Capt. Jimmy Armel: Army Ranger to Savannah Fishing Guide

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 606 with Capt. Jimmy Armel.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: This is Captain Jimmy Armel, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

A Cold Snap in Savannah

Tom Rowland: Alright, Jimmy, what's up, man?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Another day in paradise. We're trying to stay warm up here in Savannah right now, though — it got down into the twenties yesterday. This is our second big cold front of the year. Hopefully it's the last one. It's obviously going to mess with our inshore fishing, but offshore we just kind of switch gears and change what we go after.

Tom Rowland: On the inshore side — the redfish and the other things you're targeting — do you ever get fish kills when it gets really cold? We do in the Keys sometimes.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: The last one here happened two years before I even started fishing recreationally, back when I was still in Ranger Battalion — something like '08 or '09. I think real fish kills are rare in this area. We get a couple of cold days, but I think the moving tides help. Even in the creeks we have some really deep holes, twenty or thirty-plus feet — there's one spot where three creeks come together that's an eighty- or ninety-foot hole. So there are places for those fish to go hide out. As long as the tide keeps moving and the wind swings around and pushes a big tide in, it pushes some of that warmer water with it, and I think that's what saves us from fish kills.

Tom Rowland: We've had some significant fish kills from cold weather in the Florida Keys, and I'm sure a redfish handles cold water a lot better than a permit or a bonefish does. The bonefish got hit hard a while back. We just had this same cold front come through the Keys, and I was thinking, man, I hope that doesn't happen again — though it doesn't look like it'll get quite that cold this time. For folks in South Carolina and Georgia, you see them bundled up in snowsuits, and that's what happens in the Keys too — it drops to 40, even 50 degrees, and everybody's got their down jackets on.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: My Starbright family was down in the Keys the last couple of weeks, and there were a couple of days there where we had the heat turned on in the pool.

Tom Rowland: It really does feel colder down there. I was actually glad to hear that, because my boys are both up in Montana now. They grew up in the Keys and in Tennessee, and it got down into the twenties when they were home for Christmas — my son told me it felt colder there than it does in Bozeman. I've always wondered if that's just because I'm not used to cold weather, but it really does feel colder somewhere humid, like South Carolina, Florida, or Tennessee. If it's 20 degrees there, it's brutal. If it's 20 out west, guys are skiing in shorts — it just doesn't feel as cold without the humidity.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I grew up in Northern Virginia — not the D.C. part, more the rural Shenandoah Valley, in the Appalachians. It gets plenty cold there too. The other day, while I was down in the Keys, it got down to six degrees back home.

Tom Rowland: That's super cold. Did you grow up smallmouth bass fishing? I know the Shenandoah Valley is fantastic for that.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Believe it or not, I was considered the city boy of the family. Everybody else was hardcore into hunting and fishing, mostly for the eating side of it. It was nightcrawlers and going after catfish, which my grandfather refused to eat, though I liked catching them just because they were fun. We came from a humble background, so fishing was fun, but it also had to pull double duty — you'd get up after a rain, gather nightcrawlers into a bucket, then spend the whole day at the lake until that bucket was full.

From a Painter's Kid in Virginia to Ranger Battalion

Tom Rowland: So many people who end up making a living fishing have a story from their youth about being passionate about it, and then refining it later. What's your story? How did you end up doing this for a living?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Well — like your shirt there, I believe Matt Best started Black Rifle, along with Evan Hafer. I don't know him personally, but I've read about him. I think he did one enlistment and packed in four deployments, because Rangers deploy a lot. Shout out to that dude, because I love seeing gunfighters get out and just keep killing it — you usually only hear the more negative stories about what guys go through.

Which gets to your actual question. I was rough around the edges as a kid — not a bad person, never a thief, but I had a bit of a wild side. One night in 2005 we were out partying, doing it right. I come from a town where the whole county had about 40,000 people when I graduated high school — not tiny, but small enough that you know everybody. That night, somebody turned on the news, and at the time it was just Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. We'd just lost a good friend of mine, David Owens, who I'd wrestled with — he was a Marine, serving his country, and he was going to get out and become a state trooper. Another buddy, Jeremy Horsley, got hurt in the Army, and then Charlie Haggerty got hurt too, also Army. We were just kids — I was a hot 22-year-old, felt invincible — and we all started in on this anti-war debate. I started talking, and then I just had this eureka moment. I said — and it probably had something to do with the party — none of us actually had a clue. I didn't trust the media. So I didn't go to sleep that night. I got a ride from a sober buddy and went straight to the recruiting station the next morning.

