Tom Rowland Podcast episode 1028 is a conversation with Captain Rhett Morris of More Fish Florida, a fishing guide who has kept a near-daily catch log on Florida's Charlotte Harbor for about thirty years. That record now shows a steady, decades-long decline in snook, redfish, and trout. In this episode he lays out what caused it and a simple, reversible fix he wants the state to test. It is a data story, a water-quality story, and a call to action all at once.
You can watch the full conversation in the player above, or scroll up to listen in the player at the top of this page.
Over roughly thirty years of keeping a catch log, Rhett has recorded a steady decline in snook, redfish, and sea trout across the greater Charlotte Harbor area. He says the drop became noticeable after 2000 and steeper after 2005, and that Florida Wildlife Commission data shows a similar trend. To keep his own numbers honest, he compares only his best tide days — six days around each full moon and six around each new moon — so he is not mixing in slow days when the catch would be down anyway.
Rhett describes the 2018 event as the largest loss of marine life in Florida's recorded history. Red tide is measured in cells per liter, and where the previous record was around five million, 2018 ran over forty million and reached water more than fifty feet deep. As all that dead marine life rotted, it flooded the system with nitrogen, which, on top of nutrient-heavy river dumping, set off the algae bloom that went on to smother the seagrass. He walks through the full chain of events in the episode.
This is one of the more surprising parts of the conversation. Rhett says Milton's surge lifted the thick mat of algae off the bottom and pushed the vast majority of it up onto the mangroves and land, which act as a natural filter. That gave any surviving seagrass roots a chance to grow back, and the following summer he saw no rotting algae and no low-oxygen dead zones for the first time in years. He describes it as almost like time-warping back to the 1990s.
He is proposing a Charlotte Harbor test zone with a tighter redfish slot of 25 to 27 inches and a snook slot moved up to roughly 35 to 37 inches. His argument is that today's slots harvest fish before enough of them grow into breeders, and that letting more fish reach spawning size would let the fishery act as its own hatchery. He walks through the biology and the numbers in the conversation.
He points out that redfish management has not changed substantially in about 37 years, and snook in about 20, even though development, water-quality decline, habitat loss, and fishing pressure have all changed dramatically. He also notes that most of the current commission board comes from the land-development world, which he believes leaves little appetite for proactive change. His read is that it will take public pressure, not just data, to move the needle.
Using state figures, he cites recreational fishing generating over $497 million in Charlotte County in 2025, along with thousands of jobs. His point is that even a modest increase in successful trips — not more people, just the existing anglers fishing more often because the fishing is good — would add millions of dollars a year. He lays out the specific projections in the episode.
Everything lives at morefishflorida.com, where there is a short video that walks through the same facts and a petition to sign. Rhett says out-of-state signatures are welcome and may matter even more than in-state ones, given how much of Florida's economy runs on tourism. He also stresses that sharing the link may do more good than signing it.
I have spent my whole life on the water, most of it guiding in the Florida Keys, and the thing I have learned to trust more than almost anything is a person who keeps records. Rhett has fished the same water almost every day for thirty years and written down what he caught. That is rare, and it is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to hear about firsthand. I have watched fisheries change in my own life, including redfish coming and going in the Lower Keys after hurricanes, so when someone tells me he has three decades of data showing a decline, I want to sit down and really listen. Press play at the top of the page to hear his story the way he tells it.
Rhett's father was a biologist and pushed him to journal every trip back in the 1990s, even when the fishing was so good it felt pointless. Decades later, that habit turned into something a scientist would recognize: a long, consistent data set on a single estuary. What he found in it, and the careful way he filtered the numbers so they would actually mean something, is the backbone of this whole conversation. He explains it far better than I can here, so listen to how he built it in the episode.
I knew 2018 was bad. I did not fully understand the chain reaction until Rhett walked me through it — the record cell counts, the nitrogen from all that rotting marine life, and a freshwater algae that somehow adapted to live in the bay and grew thick enough to block the sunlight from the grass. The way one event cascaded into years of damage is hard to believe, and it is worth hearing him lay it out step by step. Scroll up to the player to hear the whole sequence.
