Jeff Malone: Tarpon Fishing the Florida Keys and Living 300 Days on the Water

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 573, with guest Jeff Malone.

Introduction

Jeff Malone: Good afternoon. This is Captain Jeff Malone on Tom Rowland's podcast.

Tom Rowland: Jeff Malone, how are you doing, buddy?

Jeff Malone: Doing great, Tom. How about yourself?

Tom Rowland: I'm doing great. What do you got going on today? Rainy day?

Jeff Malone: It's a super rainy day down here, so I'm just doing a few honey-dos around the house. Just kind of enjoying a day on dry land.

Tom Rowland: And that's not very frequent for you?

Jeff Malone: No, sir. It's very, very uncommon for me to be on the hard ground, for sure.

300 Days a Year: The Physical Grind of Guiding

Tom Rowland: How many days a year do you think you're guiding?

Jeff Malone: Good golly. If I had to guess, Tom, I'd say I'm probably pretty quickly approaching the three-hundred mark, something around there.

Tom Rowland: So three hundred days, but you also do multiple trips a day. So in three hundred days, how many trips would that be?

Jeff Malone: Good golly, I'd have to guess it's north of there a little bit. I haven't sat down to do the math recently, but I figure if I'm doing that many days, that's enough. It's a lot.

Tom Rowland: It's a lot. You are definitely one of the hardest working guides I've ever seen, and I've got a tremendous amount of respect for you because you just go, man. You're on this grind, and I've been watching it for years and years, and you show no signs of slowing down.

Jeff Malone: I don't know. I'll be honest, as the years go on, I'm starting to really become aware that I'm not a young man anymore. I'm getting older, and I'm starting to feel some of the aches and pains of it, particularly with the daily net throw, and that's really starting to take its toll. For many years I just assumed that was never going to be the case, but unfortunately I'm not Superman. I'm not invincible. I'm just a mortal fishing guide. So, unfortunately, the years are starting to take their toll.

Tom Rowland: What have you had to do to allow that kind of activity in your life? A lot of people think being a fishing guide is going to be super easy, but the way Florida Keys fishing guides do it — whether you're a skiff guide, a center console guide, or an offshore guide — it's incredibly physical. That's what a lot of people don't realize about the profession. I've always compared it to being a professional athlete, because if you're a professional athlete, you make your living with your body. If your body doesn't work, you can't play, and if you can't play, you're not making any money. Same thing with a rodeo cowboy — they get injured, and they've got to go do it again tomorrow night. It's the same with a fishing guide. If you hurt your back, or drop a cooler on your foot, the next day you either go get paid or you don't. So what have you done that's allowed you to fish more days than you used to? How do you take care of yourself?

Jeff Malone: I think one of the really important things I've discovered is diet — how you feed your body. In the early years I just ate junk, quite frankly, and as I got older I needed more. The junk wasn't giving me what I needed back in return. When you rely on your body to make a living, you notice a direct correlation between what you put in your body and what comes back out of it, because you see the instant results. When you're younger you don't think about it — you're just getting instant gratification and you don't notice the effect right away. As you get older you notice you need something better in your system than junk.

Tom Rowland: That's what a lot of customers bring, too. They'll bring me lunch, which is super nice, but they're on vacation — they're bringing whatever they want to eat, not what they'd normally eat. Cookies, sandwiches, soft drinks, sweet tea. That's fine every now and then, but as the guy who's out there three hundred days a year, if that's what you're eating every day, it doesn't work. But the funny thing about you is you tend to drop weight. I'll see you at the beginning of tarpon season, the middle of tarpon season, and the end of tarpon season, and you've really shed a lot of weight — you look like a skeleton by the end of it. Everybody's different with diet; some people put on weight easily, and for others it's tough to keep weight on. It seems like when you're working that much, you're not getting enough food, because you lose weight. How much weight?

Jeff Malone: Oh, gosh. I'm not a big guy to begin with, Tom — soaking wet I'm about a hundred and fifty pounds. I'd guess I probably lose a good twenty pounds or so during tarpon season, just because, let's face it, in the middle of the afternoon in June there's nothing that sounds good to eat in a blistering sun. I'm lucky to just get some cold fluids in me, because that's what I want — I'm not hungry, I don't want to sit down and eat a cheeseburger, I just want something cold to drink. So I focus on trying not to get dehydrated, most importantly, and if I can sneak a little something in to keep me going, I will. But it's tough to find food you want to eat under those conditions. And on top of that, I'm never just sitting around waiting for something to happen — I'm always trying to make something happen. I'm not one to sit idly aside, take a break, and eat. That's just not my personality. Once in a while I'll get hooked up with a big fish and get to fight it for a while, and I'll get a chance to get myself some nutrition for a minute, but I don't make it a priority. My customers, my fish, and what I do every day — that's my priority.