I'd actually painted that recruiting station with my dad, so they knew me. I walked in wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, sunglasses, and a straw hat — no shirt, no shoes, true story. They said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "I want to go to Iraq." They said, "No way — you?" I said, "Yeah, man, I want to go to Iraq." They asked what I wanted to do, and I said, "Fight." About four weeks later I was off to basic training.

I did a fifteen-month deployment to Iraq during the Sadr City uprising, which was absolutely awesome, and then I did five deployments with 1st Ranger Battalion. On my very first Ranger mission, we lost two great guys — Jason Dahlke and Eric Haerter. You can actually watch that story on the History Channel. Long story longer, I ended up getting medically discharged. I did a lot of the gunfighting and door-kicking work, the surveillance and counter-surveillance side of it, grew the beard out, all of it. Then a brain scan turned up a spot on my brain and they deadlined me medically. It took over a year to actually get out, and I had a difficult command environment at the time — not his fault, I own my own stuff — but I went down a serious downward spiral. I'd just gone through a divorce, and I'd just failed a selection course and gotten a "do not return." If it hadn't been for a guy named Brian Jensen, I don't know that I'd have made it through that. I ended up physically dependent on alcohol. I got out and wasn't taking care of myself at all — the house I'm in now, you could barely see the floor for the trash in it, there was even a spot where the dog had gone to the bathroom inside.

Rock Bottom and Getting Sober

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I was in a really bad place. All I was doing was drinking — wasn't paying bills, wasn't doing anything. I had a 510 credit score and didn't even know it because I didn't care. One night I went and bought a high-end bottle of Midleton whiskey — I still have that bottle. I came home, unlocked the door, and started drinking, and I was about to make the ultimate selfish decision. I got what I thought was the courage, and I was crying — kind of like I am right now, I'm an emotional dude. I went to do it, and my dog, Skip — he's sitting right there staring at me, never takes his eyes off me — came over and put his paw on me, and I just broke down. I thought, what am I doing? About four or five weeks later, I quit drinking, cold turkey, without any medical supervision. Anybody listening who's physically dependent — do not do that. It's incredibly dangerous, it almost killed me. You lose control of bodily functions. It's the worst pain I've ever felt in my life.

Tom Rowland: Just from alcohol — no other drugs involved?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: No, no other drugs. There are really only two things where the withdrawal itself can kill you — alcohol and heroin or other opioids. If people can drink and handle it, I'm all for it, and almost every one of my friends has a beer now and then. But for somebody like me, it's really bad, especially once you can't control it. I couldn't hold down water for forty-six hours. My girlfriend at the time — still a good friend of mine — told me if I hit forty-eight hours, she was taking me to the hospital. We hit forty-six and I could finally hold down water. I got through that, but I knew the problem wasn't solved — there was still a big mountain in front of me. The next step was figuring out how I wanted to stay alive. I needed a job. I applied to 53 jobs and got one callback, to work a conveyor belt at Verizon for $14 an hour. That wasn't going to be good for my mental health.

Becoming a Charter Captain from Nothing

Capt. Jimmy Armel: So I started hitting up every boat dealer I knew, going in and looking at boats. I told myself, I need to be a charter captain — I need to fish every day, but I'm broke, and the only way to fish every day while you're broke is to be a charter captain. My mom, who's my best friend in the world — I'm a big mama's boy — co-signed for me, even though she's up in Virginia and I'm down here, which made it a struggle. Then Will, from Custom Marine in Statesboro, Georgia, reached out to me. I'd gone down there to look at boats and couldn't afford anything — I mean, I was desperate, and I don't like asking for help, that hillbilly thing where you just don't. But Will emailed me, being a good salesman, and said, hey, I saw you stopped in and left your information but never got back to us — did we drop the ball? I was still shaky from withdrawal at that point. I wrote back standing in my driveway and just laid it all out — I can't afford anything, I have terrible credit, don't waste my time and I won't waste yours.