This is the part I keep thinking about. Rhett makes the case that Hurricane Milton did something no cleanup crew could, physically lifting the algae off the flats and stacking it on the mangroves so the seagrass finally got a chance. I have seen storms reshuffle fish in the Keys, so I was leaning in here. Whether this is a real turning point or a short reprieve is the open question, and he gives his honest read on it in the conversation.
The heart of Rhett's proposal is simple: let more fish grow into breeders and let the fishery restock itself. He gets specific about redfish, about snook turning female at a certain size, and about a figure for potential egg production that is hard to wrap your head around. I will let him say the number. He is careful to frame it as the start of a conversation, not a finished law, and that nuance matters. Hear the full argument in his own words in the episode.
If you only listen to one stretch of this episode, make it the part where he lays out the fix. Press play in the player above.
The most interesting turn for me was connecting all of this to money. If the fishing gets better, the people who fish will spend more and more of them will want to live here, and that touches restaurants, real estate, and plenty of folks who never pick up a rod. Rhett has the state's own economic figures to make the point, and it reframes a fisheries question as an everybody question. He runs the numbers in the episode.
The morning after this conversation, the thing that stuck with me was how reasonable Rhett's ask actually is. He is not saying stop keeping fish. He is saying test a change in one bay, watch what happens, and move it back if it does not work.
I have seen what a closure did after 2018, and I have watched slot changes on other species turn things around faster than anyone expected. That is why I signed the petition, and I would encourage you to take a look for yourself.
If it makes sense to you the way it made sense to me, go to morefishflorida.com, watch the short video, and sign it. Sharing it may matter even more than signing.
Captain Rhett Morris, More Fish Florida (morefishflorida.com), Captains for Clean Water, the Florida Wildlife Commission, the Florida Wildlife Research Institute, Sarah Burnsed Walters, Dave Blewett, Lake Okeechobee, the Caloosahatchee River, the Peace and Myakka Rivers, Charlotte Harbor, Pirate Harbor, Alligator Creek, Hurricane Milton, Hurricane Helene, Hwange National Game Park, Florida Power & Light, the Southwest Florida Wild Bird Hunters Association, Lee Wulff, and Oyster Rods.
Captain Rhett Morris runs More Fish Florida (morefishflorida.com) and has guided the greater Charlotte Harbor area, from the Caloosahatchee up to the Peace and Myakka Rivers, for about thirty years. Raised by a wildlife biologist, he grew up around record-keeping and conservation and has carried that into a catch log that now spans three decades. He is the force behind a petition to test new snook and redfish slot limits in Charlotte Harbor as a way to rebuild the fishery.
Transcript
Tom Rowland Podcast — Episode 1028: Capt. Rhett Morris
In this episode: thirty years of catch records, the 2018 red tide and the algae that smothered the flats, how Hurricane Milton helped, and a slot-limit fix Rhett Morris wants Charlotte Harbor to test.
Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Tom Rowland Podcast, brought to you by Star brite. We're brought to you by Star brite today, as always. Star brite is the maker of an awesome line of products to take care of your boat. That's where I use it most, whether it's the Salt Off product or any of the boat cleaning products. Star brite has you covered. Definitely check them out. They're not only a great company for the products that they have, but they also do a tremendous amount in conservation, and that is certainly important to us all.
Rhett Morris: I'm Captain Rhett Morris with morefishflorida.com, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.
Tom Rowland: All right. Rhett, how are you, man?
Rhett Morris: I'm doing well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be on the show with you here today, man. I appreciate it.
Tom Rowland: I like your room, man. You've got all kinds of stuff back there. It's like your rigging room. What am I looking at? A lot of trout pictures?
Rhett Morris: Yeah, out west. That's my little nephew right there. He's now playing college football up in Pennsylvania, but that was his first brown trout and first rainbow trout in the Madison River in Montana.
Tom Rowland: Is that your stomping ground? Do you go out there in the summer?
Rhett Morris: Yeah, we love being out west in the hot summer, always doing a lot of that. And then a little bit higher there is one of the largest snook I've ever had a client catch.
Tom Rowland: Wow. How big is that one?