Hydration and Staying Fueled in the Heat

Tom Rowland: When you've gotten more dehydrated over the years, that was one of the things for me — if I paid attention to my hydration, my energy level through the day was a little bit better, and by the end of the week it was way better. Then I could go two weeks straight, three weeks straight. But if that hydration level slipped, it wasn't like you got super dehydrated in one day — it was like a slow leak in your tank, and by the end of four or five days you just feel terrible.

Jeff Malone: No doubt. It's something you've got to be careful of, particularly in the heat down here. It's hot, it's humid, and you don't even recognize how quickly you're losing fluid from sweating, working, and roasting in the sun all the time. It's something you really have to watch.

Tom Rowland: Do you have an amount of water you try to drink a day?

Jeff Malone: As much as I can, but I'm bad about it, Tom. I'd say I'm dehydrated more than I'm not, just because I can't put enough fluid in my system. I try. But again, I don't make myself a priority — I'm focused on what I'm trying to do. Sadly, it's the sacrifice I've made to my body, myself, and my mind, because my priority is doing my job, not taking care of myself. It isn't necessarily a good thing, but it's the harsh reality of my lifestyle.

Why Fly Fishing Is His Favorite, Even Off the Clock

Tom Rowland: You're a consummate entertainer — you put the customer first, and I've always noticed that about you. What do you think your favorite style of fishing is? You do basically every type of fishing.

Jeff Malone: I do a lot of styles and types of fishing, but for me personally, I really enjoy fly fishing myself. Now, I didn't say I enjoy guiding it — I enjoy doing it. Guiding fly fishermen has its own unique challenges, so I wouldn't put guiding it at the top of my list, but I really like fly fishing a lot. It's hard not to. I enjoy the challenge of it. I can accept going out all day and not catching a fish — I catch plenty of fish, so I'm good. If I didn't catch one today, well, I caught eighty snook yesterday, so I'm probably good for a minute. I think that's what I enjoy about the fly game — I like the challenge of the bite, and I enjoy casting. Most of us fly casters enjoy the casting part of it as much as anything. You make a good cast and it feels like you caught a hundred-pound tarpon.

Tom Rowland: What species, if you got a rare day off and went fly fishing, would be your preference?

Jeff Malone: It's really tough to beat the tarpon. I love them — I do it every day. There are times my wife just shakes her head, like she doesn't understand at all — you've been out there every single day, and now you get a few free minutes and you want to go do it again?

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but that's the passion — that's what drives it. When that feeling overwhelms you and you're like, "I've got to go check this out," are you going to learn something, or to see if something you thought was happening is actually happening? Or is it just, "This is my time, and I want to go catch a tarpon"?

Jeff Malone: That's tough, because sometimes — good example, last year we had a situation where I had a few minutes right around sunset and the worm hatch was going off at the Seven Mile Bridge. For some reason I had to run the boat by there, so of course I get there and they're going off, boiling, eating worms like crazy. I drop anchor, make a cast, get one on. In that process we learn too, because if you spend that much time out there, you're constantly paying attention to what's going on — you're bound to learn. Over all the years it's just building blocks of learning that turn into your bag of tricks, so when you're in a tough situation you can dig into that bag and say, "Under this condition, where's my best opportunity here?" That's where an experienced guide is beneficial — he's got a big bag of tricks to dig into and say, on this last cold front, this is where it was going off, and fish generally repeat those same patterns.

Reading Changing Conditions Without a Logbook

Tom Rowland: That's one of the most interesting and exciting parts about fishing in saltwater, especially in the Florida Keys, because we've got all these tidal differences, wind, and temperature. There are many opportunities to replicate something you saw before. When you're doing that kind of thinking, have you kept any kind of journal or written record, or is it all up in your head?

Jeff Malone: I really don't, Tom. I've considered it over the years, but I think the reason I haven't is because I do it every day — I'm plugged into the system every single day. The seasons change and I change with them, and I'm out there so much that I'm literally plugged into the ecosystem, watching how it changes daily. I'm not saying it wouldn't be beneficial as I get older and don't remember as well, but some of the enjoyment I get out of this is unlocking that puzzle and figuring out what the deal is. There are times I don't necessarily want to know — let me go figure it out. If I had a playbook of exactly where to go and exactly what to do, at what point are you not even really fishing anymore? I'm almost afraid of the day you turn on your GPS and it shows you where every school of redfish is, every pack of tarpon, every school of permit. I enjoy the thrill of figuring it out — the thrill of the hunt. Once you get there and you've got them dialed, it's fun after your eightieth snook, but the joy of it really was figuring it out, and being able to pat yourself on the back — good call.