He asked if he could call me, and when he did, he asked how I was even planning to book charters with a Virginia area code. I told him I'd already gotten a local phone number — I'd done everything out of order. He asked how I was going to market myself when I wasn't even from there, since charter fishing can be such a localized business. I told him: whatever it takes. I wasn't trying to sell him on anything, I was just telling him straight — I'm at a point where I'm going to die if I don't get on the water. So he had me come down, and there was a Skeeter rep there too, and the whole group said they were going to do everything they could to get me in a boat. Will worked his butt off to get me financed.

My third offshore charter ever, I brought back 160 pounds of sheepshead on a six-hour trip. I didn't even realize how good that was — I'd only ever fished saltwater here, couldn't afford charters in South Carolina, and didn't know anything, just what I'd picked up working the deck a little and running scared. I was sleeping two hours a night — depression, PTSD, alcohol, all of it. I found some of my old marketing materials cleaning out the house recently — my stepmom made me T-shirts, and I had a little brochure. I was running six-hour charters for $500 in a 22-foot boat, sitting in bars every night — while going through recovery, mind you, which I still hang out in bars now and I'm fine, you just always have to keep an eye on it — handing out business cards, taking people out for $100 for two hours right next to the dock, anything I could get.

After that third charter with the sheepshead, Will had me come back down because Blair Wiggins was going to be there. I'd watched Blair's show while I was deployed in Afghanistan, so I thought that was pretty cool. When I got there, Blair had already heard about me — he asked, "You're the sheepshead guy?" pulled up a picture, and said, "Is this you?" I was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, standing there — I'm not much of a fan of clothes, you'll notice a pattern. He said, "I'm going to put you on my show." That led to StarBright coming on board too.

A Relapse, and Getting Sober for Good

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Around that same time I had a relapse with alcohol — about a year of it, never ran a charter intoxicated, never got back to being physically dependent, but I really didn't grasp how big an issue it still was. I'd get off a charter and go straight to the bar, drinking IPAs and chilled tequila. The bartenders were great about it, never pushy, but once they realized there might be a problem, they'd still ask if I wanted another round, and in my head I'd think, no, I'm good — but I'd say yes anyway. I'd do that five or six more times, so that's twelve drinks, then go home, sleep, and go straight back to charters. Eventually I thought, this isn't cool, and I quit again. That time, the clarity was something I honestly can't fully explain, and things really took off after that.

I realized we needed to do something for gunfighters. I started taking out guys I knew, even if they weren't going through anything specific — dudes would call me just to talk because I'm open about my own stuff. It really took off when a local station did a charter feature on me, and I told them I wanted to talk about PTSD on camera. I woke up the next morning to almost 300 Facebook notifications. People were trying to give me money, asking if I had a nonprofit, and I didn't even know why I'd need one — that's just how naive I was about it. A gentleman on the phone asked if I knew anybody smarter than me about business, and thank God I did — Mike Weathers, the same guy who first taught me how to throw a popping cork. He sat down with me and helped square everything away, and that's when I really hit another gear — building the business, getting deeper with StarBright, and it felt like I was being carried by something bigger than me.

I walked back into Will's office one day and told him I needed to upgrade boats — not to a 25- or 26-footer, but thirty to thirty-five feet. He said, "Jimmy, man, your credit can't be that good yet," but he still helped me. I went down to the Miami boat show, looked at a few different builders, and ended up going with Sportsman. I started with an 18-foot Carolina Skiff, then a 22-foot Skeeter Bay Boat, and now I'm in a 31-foot Sportsman I've had for a year and a half — I'm a kid in a candy shop. I was making 50-mile runs by myself in that 22-foot Skeeter on a regular basis, just fishing and filming for YouTube. Now I've got a 30-foot boat with two engines — I feel like I can do anything.

Building the Nonprofit — Knot Lucky

Capt. Jimmy Armel: With the nonprofit, I'm taking guys out even when they're not necessarily going through something specific — I'll call up a buddy still in Ranger Battalion and ask him to send me two guys who'd appreciate a day on the water, maybe after a hard stretch at work or something going on at home. We keep it very small and fund it ourselves — myself, StarBright, and two other individuals who stay anonymous — because I've learned that bringing more people in can get things messed up.

