer break. Since we weren't sure about medical school anyway, we figured, why not expose ourselves to another part of life and try working on a fishing boat?

The First Fishing Job

Tom Rowland: Really? Who was that?

Gale Twins: It was Captain Marlin, running charter trips in the Keys. We thought it would just be a fun summer job, but on that job he was the one who told us we should get our captain's licenses — that it would be great for us. We figured, sure, why not, and started studying for the exam and logging our sea time, mostly thinking it would look good on a resume. As we kept going through college, still not sure about medical school, staying in the fishing world wasn't really a deliberate choice so much as opportunities kept opening up. We ended up working a series of fishing tournaments in the Bahamas for Skip Smith, who runs the Custom Shootout and his other tournaments. He reached out looking for help, and since it was a seasonal job and we were about to graduate, he told us to call him when we needed work.

Tom Rowland: That's kind of a pivot — from working on a charter boat to running tournaments. Was there any hesitation moving from being on the water to being on the dock running the event?

Gale Twins: Not really about taking the job — we thought it would be a good networking opportunity. But once we were actually working it, and every boat went out in the morning while we stayed back at the dock, it was definitely obvious we'd rather be out fishing. We did that for about six months, starting in January right after we graduated in December, with the tournaments running from around April through June. We really enjoyed it — the number of connections and captains we met at those Bahamas tournaments was eye-opening. We started to realize just how big the fishing world really is: there's the charter side, the tournament side, the private side, the sportfish side. We were absorbing all of it, and honestly still had no idea what the next step would be.

Tom Rowland: There's a point in a lot of careers — certainly mine — where you have no idea you can be a professional fisherman, a guide, an outfitter. I didn't know any of that growing up. It wasn't until a couple years into guiding trout in Wyoming, around people who were actually doing it as a real career, that it clicked for me that this was a real job, even while everyone kept asking when I'd get one. When did that realization hit for you?

Gale Twins: It really started at that first tournament job, getting paid every day before we'd even graduated college, making more money than we expected without a degree. We were at a very academically intense school where everyone around us was headed to medical school, vet school, or a PhD program, so realizing there were entirely different paths to make a living — on the water, in the air as pilots, on land — outside of strict academia felt almost freeing.

Tom Rowland: When your mind opens up like that, does it change how motivated you are to finish school, or does it bring on some real introspection about whether you're doing the right thing?

Gale Twins: We definitely had doubts about our majors, but as student-athletes you have to complete a certain percentage of your degree each year to stay eligible — something like twenty percent freshman year, sixty percent sophomore year, seventy-five percent junior year — so changing majors would have cost us our eligibility. We decided to just finish the degree, and figure out the next step once we were done. The motivation for the degree itself wasn't really there anymore in that last stretch, but we're competitive people, so we still finished strong. We'd always been straight-A students, and neither of us was going to throw all that work away.

Finishing the Vaulting Career

Tom Rowland: In your last year, were you still competitive on the track, approaching a national championship level?

Gale Twins: We both finished around the same time. In my fourth season I had a bone bruise in my sacrum, the bone above the tailbone, which is mostly a pain-management injury, so I could still train and compete through it. By my last indoor season I really wanted to go out strong, and I did — I medaled, we won ACCs, we had the rings. That felt like the perfect note to end on, so I put the poles away. My sister took a little longer to walk away, partly because she didn't have an injury forcing the decision, so there wasn't as clear a reason to stop. We did look into continuing to vault outside of college — it's actually a sport more like golf than gymnastics, where you can keep improving and peak in your late twenties, so post-collegiate athletes train at programs around the country, similar to how pro fishing teams work, competing in an open division against everyone from recent grads to Olympians.

Tom Rowland: What was it like coming to peace with having taken it as far as you wanted to take it?