Tom Rowland: With all the time you've spent out there, are you still running into situations that blow you away, where you thought something might be the case, checked it a couple of times and it wasn't happening, then something was slightly different and you checked it again and it happened? Does that still happen to you?

Jeff Malone: It does. It happened recently — I had a suspicion a particular spot was going to be good, and oddly enough that location had changed.

Tom Rowland: Due to a storm, or what?

Jeff Malone: Yeah, it changed, and it changed for the better. I looked at it and said, this is going to be really good, and we went there and my customers were absolutely blown away. It wasn't all because of the change of the spot, but partially — it created a better environment than was previously there. So that was one of those situations where we just got lucky. I didn't change it, it changed, and fortunately I knew what it was before, and they adapted to the change in a positive way and we were able to capitalize on it. That's part of why keeping notes and tracking barometric pressure and water temperature isn't going to help you that much — if I go back to a spot five years from now, chances are the barometric pressure, the water temperature, and the tide are all going to be different. You have to adapt on your fishing day; it's not often going to be the cookie-cutter day you had last week. I go three times a day sometimes, and it's different every time.

Tom Rowland: Do you ever pull up on a spot you haven't fished in two years and think, "Whatever happened that I stopped coming here?" It's still good, but there's just so much time in the day and so many days in the year, and you're accumulating all this knowledge and all these spots, and some of them fall by the wayside — they might still be fantastic, but there's some reason you stop going there.

Jeff Malone: Absolutely, that's the truth. I have places I can picture right now that I used to do really well, and I don't know why I don't go there anymore. I'm sure they're as good as they ever were under the right circumstances — the right tide, the right time of day. Conditions are huge, too, because a place that's excellent under one condition is not the same under a different one. Can we catch a permit today? I don't know — they're super conditional. It's full on, and then one condition changes and it's game over. Same with our bonefish and redfish — the wind direction changes and it's game over just like that. I think that's a challenge for people to understand: a lot of our fishing is conditional, so you almost have to approach it on a daily basis because you never know what Mother Nature has for you.

Tom Rowland: When we're talking about record-keeping, I remember people would say, "See that guy over there? That's Steve Huff — he's forgotten more than you're ever going to know." And I'd think, how is that possible? But then you hear the stories about everything he's done and you think, maybe it is. What really starts to hit home is when you get older and you're like, "Oh yeah, that spot — I hadn't been there in ten years, I used to go there all the time, and it's still good." Do you think you've forgotten things, or replaced old knowledge with new — like the Simpsons episode where Homer had to get something out of his head to put something new in, because there's only so much room in there?

Jeff Malone: I have to laugh, because this is a true story that happened to me recently: my GPS only holds five thousand waypoints. So I'm trying to figure out what to do, because I'm constantly saving new spots, and I have to literally go in and delete the ones I don't need anymore — I don't go there anymore, delete, delete — just to create enough space to add more. So I totally understand what you're saying. But getting back to your point, whether I've forgotten stuff, I don't know — most of the good stuff is still pretty near the top of my mind. Overall, that's a tough question.

Snook Comeback, Slot Limits, and the Tripletail Boom

Tom Rowland: When we're talking about things that change — we've had a lot of change in the Florida Keys. Cold fronts, storms, regulation changes, more boats, fewer boats, hurricanes. Some years you'll see a lot more of a certain fish than you ever have before, and other years it's been really tough to catch a certain species. What do you think has been a positive in recent times? What have we seen more of, or what opportunities have opened up?

Jeff Malone: Well, I was really devastated back in 2010 when we had that real bad fish kill — I'd never witnessed anything on that scale before. It killed the snook really bad, and our tropical hogfish, bonefish, and even some snapper and parrotfish took a licking too. I drove up to Everglades National Park a couple of days after that real bad cold snap in 2010, like a bunch of local guides probably did, and I had never in my life seen that many snook belly up. It was truly one of the most disheartening things I've ever seen. But fast forward to now, and that fishery is better than I've ever seen it — you catch snook anywhere and everywhere, you don't even have to fish for them, they've really come back strong. Overall, I think the fishery managers are doing a pretty good job with the snappers and groupers that are so heavily targeted. I'm a big fan of slot limits — I think they're fabulous. I do believe we should be allowed to buy something like a trophy harvest tag for the case of a world record, because right now you can't catch a world-record redfish or snook, since you can't keep them once they're that big. But in my opinion the slot limit is great, because those big spawning fish need to go off and spawn. If you're going to eat a grouper, I'd rather have a fifteen-pound grouper than an eighty-five-pound grouper — let those big ones grow up. They're cool fish, but the smaller ones are the ones we need to eat; are you really going to eat an eighty-pound snapper, or take a picture and bring it back to the dock to show what you caught?