One day a guy came out with me who'd been blown up twice in one night — hit with a fragmentation grenade, knocked unconscious. When he came to, they'd cut his pants up the seams to check for shrapnel, and the medic told him he was fine, just "bop" — basically a concussion, almost like being drunk. He tucked his pant legs back in and went right back into the compound to keep fighting, then took the overpressure from another grenade on top of it. Long story short, he eventually got shipped home, dealing with stuttering and other issues, and then a couple of months later he had a stroke in the middle of the night. His wife's a nurse — she told him he needed to go to the hospital, and when he got there, they almost didn't want to run a stroke test on him because he was only 27 at the time. It turned out to be a brain bleed that was going to kill him — they had to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure and put a plate in. He came out of it unable to talk, unable to do math, unable to solve basic problems, though he could still walk.

Think about that — this is a guy, a gunfighter, and I mean that as the highest compliment. There's nothing on land more lethal than a gunfighter — it's just a fact of life. You're at the absolute pinnacle, an Army Ranger slugging it out with the enemy, the ultimate competition, and then in a flash you can't talk, can't solve a common problem, can't do math, don't remember where you parked your car. You go from running programs overseas that people make movies and write books about, doing that in your twenties, to nothing. Your purpose is gone. You go from being the best of the best to the bottom of the barrel, and people just don't understand — because they can't.

Helping Veterans Find Purpose

Tom Rowland: There are so many people who have real empathy for guys who've been through what you just described. They want to do something, but they don't know what to say or how to help. What would your advice be to someone like me, who has tremendous respect for what you all do, but doesn't know how to actually help?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: That's the million-dollar question. I've been through it myself, but my buddy Hunter's experience is different from mine — he's getting ready to start running charters himself. It's almost like anything else — you're not going to be able to help until the person actually wants help. As simple as that sounds, you're also dealing with an extremely aggressive personality, someone who's still fight-or-flight all the time even when they're down. If they're not ready, they're not ready. I can really only speak to my own experience with gunfighters specifically — I have huge respect for all veterans regardless of their job, but I can't fully relate to what someone else went through or what trauma means to them. As far as helping gunfighters, you give them tools, and you have to remember the comparison I always come back to: the Apex Predator, the T-Rex from Jurassic Park — it doesn't want to be fed, it wants to hunt. We're no different. Everybody talks about peace and tranquility with fishing, and I do feel close to God out there, I feel real peace sometimes — but that's not really what it's about for me. It's about developing a pattern of life the way we did in the military, exploiting a weakness in that pattern, and executing the capture. That's why I do it. So to help, you have to remember that's often what you're dealing with — what looks peaceful to us looks different through other people's eyes.

Tom Rowland: But it's also giving you a new purpose. In the military everything is organized, you're extremely focused, you have a mission. When you get out of that — even without an injury — a lot of guys have a hard time just drifting, not knowing what to do, feeling like there's no purpose in just going and getting a regular job. How do you suggest people find their purpose once they're out of the military?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: That's actually an easier question than the "how to help" one. There are programs within the service meant to help guys transition that, in my opinion, are failing — I know new guys who've gone through them and still struggled. My answer is simple: do what makes you happy. That sounds so simple, but it's not going to be easy. People hear me say that and think fishing just made me happy and I went out and did it and all this stuff happened — that's not the case, as you just heard. There were loan rejections, there was a night I collapsed in the house because I thought it was over, there was genuinely believing I was going to die if I didn't get a boat. So do what makes you happy, but understand you may have to go through a grind to get there. If you put the same intensity and work ethic into it that we put into slinging lead across the pond, you're going to succeed.

Greg at StarBright is like a brother to me, and one thing he's helped me work through is what winning and success actually mean. There was a stretch where I was going way too hard — not sleeping, never stopping, a whiteboard completely covered — and people would ask, Jimmy, what do you actually want? I'd say, I just want to win, and they'd ask, at what? And I didn't know. Everybody's version of winning is different. Mine, I've learned, is just being happy and doing what I love — and when I do that, all these other good things tend to follow. Right now I'm working on creating jobs for veterans. We've already helped create one new charter captain — a guy who couldn't talk two years ago is about to be running his own brand-new Sportsman here in a month or so. That's winning.