Gale Twins: Vaulting brought so much joy and so many great memories that for a long time I genuinely believed I'd never find something that made me as happy. It helped that it overlapped with our first job on the water, where I started finding something I really loved, which made it easier to let go slowly rather than all at once. It still took a while after finishing track to find something that got me as excited as a track meet did. Once we'd stepped away after ten years of vaulting, we were essentially starting over at year one in fishing, and year one of anything isn't going to feel like year ten. Over time, as we started making a name for ourselves and getting invited onto different tournament and private boats, the tournament side of fishing gave us that same feeling — the chance to compete again, to win an award like top lady angler or biggest mahi. Being that competitive by nature, getting to compete in fishing is what really got us excited about it.

Tom Rowland: When wrestling went away for me, I didn't even realize there was a hole in my life until fishing tournaments came along — starting with a little redfish tournament in the Keys that felt like an enormous deal at the time, with the boat races and the whole atmosphere of competitiveness. I didn't even know I was missing that until it showed up again.

Gale Twins: I think part of it is almost biological — your brain gets used to those regular adrenaline rushes, and when they stop you start wondering when you'll feel that again. For about the first year after we stepped away, we went looking for adrenaline anywhere we could find it — we did a cage-free shark dive, tried getting into CrossFit, talked about competitive powerlifting.

Tom Rowland: How long did the CrossFit last?

Gale Twins: Only a few months. My biggest struggle was lifting heavy weight in such a fatigued state — coming from track, where everything was so technical, it was hard to wrap my head around doing something like a power clean while exhausted. It just didn't feel safe.

Tom Rowland: Elite athletes don't just stop training. What do you do now to stay in shape with such a demanding charter schedule?

Gale Twins: We got into weightlifting, which is really the one thing that's carried over from our track days — we lifted four times a week back then. We have a gym membership at home in Fort Lauderdale, and in the Keys we've put together a squat rack, barbells, and a lat pulldown, because there's something about feeling strong no matter what else is going on. We try to get a workout in before charters, sometimes as early as 4:20 in the morning — if we don't do it before, we're too worn out by the end of the day.

Working on Someone Else's Boat

Tom Rowland: You also have to be strong to be a charter guide — throwing the net, hauling garbage cans full of ice, dealing with chum, especially offshore. You're five-foot-three, five-foot-four. Do you find your size to be a challenge, or do you just work around it?

Gale Twins: The biggest challenge when we started working on other people's boats actually wasn't a strength issue at all — it was a height issue. I felt strong enough to handle plenty already. It was more about having long enough arms to gather fish, being able to reach the rod in the top holder of the tower, or seeing over everyone's heads on the boat to cast at a bait school. Learning how to climb around the boat helped a lot with that.

Tom Rowland: That's a tough problem on someone else's boat, where you don't really have the chance to rearrange or customize the setup. Tell me about moving toward having your own boat — you mentioned working in Key West and for Skip Smith. Did you work for anyone else?

Gale Twins: Right as the seasonal job with Skip Smith was wrapping up, we got a call from Two Conchs, a charter company in Marathon, who were specifically looking to hire some female captains. Like everything else, it was just an opportunity we said yes to without overthinking it — we came home from that stretch of tournaments and told our parents we were moving to the Keys.

Tom Rowland: Were your parents supportive of that? And what was it like finding a place to live in the Keys, which can be expensive and difficult?

Gale Twins: Thankfully our parents were very supportive through the whole process. I think after watching us be so structured and rigorous with school for so long, seeing us take a fishing job felt like a breath of fresh air to them. Actually, when I graduated college and was applying to internship programs in my field, my mom told me to stop — she said I needed to get a regular job for six months first, no matter what it was, before applying to anything else. That's when we called Skip Smith to see if he was hiring. It was really just one thing leading to another, and I think they were happy to see us pursuing something without so much rigid structure in our lives.

Tom Rowland: Looking back, was that good advice — to step outside the academic mindset you'd been locked into?

Gale Twins: Definitely. Since we were eighteen, choosing to be pre-med biology majors, I always had this voice in the back of my head asking what I actually wanted to do with my life. When you feel like you could study any degree and pass, it's almost overwhelming, because the world is wide open — there's a real freedom in that, but also a lot of uncertainty about which direction to take.

Tom Rowland: Do you ever get FOMO, like fishing is what's happening now, but maybe there's something else out there for you?