Tom Rowland: What did you notice with the change in the slot on tripletail?

Jeff Malone: It hasn't been all that long, Tom, so there are definitely quality fish out there, but they're still growing. For a long time the slot was fifteen or sixteen inches, so there's still going to be a minute before you start catching a lot more of those seventeen-and-a-half, eighteen-inch fish — there are still a lot of little ones around.

Tom Rowland: It seems like there are more of them though. Maybe that's the regulation change, or maybe it's a coincidence with some natural phenomenon — but I like to point to the regulation change, because if it worked for tripletail, let's do that for other fish. For fishing guides and anglers, it's way better because there are more targets and better-quality fish.

Jeff Malone: Absolutely. It is — it's a fabulous fishery too. It's basically a sight-cast fishery almost anywhere in the state of Florida; you see them, you cast to them, and more often than not they're going to eat it. What a great sport fish, and they're excellent to eat too. The numbers are just really, really good.

Tom Rowland: And the yellow jack — what do you think happened there? Why the explosion of yellow jacks all of a sudden?

Jeff Malone: I don't know — I'd be lying to tell you. I've got a buddy with a bumper sticker on the back of his truck that says "Guide, not God," and I love it. I mentally resort to that regularly, because sometimes clients look at me like I'm some entity above being a fishing guide, and I'm like, I don't know, you got me.

Building (and Rebuilding) Credibility on the Bow

Jeff Malone: Probably one of the more comical situations I've had — we were tarpon fishing using a float cork with a pilchard on it, and swimming down the bar is a giant bull shark, four or five hundred pounds, full grown. My client says, "Jeff, he's going to eat our pilchard." I said, no, they don't really have a big desire to pursue a pilchard. My words weren't even out of my mouth before he does a ninety-degree U-turn straight for our float cork, eats the cork, eats the pilchard, and swims away. She looks at me and says, "They don't eat pilchards?" Apparently they love them — they'll go out of their way for them.

Tom Rowland: It's almost like as soon as you say something isn't going to happen, boom, it happens — again and again — and then it never happens again.

Jeff Malone: It's crazy. I had a friend of mine — I told him not to cast at a school of bonefish swimming away from us at eighty miles an hour. I said don't even waste your time. He throws it as far as he can, jigs it one time, and catches one. I'm like, of course you did, because I told you not to. That always seems to happen with the guy you didn't quite jive with right away, who's kind of feeling you out, wondering if this guy knows anything — and then something like that happens, and you spend the rest of the day trying to make up for it. I've had some not-so-good ones too, where I told a client not to cast at a school of fish coming toward us — I would have sworn it was a school of big barracuda, and we watched the school of bonefish, every one of them jumbos, swim right under my boat. He looked at me and said, "Those were not barracuda." Nope, they weren't. My credibility took a nosedive, but sometimes that's how you learn and live.

Tom Rowland: You've been making your living out of Hawks Cay for so long, and of course you've high-graded your clientele at this point, but at some point you were taking a lot of people you'd never met before. How do you recover from a moment like that, where your credibility just went down?

Jeff Malone: In the early days it was more difficult, because you had to really prove you were using the right fly, the right leader, that you could control the boat so he could deliver the fly to the fish and actually see the shot. It gets easier over time because you're more confident in your own ability, so you don't doubt yourself. In the early years you have a little self-doubt that can wear on you, but as you get older and you've done it for years, it gets easier — I'll just shrug it off and laugh about it now, because I'm confident in my ability and my knowledge, and I know I'm human — I can make a mistake. I thought it was a school of barracuda; well, hopefully they'll throw at the next school we see. But I've had plenty of cases where the reverse was true. I had a client one day who was starting to doubt what was up, and I said, oh my God, there he is — throw your crab right now. He said, "I don't see anything, Joe." I said, just throw the crab fifty feet at twelve o'clock. He told me later he thought I was pulling some guide-business move, that I'd seen something he hadn't. He catches a monster permit — maybe forty pounds — and that built my credibility right back up, because he said, "Holy mackerel, man, you weren't joking." I said, I don't joke about what I do out there every day. It just so happened the fish was suspended three or four feet down on a lobster trap and he never saw it until it came up off the bottom. I've had a lot of cases like that where you build your credibility with customers over time — driving along at thirty miles an hour and stopping suddenly: "There's a tripletail right there." "What do you mean, you saw a tripletail?" "Well, I'm looking for him — yeah, there they are." You pull up and there he is. It's gotten easier over the years, for sure.

Tom Rowland: When you have that confidence in yourself, the confidence from the angler probably hasn't changed, but what's changed is you have more confidence in yourself, so you can make a joke of it — "Well, shows you what I know."