Living on Stolen Time

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I'll be honest, I still go through dark stuff. I wake up around 4:30 most mornings, and for some reason I struggle sleeping in a bed — I sleep on the couch, though my goal by the end of next week is to actually start sleeping in my own bed again. I was out there at six in the morning recently just sitting there hugging my dog, crying, and I don't fully know why — I have some idea where my head goes, but it's strange, because things are actually good right now. That's something I think people need to understand about guys going through this: the darkness never fully goes away, it's just what you do with it. I look at it as a kind of blessing — it gave us a different perspective. I call where I live now an oasis. I know things feel rough in the political and social climate right now, and I don't want to sound like the grumpy old veteran, but honestly, it's not that bad. There are things that need work, don't get me wrong, but people act like the world's ending while we're sitting here talking on a computer, with a beautiful redfish mount on the wall behind you. I'm a guy who, on paper, probably shouldn't be doing what I'm doing — and that's a win. It comes back to finding that daily win. For some guys, the daily win is simply not drinking.

Tom Rowland: How much of your happiness comes from overwhelming gratitude for what you have, versus a real shift in mindset away from thinking things are bad? You've lived on both sides of that.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I try to be positive, man, and I don't hide that I deal with depression — I put it out there on social media. I tried some of the government-prescribed medications for it and they didn't work well for me, so I deal with it on my own. One thing that keeps me grounded is Hunter, the guy I told you about with the stroke — the miracle man. He looks at me sometimes and just grounds me, saying, what do you have to be mad about? We're living on stolen time. We're not supposed to even be here. A lot of guys like us didn't think we'd make it to 30, and then you make it to 30 and it really puts things in perspective. Everybody's got their own stories, between close calls with IEDs, grenades, and worse. In Sadr City, I had a sniper take two shots at me — the first missed by about 18 inches, which doesn't sound like much, but it is. The second shot, when we started clearing afterward, I was up on a rooftop and it landed about 10 inches from my face — close enough that when it hit the wall, pieces of the round and the mud hit me in the face. Every single gunfighter has looked death in the face like that, a lot, and that can bring on darkness. But it's also almost like building a tolerance for the adrenaline and serotonin we all need. If you really look at it, you're living on stolen time, so you might as well live it — and we get to fish almost every day. I fish over two hundred days a year and put a thousand-plus hours on my motors annually.

Splitting Time Between Charters and Veteran Trips

Tom Rowland: So is what you've built here mostly charters, or mostly the nonprofit taking veterans fishing? How do you split those two hundred days?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: This year I did something a little different — I ran all my charters through spring and summer, and then November came around. I've got great clients, generally, but there were a few trips in a short stretch where I just wasn't feeling it. I can be impulsive, so I turned to Hunter after our last trip and asked if he was good on money through the winter. He said yeah. I asked if he needed tips, he said no, and I said, good, because we're shutting it down — and I started bringing out every veteran I could, about twice a week, until we pulled the boat out of the water in mid-January to redo the bottom paint and handle some warranty work. We'll start running charters again in March. Going forward, I want to run a veteran trip once a week and charters the rest of the time while things are slower, and then once the busy season really kicks in, bang out as many charters as I can, since we fund everything ourselves — then shut it back down again in November for more veteran trips.

Tom Rowland: If you could, would you just take veterans out all the time?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Oh my gosh, yes.

Tom Rowland: So why don't you? This is exactly the kind of thing people want to help with — why the hesitation about letting more people in, even anonymously?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I want to be honest — if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a pretty straight shooter, and I have real trust issues personally. I do everything I can to keep my own shortcomings from getting in the way of the business, and when I say the business, that includes the nonprofit. From day one I've said this thing will not be corruptible and will not be a way for anybody to make money. I'll never take a penny from it myself — there's been no money taken out of the nonprofit in over twelve months. Anything that's gone in has stayed in, and I've paid for everything else out of my own pocket, which I'm fine with. Not taking anything out also means I wouldn't be able to fund the for-profit side as well if I did more of it. My long-term goal is to create ten jobs — ten real careers, not necessarily all charter captains. I'm helping set up another business, I've got to stay a little vague about it, that could employ gunfighters part-time for a substantial income.