Gale Twins: Not anymore. If anything, pursuing fishing was about making sure I didn't miss out — I was young, nimble, and athletic, and I knew if I didn't try it then, I'd probably regret it later. We both knew we could go to grad school, get a four-point-oh, and get a job easily enough. So we asked ourselves, what's actually the challenging path here? Starting a fishing charter business from scratch was the harder, riskier choice, and that's exactly why we wanted to try it instead of the easy one.

Starting Their Own Charter Business

Tom Rowland: So much of your story makes more sense with this background — it's no wonder you're having the success you're having. That's where you are now, right? You have your own boat, you were running charters, and then COVID hit and you're devoting more time to YouTube and social media.

Gale Twins: That's basically what happened. After working at Two Conchs — and we give the owner a ton of credit for teaching us so much about fishing the Florida Keys — we'd picked up a lot of different skills, from running a charter business to actually fishing. We noticed there wasn't really a family-friendly, kid-friendly, slow-things-down-for-you charter boat option out there, so we decided to build that ourselves. We found success pretty quickly — our first summer on our own we were running three trips a week, which is a lot for a brand-new business. At the same time we were also picking up work on drift boats out of Key West on the Gulf Stream, which was honestly one of our favorite jobs.

Gale Twins: We were building a following the whole time, and these days running a successful charter business basically requires social media. We've never really thought of ourselves as just charter boat captains — we think of ourselves as entrepreneurs, always asking where we can branch out from here. In the early days the charter business was the meat and potatoes, the guaranteed income, but we always wanted to be bigger than just the boat. We wanted to show people they could go fishing, not necessarily just on our boat, and that's where the social media and YouTube videos really started to grow.

Gale Twins: When COVID hit, because of our immune issues we had to cancel a lot of our own charters, on top of the ones that got canceled on their own. I don't personally feel afraid of COVID — I'm going to live my life and take my chances — but I don't want to be reckless either. So that gave us almost the perfect excuse to commit one hundred percent to YouTube. We wanted to make videos that are educational, fun, and something anybody can watch — we keep it PG so a mom, a dad, or a kid can all enjoy it and learn something. YouTube gives us such a huge audience compared to chartering, where it's close and personal but limited to the people actually on the boat — on YouTube we can show the world.

Tom Rowland: That's exactly how we started the TV show — our audience was basically one person standing on the front of a skiff. Shaw Grigsby once told me you're worth the size of your audience, and that stuck with me. So I started writing articles and taking photographs, long before the internet existed, and slowly built an audience — if you're worth your audience, wouldn't it be better to have more than one person on the boat? That eventually led to the television show, and to sharing the passion with a lot more people at once. You're definitely onto something with your mindset there.

What's Next: Rods, Brand, and Growth

Tom Rowland: If you blue-sky it from here, what are your goals? Are you singularly focused on YouTube, or are there other things in the works?

Gale Twins: That's a loaded question. Right now the whole idea is to keep growing our business and our brand as big as we can — you're worth as much as your audience, like you said. We're still running charters carefully because of COVID, but we're really focusing on content creation. We think of new opportunities as raindrops in a bucket — chartering is one, YouTube is another, and a bigger raindrop coming in right now is a line of fishing rods. We'd already been selling a small inventory to people who'd come out on our boat, so we reached out to our rod sponsor, Batson Enterprises, which makes RainShadow rod blanks, about building out a proper line. We're planning to build the best all-around offshore rod we can — something for mahi and tuna — because when you walk into a tackle shop there are fifty rods and five different rod walls and it's completely overwhelming, especially for someone just getting started. We want people to be able to walk up and know, this is a great mahi-tuna rod, this is a great snapper rod, without agonizing over line weight and length specs.

Tom Rowland: Getting started, it really can be overwhelming — there are a lot of options for everything in fishing tackle, and sometimes it feels like companies just add another inch or another pound rating because they need something new to sell, and it gets confusing fast.