Jeff Malone: It's a lot more fun now, for sure, because there's no doubt on my side. I'm covered, I'm all set — everything I've got to do on my part is covered. So when you jump a fish and didn't bow because I told you five hundred times, I don't know what you want me to do — I'm not going to catch them for you.

The Challenge of Filming for TV

Tom Rowland: Do you still get nervous before charters?

Jeff Malone: No, not usually. The only time I ever get nervous is with you guys on the film program.

Tom Rowland: I don't know why — some of the best shows we've ever filmed have been with you. We had one tough day, but that's it.

Jeff Malone: That's nerve-wracking, though, man, because there's a lot going on — drones flying, camera boats, four other guys with cameras, someone saying "Alright, camera's on, Jeff, what are we going to do?" It's like, holy moly, I don't know, this is a lot.

Tom Rowland: That's a very difficult situation to explain to someone, and it's also very difficult for some guides to be in, because normally you're moving all the time — we're going to catch bait, we're going here, and if we're not seeing something in thirty seconds we're out of there. But on camera, you've got a plan materializing in your head and I can see your wheels turning, and it's like, no, this is a real slow-moving ship, and it's hard to turn. Everything you want to do can be done, but it's going to take five times as long.

Jeff Malone: It is a tough one. It's just a slow-turning ship — it's not "alright, let's go," it's "wait a minute, all these guys have got to put away their equipment, we've got to get two boats ready to move to another spot."

Tom Rowland: That's why, whenever I'm talking to somebody we've never filmed with before, I tell them: just take us straight to the meat, because a fishing guide rarely does that. When I'm making the plan for a normal day, I've got it timed — I want to hit this spot when the light is right, not too early, and we'll check a couple of spots first where I don't expect much, and the day builds toward this one spot, like it's been there for a week, the weather's nice, everything's perfect. But when you're filming, that's the spot we need to go to immediately, because it's going to take us forty minutes of running shots to get there and you're planning to arrive at eleven — that's about the earliest we could possibly get there. So just take us straight to the meat.

Tom Rowland: Do you like the film thing?

Jeff Malone: It's fun — a lot of fun, a nice change-up from my daily routine. It's just a little bit stressful because of all that, but at the end of the day I think it's a lot of fun.

Tom Rowland: It's one of the craziest and best memories of shooting, and it comes from you. We went out right after a hurricane — not sure which one — and you took us to catch a tarpon in the morning right at the bridge, no surprise, you had bait, everything, you were all prepared. Then we went back to the flat right in front of Hawks Cay, what we call the Resort Flat, and it's like, well, the water's still muddy from the hurricane, and we're going to catch a couple of bonefish — no dice — but we just started catching permit, and it was awesome. We kept a permit right there, and I'm like, you catch them right here, just chumming for them? We caught about five like that and no bonefish, but it was a cool thing, and the way you were fishing that jig — pretty aggressive, putting it right on their head — and they were eating it. I find that to be the case after hurricanes. Does it seem like the hurricane can be the worst thing for the human population in the Keys, but it almost always benefits the fish?

Jeff Malone: Yeah, I think — and I could be wrong — that a lot of times they sense the barometric pressure dropping, so they'll feed heavy prior to it, and then they'll go hunker down, whether that's running out into the Gulf somewhere deep or out in the ocean. After a big blow like that, their feeding is based on the severity of the low pressure — they sense a really heavy load coming and they'll chew the back of the boat apart, because they know they've got to hunker down for a prolonged period, could be weeks. Whereas with an average cold front, it's not as big a pressure change, so they'll feed prior to it but knowing it'll be short-term. But when a big hurricane comes, they feed heavy and then lay low for weeks, and when it's time to get back after it, boy, are they eating and biting.

Tom Rowland: Especially as the water is clearing — right after the hurricane the entire ocean is chocolate milk, shallow and deep, like flushing a toilet, everything's stirred up. Then you get a few tide changes and the water starts to clear up a little, and when it hits that perfect condition, that's when I've seen them chew the back of the boat off — it's clear enough for them to see what they want to eat, and they don't care what's going on.

Jeff Malone: Yeah, and you have a lot less pressure on the fisheries, too — after Hurricane Irma, there wasn't pressure on our fisheries for at least a year. Anyone who had any kind of interest here, a house or a business, was working on their house, their business, with contractors or the insurance company — they weren't out there fishing, trust me. I've fished through it all, and a lot of days I was just driving around out there by myself, because everybody was wrapped up in property management.

Tom Rowland: But you can get enough customers to keep fishing every day.

Jeff Malone: That's true — it was pretty quiet for a minute during that time, but I had some folks who wanted to go fishing, so that's what I did. And thanks to you guys — I've got to give credit where credit is due, you put me out in front of the world, and people looked up and said, wow, we could go fishing with that guy.