Rhett Morris: We never put a measurement or a tape on it, but I know that he couldn't hold that thing without his nephew, who's 21, helping him. His name's Hank Feinberg. He's no longer with us, God rest his soul, but he caught that thing on a snapper rod in the middle of January in a creek, on a 10-pound braid with a 25-pound leader and a tiny little 1/0 hook. It should have never happened, but somehow it did.
Tom Rowland: That's the way it always happens, with the smallest rod in the boat. That's what used to happen when I'd take my kids fishing. You'd go fishing for snappers or whatever, they've got some Snoopy rod, and that one always, every time, would get the biggest fish. It doesn't take much to spool one of those little Snoopy rods.
Tom Rowland: But then you've got turkeys. You're a turkey hunter, too?
Rhett Morris: Yeah, I love turkey hunting. I've shot plenty with a shotgun, and then decided that I wanted to try to get a nice bird with a bow, and that took me three years to complete. I did not understand when I embarked upon that little journey how hard it is to put a big osceola down with an arrow.
Tom Rowland: That is a difficult task. Is all your turkey hunting in Florida, or have you gone other places?
Rhett Morris: A little bit in the upper northeast, but primarily just the osceolas we have in south Florida here.
Tom Rowland: Is that a compound bow, or what kind of bow were you using?
Rhett Morris: I used a compound bow there. The other bow on the wall was confiscated from a poacher. I'm actually from Africa. My lineage goes back — I was like seventh generation in Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. We were there visiting family, and this thing is pretty impressive. They took that bow off of a guy who was poaching my uncle's farm, and they do safari hunting there as well. That's a piece of steel pounded into a blade with one feather tied there. You can't believe how beautifully that thing travels through the air. The bow is obviously made out of a tree branch of some description, and the string is dried and stretched animal intestine.
Tom Rowland: Really? And what's that going around the bow at the top?
Rhett Morris: That's what's left of the string, because over time, where they pull the string ends up getting weak, where the arrow has contacted. So they always make the bows with a longer string than needed, and that's just where the excess goes.
Tom Rowland: Interesting. And have you shot that bow?
Rhett Morris: Yes, I have. It is daunting to shoot, and I'll tell you, when you let it go, I don't really know what the grain weight is of that arrow, but it is incredible.
Tom Rowland: That is a large arrow. What is he hunting with that?
Rhett Morris: One of the things they do is grab a seed pod from a certain tree — I don't know the name of it — and they mix this sap with a different sap from another tree, and it forms a poison. They put the blade in that seed pod the day they're going to hunt. As it slowly crystallizes, it forms a bond with the steel, and then when they shoot it into the animal, even if they don't make a vital shot, the poison will bring it down. They're shooting maybe an eland, a Cape buffalo, a kudu. It's very difficult to make a vital shot with an arrow like that, and quite often they don't, and the poison is what brings the animal down over time.
Tom Rowland: Wow, that's incredible. A Cape buffalo. I was able to go to Africa once and got to see a lot of those animals, once in Zimbabwe and somewhere else. It got a little confusing there, but incredible place. So you were born there?
Rhett Morris: Yes. My family was originally introduced to Africa in the early 1800s, and we migrated from Southern Africa up into what was then Rhodesia. I was, I think, third generation born in Rhodesia. My dad was a game scout and biologist who worked for the Hwange National Game Park, which is right near Victoria Falls. So we lived in a government outpost that was about an hour and a half, two hours away from any kind of civilization, out in the middle of the game park. It was incredible.
Tom Rowland: Wow. And how old were you when you moved?
Rhett Morris: We left there when I was almost five. The Rhodesian Bush War, if you've ever heard anything about that, lasted for 15 years, and I was sort of born in the last third of that war. When the war ended, trouble was going to start for the country, so that's why we got the heck out of there. We were very lucky to be able to immigrate to the US, because it was one of the top three places in the world you could have left Africa to go to, and we ended up here, thank God.
Tom Rowland: And then how did you end up in Florida?
Rhett Morris: We went to a quail plantation in Albany, Georgia, called Mercer Mill for seven months. My dad was the head biologist there for that plantation, and it was bought by some wealthy investors, and the staff was changed. We quickly shipped down to good old Punta Gorda, Florida, and this is where we've been ever since.