I'm spread pretty thin, and I know that can sound like an excuse, but if I stopped running charters and building the for-profit side, it would slow down job creation. The nonprofit right now is mostly just about getting gunfighters on the water — every once in a while we run into someone who needs more individual attention, and that's what we have funds set aside for, usually just a phone call away. I do have a donation site, and when we first set it up, we ran into people asking for a discount on a charter because they'd donated $50, and I just said no, that's not how this works. I've refunded people's money before when I could tell there was an ulterior motive. I look at money as a tool — I've been at rock bottom, scraping for money, and while I'm nowhere near wealthy, I'm nowhere near rock bottom now either. I just don't value money the way other people do; it's a tool to do good and make problems go away.

Tom Rowland: You might be getting a lot of your own happiness from the giving itself — your time, your money, your resources. If everything were paid for by someone else, it wouldn't be your sacrifice anymore, and that sacrifice might be part of what makes it so rewarding to you. Whatever it is, keep doing it, because it's clearly working.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: It's something else, Tom. I'm not opposed to help, though — if somebody like yourself, even just from this conversation, is what I'd call a true believer, and I know that sounds dramatic, I am willing to listen. One of my best friends has a brother who had a rough deployment as a medic; my friend Andy Lipsky, who owns a couple of daycares, has been a huge help on a personal level and has kind of been putting the same idea in my ear as you — that if it comes down to my time, the nonprofit could pay me some percentage, maybe tied to dockage, since it's really a time issue. Honestly, I'm open to that.

Tom Rowland: If it's genuinely benefiting your life and you're getting real energy from giving, that's great — a lot of people find that helping someone else at your own darkest moment makes you feel better too. But there's also a responsibility to make this sustainable, so you can help more people than you ever imagined, rather than it becoming such a financial drain that you can only run one trip a month. Is that really serving the mission? Maybe it is — I don't know.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I see exactly what you're saying, and I wholeheartedly agree — plans shift, you adapt on the battlefield, so to speak. My game plan is to run everything like a special operations unit: small and efficient. I don't like mass-blasting things and having limited impact. When we got serious about the nonprofit a year or so ago, I actually semi-retired from chartering to focus on it almost full time, and we've adjusted quite a bit since. My idea has been to build the for-profit side into a select group — the door isn't closed, if somebody genuine comes along without an ulterior motive, we're a growing family and we're open to that — but to make the for-profit business profitable enough that either a gunfighter would want to take it over, or, if that doesn't happen, a real businessman could buy it. In that sale, I'd build in a clause requiring the nonprofit to keep going, so that eventually, if it grows enough, it can pay a veteran a real salary to run it. I'm all for growth, but I want to do it without the corruption where things quietly turn into just taking people fishing for photo ops. I won't take money from it myself, but long-term I do want it set up so a person or two can make an honest living running it — that would be their job, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's how nonprofits stay sustainable — plenty of them do have corruption in them, but you can run yours however you choose, as long as you stay focused on making sure it doesn't happen.

Catching a Great White Shark

Tom Rowland: I also want to talk about great white sharks — I'm fascinated by all kinds of sharks, but I've never actually seen a great white myself. There are some around the Keys, and it seems like sightings are becoming more frequent, though I think that's partly just because more people have a phone in their pocket whenever one shows up, and partly the great tracking work groups like OCEARCH have done showing these sharks moving right through our waters and yours. But you've actually caught one.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Yeah, we lucked out. I was out with the Palmetto State Armory crew — I love those guys — and this is actually the second one we've caught, the first time with Hunter along, which is honestly how Hunter first got connected with all this. We were just out there catching fish and said, hey, let's see if we can find a thresher — I'd seen one before, or at least I swear I did. My buddy Andy says it wasn't a thresher, so now if I get the chance in cooler water, I'm going to throw a bait out just to prove it to him before I die. Anyway, we were overrun with American red snapper that day, so we said, let's see if we can catch something a little bigger than a snapper. In the back of my head I'm thinking, come on, thresher. We threw a bonito out on a leader with a sinker to get it to the bottom, and when it first took off, then dropped the bait, then came back and did it again, I thought, that's weird — whatever this is, it isn't scared. In the video you can actually see it come right up to the bow, and that's when I realized it hadn't dropped the bait at all, it had swum right back to us. Once we realized it was a great white, we put the heat to it to get it boat-side quickly, since they're protected — we didn't get the hook all the way out because I didn't want to overhandle it, I don't fish for the hook, that's bad for the animal.

