This episode of the Tom Rowland Podcast is a conversation with Carter Smith-Wellman, a charter captain who runs the only inshore fishing operation on Saint Croix in the US Virgin Islands. He guides out of kayaks, targets every flats slam species the Caribbean holds, and catches bonefish on Rapalas and swimbaits rather than shrimp and crab flies. We cover the island's fishing history, its collapse and recovery, and why Saint Croix may be the best-kept secret in saltwater fishing.
Listen now: press play in the player above to watch the full conversation with Carter Smith-Wellman.
Carter Smith-Wellman is a charter captain based in Saint Croix in the US Virgin Islands and the only inshore fishing guide working the island. He runs Silver Kings Kayak Charters, guiding clients out of kayaks to the flats along Saint Croix's South Shore. His family roots on the island go back generations—his mother was born there and his grandmother arrived in the 1950s—and he grew up visiting the Caribbean from Connecticut. After years in the energy and sustainability field, he left a consulting career about sixteen months before this conversation to guide full time.
Saint Croix is the southernmost of the US Virgin Islands, sitting about 40 miles south of Puerto Rico and separated from the other islands by some of the deepest water in the Caribbean Sea. It is 23 miles long, with a South Shore that forms one nearly continuous flat broken into roughly 20 bays. Carter Smith-Wellman calls it under the radar rather than on it—he is the only inshore guide on the island, and there has only ever been one inshore operation there. Baseball legend Ted Williams fished it for bonefish in the 1950s and called it the best he had ever experienced, but the fishery later collapsed and few anglers have thought of Saint Croix as a flats destination since.
Carter Smith-Wellman says the island holds every flats slam species, and his boats landed more than 32 unique species in a single year. Anglers can target bonefish, permit, tarpon, and snook inshore, along with jacks, several snapper species, barracuda, triggerfish, and more. Saint Croix does not have redfish or trout, which do not range that far south. Offshore, a commercial fleet works tuna, mahi, and wahoo, and the same pilchard schools that feed the flats fuel that fishery too. The best inshore fishing runs along the South Shore and out to the east.
On Saint Croix, bonefish feed heavily on pilchards—known locally as sprat—that make up most of the island's bait biomass. Since those bonefish are keyed on baitfish rather than shrimp and crabs, Carter Smith-Wellman targets them with lures and baitfish flies: four-inch Wild Eye Storm Shad swimbaits, small Rapala-style diving baits, bucktail jigs, and EP minnow patterns. He watches for subtle surface disturbances he calls pits—little raindrop-like dimples that signal bonefish feeding on bait below—rather than tailing fish. He rarely ties on a shrimp or crab fly anymore, and says the technique likely works across much of the Caribbean, not just Saint Croix.
Starting in the 1960s, Saint Croix industrialized its South Shore, dredging a 700-acre mangrove lagoon—the island's largest nursery—to build one of the largest oil refineries in the Western Hemisphere and a major aluminum refinery. Deep shipping channels split the island, gill nets arrived in the 1970s and 80s, and by the early 1990s the bonefish had all but disappeared; Bonefish & Tarpon Trust's Dr. Aaron Adams reportedly had to fly to Saint John to catch his first one. A string of changes reversed it: the aluminum plant closed in 2001, a tarpon and bonefish moratorium came in 2004, gill nets were banned in 2006, the oil refinery went bankrupt in 2012, and a major cleanup followed. Carter Smith-Wellman says this has been the best fishing he has seen in more than ten years on the island.
Carter Smith-Wellman runs Silver Kings Kayak Charters. Trips can be booked through his website at silverkingsvi.com, and he posts fishing videos, photos, and reports on Instagram and YouTube under Silver Kings VI. He runs most charters off kayaks because many of the best flats sit behind private property but are reachable from public beaches. Saint Croix is small enough—about a 60-minute drive tip to tip—that visitors can stay almost anywhere, though the Christiansted area on the South Shore puts them closest to the best fishing.