Tom Rowland: Maybe a little of that's going on, but when they get with you, don't expect to get them back, because you're a professional — one of the hardest-working guys I've ever seen, and you take guiding to an art form. There are certain people, in any profession, who take what they do to an art form, whether that's a banker or an insurance salesman — everything they think about every single day is how to be better at what they're doing. How can I clean my boat better, have better tackle, know where the bait is better? I see that clearly in you. Where do you think that comes from?

Jeff Malone: I think it's just an inside drive to never be good enough, no matter what — there's always room to improve. I want to be as good as I can possibly be, and I think a lot of that has to do with respect for my customers, because they're investing a lot in me. They're taking time out of their lives to come spend with me, and it's a financial obligation, and a lot of them are booking me far in advance. So the least I can do when people fly in to spend time with me is give them a hundred and ten percent — no excuses like "my boat's not working because I didn't maintain it," or "that reel screwed up because I didn't put new line on it." That's stuff I can control, so I try my best to give everybody a hundred and ten, because that's what they're entitled to. You wouldn't tell a professional golf caddy to hand you a putter to tee off with — you've got to help me here. I want to give my clients a hundred and ten percent, because that's what it is.

Measuring Success: Happy Customers, Not Just Fish Counts

Tom Rowland: How do you measure success in your own mind? What makes a great year, or a great day?

Jeff Malone: Happy customers — that's the bottom line. I want everybody who goes fishing with me to have one of the best times they've ever had fishing. I don't measure it by what we caught, because if you put your soul on the line for the end result being a hundred-pound tarpon, you're going to miss most of the reason we even go out there. I tell my customers all the time: if the ultimate bottom line for your happiness is catching a hundred-pound tarpon, you're with the wrong guy, because you're going to miss all the sea turtles, the stingrays, the spinner sharks, and the cool stuff we see out there, which is the whole reason we go. Now granted, we use the excuse that we're going tarpon fishing, but at the end of the day, most of us go out there for all of it. Most of the time my day is made just watching the sun come up, and if you don't appreciate that part of what we do, you're probably not my customer, because my customers enjoy all of it — riding around, seeing turtles, seeing wildlife. Naturally the goal is to catch a bunch of fish, that's what I love to do, but there's way more to it than that. So I judge it by making sure my clients have had the time of their lives, and that they want to go with me again, because you're not going to be successful if you don't have clients who want to book you again and again. I've got a number of clients I've had for twenty-plus years who keep coming back. So the measure for me is just people having a good time — and if you're not having a great time with me, there's a bunch of other guides, go with them, see if they can provide a better experience. But I can assure you I've done my homework and I'll provide you with the best boat, equipment, and knowledge I can, and give you a hundred and ten percent. That's all I can do, and it makes me sleep good at night knowing I did that.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man, and it's very similar to how I thought about it too. You're certainly trying to catch all the fish you can, but plenty of people have caught more fish than I did and their customers didn't like them — they were grumpy, they'd get upset if somebody missed a fish. You can go out and catch a four-hundred-pound tarpon, but if the guy yells at you on the last one because you didn't bow, it ruins the whole day. You could go out with the same person, have a slightly different attitude, a little more entertainment value, be nice to his wife, keep a clean boat, and maybe only catch two tarpon, and it's the best day they've ever had. Or catch no tarpon, not even see one, and if they come back and say it's the best day they've ever had, that's fantastic.

Jeff Malone: And they want to book you again.

Tom Rowland: Right — we have to book this again next year, we'd like to come in the summer and the winter, we want to make this two trips. That's success. But success is also obvious in that there's a benchmark of days — if you can get anywhere between two hundred seventy-five and three hundred days, first of all, you're a madman, and secondly you probably need some counseling as well as a physical therapist to get the knots and injuries out of your body. But it speaks volumes, because the three-hundred-day mark is a big one for a guide — there are a lot times of the year when trips just aren't flowing, when there aren't as many tourists around and the fishing isn't as well known, like tarpon season or sailfish season, when there's a big draw. In order to have three hundred days, you've got to fill all those off times, and you've got to have way more than three hundred people who want to go fishing with you, because most of them all want to go at the same time. But it also speaks volumes about the place you've chosen to make your living — the Florida Keys.

The Advantage of Guiding in the Florida Keys

Tom Rowland: What we have there is so special, in the variety of species and places to fish for them, in the tidal differences between Flamingo and the ocean side, the Lower Keys and the ocean side — you can throw this amazing combination of fishing days together. You could have ten different guides go out from the same dock and have ten completely different days. One guy catches a bonefish, then runs out and catches a sailfish. Another goes straight to Flamingo and catches snook and redfish, maybe even goes into the freshwater and catches a bass. Another heads down to the Lower Keys and does something completely different. It's such an incredibly diverse place. What do you think about how lucky you are to be fishing the Florida Keys?