Gale Twins: A hundred percent. So to answer your question, we're always looking for the next opportunity and the next platform, but no matter what, we know we want to stay in the fishing space. This is what we want to do — we want to keep growing and inspiring people to get outside, get fishing, get kids out, get women out. There aren't a lot of women in this sport, and a lot of them don't picture themselves doing it. We want to show them they can.

Getting More Women and Families on the Water

Tom Rowland: There's been a push to get more women into fly fishing, which feels like a gentler introduction — smaller fish, smaller flies, lighter rods, freshwater. What kind of intimidation factor do you see for women and families around offshore fishing specifically?

Gale Twins: A lot of charter captains and charter boats can just look scary — beat up, not very put together — which is intimidating for a mom deciding whether she wants to bring her kids around. It's no secret there's a lot of drug and alcohol use in the charter fishing world, and that was one of the things our own mom looked for when she was choosing captains to take us out with — someone she could trust with her kids. Outside of that, a lot of women worry about getting seasick, and about the bathroom situation — where do you go if it's rough out and there's no head on the boat? We don't have a head on our boat either, but we've tried to create an environment where using a bucket, or just going over the side, is no big deal. It's actually funny — guys tend to be more uncomfortable going to the bathroom around us, since we're the captains, than women are.

Tom Rowland: I've found it helps to just address it right up front — I'd tell clients I drink a lot of coffee and water and I'll need to go now and then, so it's out in the open instead of becoming awkward later. How do you handle that?

Gale Twins: Before we leave the dock we always say there's no head on board — if you want to go before we leave, now's the time, and if not, no big deal, use a bucket or jump in whenever you need to. We just say it upfront and normalize it. Some people will hold it all day no matter what we say, which we're guilty of too sometimes.

Twin Dynamics: Similar and Different

Tom Rowland: One final question — how are you similar, and how are you different from each other? Let's start with Emily.

Gale Twins: We're similar in that we're both very driven, intense people who thrive under pressure and are a bit high-strung. Where we differ is that one of us is more easygoing day to day and can go with the flow when things get stressful, while the other feels the stress more when things aren't structured. But it flips depending on the subject — when it comes to work and the business specifically, the more easygoing one becomes intensely focused on the schedule and getting things done, while the other one trusts the process more and knows growth happens naturally over time. Each of us would probably call the other one more of a perfectionist.

Tom Rowland: Obviously you two could go back and forth on that all day.

From Competitors to Business Partners

Tom Rowland: When you were competing against each other in pole vaulting there was some friendly rivalry, and probably some real competitiveness too. Now you're running a business together with a common goal. Does that competitive background help you work together, or was it an adjustment?

Gale Twins: Track was always an individual sport, and we had a healthy rivalry between the two of us, but going into business together meant transitioning from competitors to teammates, which was actually new for us — gymnastics, track, pole vaulting, it had always been just each of us individually. Suddenly it was all on both of us together, and that took some adjustment to remember: this is my teammate now, what do we need to do together?

Tom Rowland: How's that been working out?

Gale Twins: The first six months to a year in business together, basically every sibling dynamic that wasn't perfect got amplified tenfold. It's one thing to have friction as siblings and just shrug it off, but when you're working together those issues don't just go away. We've had to work through it and remind ourselves when we're working, we're working, and when we're sisters, we're sisters. We schedule sister date nights — like a Monday night dinner where we agree not to talk about work at all, since we live together, work together, work out together, and share the same social circle. We try, not always successfully, to not talk about work after six o'clock Monday through Friday — if a thought comes up, write it down and bring it up in the morning instead. It's helped us create some boundaries so we can be sisters and coworkers without one completely swallowing the other.

Tom Rowland: Well, it seems to be working for you, and I'm happy for you. We need more people like you in the fishing industry who are focused on bringing new people into the sport, especially kids. I'm a big fan of what you're doing. Hopefully we'll get to go fishing together sometime — that would be really cool.

Gale Twins: That would be awesome.

Tom Rowland: We'll make that happen. Thank you very much, and everybody, if you want to check out some cool social media and some good videos, go follow the Gale Force Twins on all of their platforms. We'll see everybody next week with another awesome guest. Thank you.

Gale Twins: Thank you.