It was wild, man — we watched it come all the way up to the surface, and that feeling was unbelievable. When it circled back around and I actually got to touch it and look into its eye, it was like, what has this shark been through? It's an apex predator, just like us. That shark eats its siblings in the womb, then gets thrown into the world completely on its own to survive — swimming, attacking, fighting, doing everything it can to become a big, strong shark. And if it makes it, it comes out scarred up from battle, but it made it on its own, and it's the king of the ocean — nothing messes with it. There's just a huge connection there. It's funny, because I'm actually scared to death of the open water myself — I don't dive, I don't get in offshore, I'm no Navy SEAL. But I genuinely wanted to get in the water with that animal. It's hard to even describe — it's just magic.

Tom Rowland: The one I saw footage of didn't look like the biggest great white — more of a medium-sized one.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: That one was a little guy, honestly — probably around eight feet, closer to five hundred pounds.

Tom Rowland: An eight-footer — and they're thick for their length compared to a lot of other sharks. How does that fight compare to something similar-sized, like a bull shark?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Once you put heat to a great white, it just doesn't stop — it keeps going. I've hooked one full-size adult that was about fifteen feet, which Google says works out to over a 2,000-pound fish. There's actually a clip on YouTube of it jumping clear out of the water. I was by myself, four-foot seas, backing down on it — you know how it is watching a video afterward, you can tell it wasn't exactly a calm ocean that day. I was just out there alone catching bull redfish, minding my own business on a cold, snotty, rainy day, and threw a big bait out the back. Next thing I know I see a fin circling a piece of cardboard in the water, and when I saw that much dorsal fin without any tail showing, I knew it was a big shark — the biggest I'd caught before that was about a 13-foot tiger shark. I fought that fish for two hours and twenty-four minutes, and I'm convinced she was actually feeding while I had her hooked.

The whole fight, fully locked down on an unlimited-class rod and a Penn International 50-wide, she only moved us about 860 feet total over two and a half hours — she'd make a run, and one time she came completely out of the water, Shark Week style, maybe two hundred yards off on the GoPro. To a fisherman looking at the footage, you know exactly how big that splash means the animal is; to somebody else it might just look like a big fish. Then all of a sudden there'd be these head shakes — and remember, throw in a little fisherman exaggeration, but say she was around twelve feet, the widest animal I've ever seen in my life — the rod would go fully bent over on those head shakes, hard enough that it actually cracked the gunnel on my boat, a boat from 2020, not some old hull. I've got it on film, the gunnel visibly lifting. That's how powerful they are — the rod bends all the way over and then slams back so violently that if something breaks while you're fighting it, it's going to hurt you.

Tom Rowland: That's exactly how it is with the big hammerheads too — the head shake makes the rod go completely slack and then snap taut hard enough to pull you right out of the boat if you're not careful.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Exactly that, just on steroids. And the reason I think she was feeding is that the whole time, birds were working the surface nearby — maybe picking up whatever she was stirring up or even coughing up down there.

Tom Rowland: That happens a lot — action brings more action. Once you bring fish up and they start coughing up bait, other fish move in on it, almost like a chum bag. The best footage I've seen of a great white around that size actually came from a legendary Keys captain, Paul Ross Sr. — his son, also Paul Ross, is a great captain too — aboard his boat, the Relentless. If you scroll back through his Instagram, there's a clip of them bringing in a kingfish, and this massive, incredibly wide great white comes right up under the boat and takes a swipe at the kingfish while they're basically working it like a topwater lure, right at boatside in gin-clear water. It's become more common in the Keys, and I know it's happening in your area too — I follow another account a little north of you that catches quite a few of them.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: We're not out there trying to specifically target them — honestly I wouldn't even know how, they're tricky animals. But you're more than welcome to come fish with us, brother. Me and Hunter would love to have you, and we'll bring a Ranger buddy or two along too.

Tom Rowland: That sounds fun. I've never done any offshore fishing in your area — I've done a little inshore redfish work, a redfish tournament in Georgia, and fished the marsh grass in South Carolina, which was great, but never offshore up there.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Oddly enough, the same winter conditions that bring those big sharks through are also the best time on the reef for the big bull redfish.