Tom Rowland: And then your dad continued the biologist work there?
Rhett Morris: Yes. He didn't have any beautiful, fancy quail plantation to start on down here. It wasn't as big of a thing in Southwest Florida. But he became an environmental ecologist and started doing work for all the land-developing companies that were turning massive tracts of land into orange groves back in the early '80s. That was his main purpose from then on out, and he still moonlights with it, helping guys develop large tracts of land in the most effective way, still keeping the natural ecosystem viable — the wetlands and marshlands that can't be developed.
Tom Rowland: And so you've had that as your background. He's your mentor your entire life. You're seeing how he operates, and that has kind of led you into the fishing guide business?
Rhett Morris: Exactly. I just love being outside. Dad was a bit of a guide himself. He used to run quail hunting charters, if you will, all the way through the late '80s, most of the '90s, and early 2000s, for large landowners that were affiliated with Florida Power & Light. So I got into watching him interact with clients from a young age, as a helper there with the bird dogs and daily goings-on of those hunting trips. It helped a lot.
Tom Rowland: That was the next question — are you a dog trainer as well?
Rhett Morris: I wouldn't call myself a dog trainer, but doing anything in the woods, hunting with dogs, that's really more than half the reason we go. Those dogs really make it, especially the quail.
Tom Rowland: We don't have quail like when he came over. Maybe we do some places, but I don't have access to those places like I would like to. I have been able to go, and we have a place we can go, and they do it old-style horseback. They're trying to mirror the way that it should be as much as possible. But you have to have planted birds for the most part. They'll have holdovers, and some wild coveys, but it's just the habitat. The habitat has decreased so much. When you talk to the old-timers, they used to just go quail hunting — park their car and start walking. I think first the access is not as available, but also the habitat has changed considerably.
Rhett Morris: Yeah, that's a big part of it. We all hear the same stories over and over from the '60s, '70s, and early '80s. When we started here, it was quite phenomenal. We could take a bird dog and a single-barrel shotgun out of the back of the house, as long as we finished our homework in junior high school, and go walk around and find a couple coveys and bring a few birds back for dinner. That's all nothing but houses now. As you say, the habitat's changed dramatically.
Tom Rowland: And when they do turn a place into quail land, it is a big undertaking. Like down there around Thomasville, that's the mecca.
Rhett Morris: Well, I understand there's some really good stuff in Texas as well. We actually go to Texas, and it is phenomenal out there, but the brush management gets to be pretty heavy there too, because they have such a rough level of underlying brush, all that mesquite and cactus. The quail hunting out there, Tom, rivals anything I ever saw in Florida. On its best day, Florida would struggle to keep up with what I've seen in Texas.
Tom Rowland: Wouldn't that rough underbrush be good for the quail? That's what they need — places predators don't want to go. But my favorite part by far are the dogs.
Rhett Morris: One hundred percent. My dad's had a full kennel of English pointers. I think he's on his fifth bloodline now over the last 46 years.
Tom Rowland: Really? And he's still in Florida now?
Rhett Morris: Yeah, he's still got the kennels behind the house to this day. He's 78 years old and still doing it. We've bred and trained dogs all the while. He's got an entire room full of trophies for all the local field trials here, the Southwest Florida Wild Bird Hunters Association, and he's been heavily involved for a long time. He's stuck with English pointers primarily, but he's had some setters over the years, and he actually does have a setter now.
Tom Rowland: That's an operation right there, and one you have to really love, because it's full-time, 100 percent of the time.
Rhett Morris: Oh, yeah, man. There's a lot of work that goes into keeping those dogs right throughout the off-season.
Tom Rowland: One of the things we talked about before we started to record today was record keeping, and how what your dad did kind of influenced you in your fishing. Tell me about the record keeping and what you've been able to do.