I met Carter over the podcast text line. He would send me messages about the fishing he was doing in Saint Croix, and the more he told me, the more I wanted to hear the whole story on tape. What got me was the bonefish. I have spent my life on the flats in the Florida Keys, and I have a handful of stories about catching a bonefish on something that was not a bonefish bait—a pilchard, a jig—and treating it as a fluke. Carter is doing it on purpose, every day, and he had listened to my episode with Mike Larkin and gone and applied the science to his own water. I wanted to sit down with a guy who respected the fishery enough to figure it out and build a whole approach around it. The way he tells it is better than anything I could summarize here.
On most flats, you throw a shrimp or a crab fly at a tailing bonefish and hope it eats. Carter does something almost nobody talks about—he targets them with hard baits and swimbaits, because his bonefish are keyed on pilchards. He explained the mechanics of how a fish with a downturned mouth actually eats a four-inch baitfish, and it changed how I think about water I have poled past a thousand times. He walks through the whole approach in the episode, and it is worth hearing him lay it out himself.
Ted Williams called Saint Croix the best bonefishing he had ever experienced, and this is a man who set dozens of fly world records. He stayed in Christiansted and fished the same southeast flats Carter runs today. What happened between that era and now is the part of this conversation I keep thinking about—how a fishery that good could nearly vanish and then quietly come back. Carter is a Connecticut guy and a serious Red Sox fan, so he tells the Ted Williams piece with a little extra care. Hear it in his own words.
Carter walked me through a timeline I did not know: a mangrove nursery dredged for a refinery, deep channels that split the island, gill nets, and a bonefish population that all but disappeared by the 1990s. Then the plants closed, the regulations changed, and nature did what it does when you give it room. I have watched the same thing happen with redfish in Florida, so this one hit home. The full arc—the collapse and the recovery—is one of the better fishery stories I have put on tape, and it lands harder on the audio.
Carter kept describing little surface disturbances he calls pits—faint raindrop dimples with no tail, no wake, nothing you would notice unless you knew. I have seen exactly that on my own flats and written it off as bait doing bait things. He is convinced those pits are bonefish, and he backs it up by throwing a lure in and hooking them. Once he described what to look for, my head started spinning about places back home. He explains the tell better on the audio than I can in print.
Carter runs almost all of his charters off kayaks, and it is not a gimmick. A lot of the best flats sit behind private land, but every beach on Saint Croix is public access, so a kayak unlocks water you simply cannot reach from the road. He also has a hidden spot—a spoil island built from dredged coral and sand—where he caught a 15-pound permit on one side and a bonefish on the other in the same afternoon. He names it in the episode, and you will want to hear that stretch.
Listen to the full conversation with Carter Smith-Wellman: press play in the player above, or find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
A day after sitting down with Carter, the thing I keep coming back to is how much fishing is still hiding in plain sight. Here is an island that a Hall of Famer once called the best bonefishing in the world, and most of us have never once thought to go. One guy, guiding out of a kayak, is quietly rebuilding the whole idea of what that place is.
The bonefish-on-a-Rapala piece is what will get people's attention, and it should. What stuck with me more was the reminder that a fishery can be run into the ground and still come back when people decide to let it. Carter changed his mind about how pessimistic to be, and after this conversation, I did too.
I told him I am coming down, and I meant it. Press play in the player above, or grab the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
Silver Kings Kayak Charters · silverkingsvi.com · Ted Williams · Dr. Aaron Adams · Bonefish & Tarpon Trust · Mike Larkin · Rapala · Wild Eye Storm Shad · EP minnow · Hobie kayaks · Buck Island · Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge · Christiansted · Frederiksted · Shell Island · Los Roques, Venezuela · Saint Thomas · Saint John · Puerto Rico
Carter Smith-Wellman is a charter captain in Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands, and the only inshore fishing guide on the island. He owns and operates Silver Kings Kayak Charters, guiding clients from kayaks to the flats of the island's South Shore for bonefish, permit, tarpon, snook, and more than 30 other species. Raised visiting Saint Croix from Connecticut, where his family has roots dating to the 1950s, he left a career in energy and sustainability consulting to fish full time. He is known for an unconventional, baitfish-driven approach to bonefish, and for his work documenting and promoting Saint Croix's recovering inshore fishery.
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