Jeff Malone: Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely. The reality of it is you can start in the morning in the backcountry where the crocodiles are, catching snook, and by afternoon you could be dropping for swordfish thirty miles offshore. You've got everything in between, from the reef to the Gulf Stream to Florida Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, the Everglades — all within about a sixty-mile area, right here. It's a blessing, let's face it — we have some of the best access to a variety of fisheries there is. It's really cool.

From Lobster Fishing to Full-Time Guide at Hawks Cay

Tom Rowland: Was there ever a path where you might not have ended up in the Keys? How did you start guiding here?

Jeff Malone: I was fishing for spiny lobster down here — I had a lobster business. And quite frankly, somebody contacted me about doing a guide trip while I was lobster fishing, because I was always fly fishing on the side. At the time I had a fifteen-foot Willy Roberts, a wooden glass boat.

Tom Rowland: Oh nice — I know that boat. One of my customers had one, all redone, it was amazing.

Jeff Malone: It was a great little boat, and I'd always go out and fly fish for fun — it was kind of my own little mental time-out. So I got a call one time to take somebody out fishing. I said, well, that's not really what I do. They said, look, we'll pay you to take us, we'll pay for your gas, and we'll bring some beer. I said, well, I might not catch you anything. They said, yeah, we know. I said, wait a minute — you're paying for the gas, you're paying me, and I don't even have to catch anything? They said yeah. I said, shoot man, we'll give it a shot. So we went out, had a great time, and it kind of started from there — they told somebody who told somebody who told somebody, and that's how it started. At some point I said, I need to get it together — get a license, get insurance, do it legit. That was some years back. And then I got the invitation to go to Hawks Cay, and when that opportunity came about, it was a bigger game-changer than I ever imagined it being. It really brought people to me that I never had, because I was operating out of my house and just never had the exposure — I'd wait for one person to tell somebody else, and that could take months. So it took a lot of years to build up a calendar, a schedule — gosh, it took a solid ten years just to have enough work to stay alive.

Tom Rowland: During those ten years, did you keep lobstering too?

Jeff Malone: Yeah, that worked out good for a while, but I was getting my butt kicked by the hurricanes — they'd come in and blow away all my equipment. I'm like, this is a tough deal. So my hat's off to all the guys who continue to do that to this day, because that's next-level tough.

Tom Rowland: Stone crabbing too — usually the lobster guys do stone crab in the off-season, and a lot of independent folks who make their living on the ocean do a little of everything: spearfishing, stone crab, lobster, whatever it takes.

Jeff Malone: That's what it takes to make a living in this environment — you have to be willing to do whatever it takes, whether that's bar-tending and guiding or crawfishing and guiding. I've been blessed to just do one job, because most guys are doing at least two, since there's not enough business to run a guide service exclusively year-round. It's hard. And without the support of my wife, there's no way I could spend that kind of time out there with our children, the house, and the bills. I've been blessed that she's been able and willing to help with a lot of the bookings and reservations.

Strangest Moments on the Water

Tom Rowland: Have you ever had anything super weird happen out there? What's one of the strangest things you've ever seen or had happen to you in the course of guiding?

Jeff Malone: One of the more interesting stories — I had a large gentleman fall overboard, and this was quite a case. We were fishing not too far from shore, and, long story short, he fell in and I couldn't get him back on the boat. It went from comical to "oh my gosh, he's going to drown," because he was completely spent, in the water, and we couldn't get him in the boat. I was throwing him every floatable device I had — every life jacket, every floatable cushion, all of it — and finally got the situation secure so he was at least floating and breathing, he was alive. But now what? I had to throw him a rope and tow him to shore, because I had no other options.

Tom Rowland: And when he got to shore, could he step into the boat at that point, or was he completely exhausted?

Jeff Malone: He was, yeah. It was a pretty dire, challenging situation — it went from a little comical at first to escalating very quickly, but I was able to stabilize it and then tow him to shore to get him back in my boat.

Tom Rowland: How did you handle the ride home?

Jeff Malone: He was good — he was fine, just wet, and his pride was a little hurt, but he was safe. That was one of the more interesting situations. In terms of a unique catch, probably one of the more unique fish we've caught — I know it's not unique to fishing in general, but for us here in the Keys — we caught a ribbon fish.

Tom Rowland: Where do you catch that? What depth of water, what are you doing?

Jeff Malone: We were fishing on the ocean side trying to catch some ladyfish — there was a big school of them and we were having a ball — when my customer said, what in the world is this? I looked at it and said, honestly, I think it's a ribbon fish, because I'd only ever seen pictures of them — I'd never caught one. It's a really interesting creature if you've never seen one — super shiny, super eel-like, funky teeth, and this weird dorsal fin that's crystal clear and runs from its nose to its tail. I took a picture and sent it to a friend of mine in South Carolina, and he said, yeah, we catch those on topwater plugs frequently.