Tom Rowland: I'd like to try that. Where exactly are you — Tybee Island?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I actually live on Wilmington Island, near Savannah. I used to run out of Tybee, and now I'm on the next island in — about two bridges and a couple of miles away. I'm two miles from my boat ramp, and if you're staying in Savannah or on Tybee, they're only about twenty minutes apart, so we're right in the middle. If you come up, we'd love to take you out on the light tackle for those bull reds — that's a lot of fun.

The Next Two Years — Growth, Jobs, and a Road Trip

Tom Rowland: Where do you see your program in the next couple of years? Blue-sky it for me — do you hit that ten-jobs goal by then, or is it moving slower than that?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I'd like to think so, but the jobs piece is hard. We're also working other angles — the folks at Custom Marine are looking for a lead mechanic for a brand-new, climate-controlled shop they're building, and Will actually told them, find me a Jimmy. So we're working on that too. Realistically, my biggest focus over the next two years is making sure Hunter gets fully established and that it goes smoothly — that's my number one responsibility right now. Once we've proven that model works, hopefully we can bring on another mate and keep growing from there.

For the nonprofit specifically, in two years I want it organized enough to have a set number of trips locked in — I don't have an exact number yet. I'm also hoping, and I didn't want to talk about it until I knew more, to put together about a ten-day road trip next fall or winter with veterans, filmed for the YouTube channel. I want to hit places like Louisiana, work down through the Gulf side of Florida, and end up in the Keys — I'm actually headed to the Outer Banks soon to tuna fish and bringing a guy or two along for that. I tried to put together a Bimini trip too. I want to start bringing gunfighters along for cool experiences like that — I want to watch them get to do cool stuff, that's really the whole idea.

I've got another buddy — the guy who actually got shot in the radio in the real events behind Black Hawk Down, one of my best friends — who's getting his captain's license to help out on Lake Sinclair in Georgia. He's not really a fishing guy himself, he's got a pontoon boat and a giant grill on it, so we're pairing him with a local veteran to handle the fishing side, and he can take out whole families, do beach days, drop a bait to the bottom, whatever fits. So we're looking to expand that way too. Beyond that, in two years I just want to keep evolving — if I stay on the right path and keep doing the right thing, I think it grows organically. I'll be a salesman for a second here, because we all have to be at the end of the day: I'll be shocked — no guarantees in life, but shocked — if you come up and fish with us and don't want to be as big a part of it as you can manage, even if that's just three weekends a year given how chaotic your schedule is. You'll be off doing your job, doing what you love, and in the back of your mind you'll be wondering what those lucky American Fishing Charters boys are up to. That's just what happens — people get close to this, and it's addictive, being around that positivity, watching guys who've each fought their own battle off the battlefield. What kind of guy doesn't want to be around a group of dudes who've done four or five deployments — some of my buddies have done eighteen-plus? That's one of the reasons I do this. I get to hang out with these incredible guys, and it's amazing.

How to Support Knot Lucky

Tom Rowland: I'd love to come do it. How can people support what you're doing?

Capt. Jimmy Armel: You can go to KnotLucky.org — that's spelled K-N-O-T Lucky, like a nautical knot, and even if you accidentally type KnotLucky.com, it'll still get you there. A big help too is just hitting subscribe on the YouTube channel, American Fishing Charters — we're on all the social platforms, even TikTok, though my daughter told me I'm not allowed to be over there.

Tom Rowland: My daughter told me the same thing.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: If people want to support financially, it's KnotLucky.org, and again, a hundred percent of that money goes straight to the nonprofit — I don't take anything out of it.

Tom Rowland: Awesome, man. I loved getting to know you and catching up on everything you're doing — you're doing great work, and you should absolutely keep going.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: I appreciate you dealing with my brain bouncing all over the place — blame the concussions, though honestly I was always a little scatterbrained before that too.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man. Good job — I'm glad to see you on the right track and living such a positive life. You're doing great work, for yourself and for other people. That's going to do it for today. If you want to follow Jimmy, check out the website and his social media, see all the good work he's doing with veterans, and go book a charter.

Capt. Jimmy Armel: Come book Hunter — he's going to be running that brand-new 24-foot boat, and his goal is 200 charters in his first year, so make sure you ask for him. He's a better fisherman than I am anyway.

Tom Rowland: Alright, well, that's a great one for this week. We'll see you guys next week — we're out.