Tom Rowland: There's a place where they catch a lot of them — maybe South Carolina, I'm not sure — but the kingfish guys will troll them.

Jeff Malone: I don't know where they catch them, because I've only ever caught the one. They're long and eel-like, they'd probably troll real good, and if you put multiple hooks in one, I'm sure the kingfish would eat it up. That was one of the more unique things we've caught.

Tom Rowland: Every guide's got stories like that — just weird things that happen out there, and just when you think you've seen it all, something comes along you've never seen before.

Jeff Malone: Of course. That's kind of the excitement of going out there every day, because you don't know what's going to happen. I had a guy walk down the dock one day and ask, "So, Captain, do you guarantee?" I looked at him and said, I guarantee I'll try to bring you back — how about that? I don't have a crystal ball that tells me what's going to happen on a given day. A lot of days I'd probably stay in bed if I did. But that's kind of the exciting part of going fishing every day — it's the unknown, not knowing what you're going to see.

On Guaranteeing Fish

Tom Rowland: Do you have opinions on guides who do guarantee fish? I had a philosophical discussion with myself on a long ride out, years ago, seeing somebody guaranteeing fish and booking trips off that, and I wondered if I should guarantee trips too. I came up with my own answer to that — what's yours? Do you think that would ever be a good idea?

Jeff Malone: Not for me and what I do, but that doesn't mean I couldn't hold up to a guarantee. But at the end of the day, what does that even mean — I throw my net on five hundred pilchards and I'm good? Where's the level — do you guarantee me a forty-pound black grouper?

Tom Rowland: Right, that's basically what I kind of got, too — you never see anybody say, "I guarantee you this particular fish."

Jeff Malone: To me it's just a marketing gimmick — that's my own opinion. Maybe there is somebody who guarantees a twenty-five-pound mutton snapper, or whatever it is, but I don't know very many solid guides who'd say, "I guarantee you can catch a hundred-and-fifty-pound tarpon on fly."

Tom Rowland: The more you know, the more you realize it might happen — you're a great fly caster, the best fly caster in the world, that's cool, but that's probably the day the fishing is going to be the worst when you show up. I've had that happen a million times — you get excited about a guy and think, if I get this guy on the bow it's going to be awesome, and then it's blowing thirty-five and raining sideways. Then the next guy shows up who can barely get the fly out of the boat, and he catches one. That's a strange thing. But I always thought that with guaranteeing fish, the customer doesn't actually want that — if you see a guide doing that, you should probably steer away, because what happens if I say I'll guarantee fish and you booked to go bonefishing, but I take you snapper fishing first to burn an hour or two and make sure you get your fish, so I get paid? That's not what you booked for.

Jeff Malone: Better check that.

Tom Rowland: Right — the customer thinks they want a guarantee, but what they actually want is a guide who's going to show up and give it his hundred and ten percent, who has their enjoyment and their safety at top of mind. If you catch fish, that's a bonus. And with a guide who has that attitude, that attention to detail, and his homework done, your chances of catching fish are way better than with the guy who guarantees something else. And you're that guy, Jeff. I've got a tremendous amount of respect for you. I love watching you on the dock — you don't know I'm watching, but I see you come, I see you go, I see the happy customers get off the boat talking about how great a day it was, and you're already off, picked up your next customers, and pulling out of the harbor before you even know it. I see all that when I'm doing interviews at the docks, and you've got a tremendous, well-deserved reputation. I've really enjoyed the days we've been able to fish together, and I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a while, so thanks for spending the time — I know this kind of time is rare for you.

Jeff Malone: Yeah, no, it's been awesome, Tom. It's been great to catch up, and I genuinely appreciate the opportunity to come on and chat with you a little bit. Hopefully we'll see one another again in the near future.

How to Book with Jeff Malone

Tom Rowland: We will. Tell them how to go fishing with you.

Jeff Malone: Jeff at Tarpon Time. Tarpontime.com is our website, so you can go on there, and Jeff@tarpontime.com is my email. Anytime a trip needs to get booked or a reservation made, tarpontime.com is where you'll find me.

Tom Rowland: You've got two boats, right?

Jeff Malone: We do, yep. I run a 25 Dorado, and we also have a 21 Egret. My fly trips happen out of a 16 Dolphin Super Skiff, so that's also an option.

Tom Rowland: There it is — you should take advantage of that. Jeff's the man. Alright, Jeff, thanks so much, man. We'll talk to you soon.

Jeff Malone: See you soon. Alright, have a nice afternoon, buddy. Take care. Bye bye.