Rhett Morris: Dad's kept records of everything, being a biologist by trade his entire adult life. When I started charter fishing — I was taking people for fun on the weekends in the early '90s, got my license around '95, '96, and started doing it full time — he immediately begged me to start keeping records. I started my little book, journaling, and it got to be kind of tedious. We just caught the heck out of fish every single day, and it was like, 'Dad, I don't know why I'm doing this. It's the same every time.' He said, 'What you don't understand is that if you keep doing this for a long enough time period, it's going to change dramatically. I hate to tell you it's not going to be as good as it is today, but it's just the way of the world, and if you ever want a chance to do something about it, having these records over decades is really going to help you make a point in the future about the fact that we need to make changes to help the fishery come back.'
Tom Rowland: He had already seen that play out in all different things, from Africa to the orange groves, how important his records were.
Rhett Morris: Absolutely. Even quail hunting, when we get back to this day, we pull all the wild birds and get the crops, and he'll analyze everything found within each bird's crop. He has learned exactly which part of the woods to be in during each part of the season, or during a wetter or drier hunting season, because of decades of looking and recording those little details. As you know, with almost anything in the great outdoors, it's those little details that really put you ahead.
Tom Rowland: That certainly is a way to be better at your craft. But what we started talking about was how that could influence policy and trends. I'd like you to go into what you have seen over the years with your own records, keeping records every day for decades. What trends have you seen? What correlations can you make to what you've recorded personally?
Rhett Morris: It's been interesting. Over the last three decades of keeping track, I started out really detailed and then moved into a catch log — how many of each species did I catch on any given day. Going back through all the data to create a level point to analyze, what I decided to do was pick the best days of each month: six days around the full moon and six days around the new moon, when we had maximum tide flow. So I wasn't comparing a day in between when the tides were no good anyway and your catch is going to be down. What I have seen, absolutely 100 percent, is a steady decline in snook, redfish, and trout catching over the 30-year period. It became much more noticeable starting after 2000. Once we hit 2005, the decline rate became a little more prevalent, and we've been in a long downhill slide. In the last couple of days, I've been checking through the Florida Wildlife Commission's data, and their data actually shows a very similar decline rate to what I have recorded.
Tom Rowland: Does this decline have anything to do with size, or just numbers?
Rhett Morris: Mine is just numbers. It's just an overall catch rate.
Tom Rowland: How much do you think the quality of an angler plays into the numbers? Some clients are really good, some are really bad.
Rhett Morris: That's a great point. Nowadays, you're fishing fewer fish that are fished more often. So if you don't have an angler who's got it figured out, or that I can spin up to what he needs to pay attention to — the guy or gal who just throws it out there, and if the fish impales itself on the hook they'll catch it, if not, they won't — those days get really tough now. I'll see folks just missing bites, not really paying attention. That's fine with me; I want everybody to have a good time. But it's interesting how much more difficult it is today with a subpar angler compared to 25 years ago, when your opportunities were so much greater. You'd get 100 bites in a four-hour trip and catch 50 fish. Nowadays, there are many days in an eight-hour day where you're not going to get anywhere close to 100 bites in double the amount of time.
Tom Rowland: When you're looking at this data, do you factor in techniques — bait versus spin versus fly — or is it just based on catch numbers?
Rhett Morris: It's catch numbers, and predominantly done with bait. I started out wanting to take people fly fishing and sight fishing and artificials, and I quickly learned in our area in the '90s that most anglers really didn't have the skill on fly in a saltwater situation. The guys who wanted to fish artificials didn't quite have the skill to get it done, so there was a growing frustration because we weren't getting it done. I started using more live bait and quickly understood that live bait's the thing. I have a select group today that are really good with fly and artificial, but in our fishery, as the overall abundance of snook, redfish, and trout began to decrease, live bait became much more important than it used to be. Most of the catch rate is based on a live-bait fishing day.
Tom Rowland: What's your territory that you guide in, where all this data has been collected?
Rhett Morris: It's predominantly the greater Charlotte Harbor area, from the Caloosahatchee River up to the Myakka and Peace River.
Tom Rowland: So squarely on the bullseye of where Captains for Clean Water was created, because of the Caloosahatchee River. What about the bait situation? Have you seen any increase or decrease in bait availability?
Rhett Morris: I really have not. I've seen increases and decreases, but it's never been tied to what some people have brought up over the years — that the cast-net boats, or any guide or recreational guy with big cast nets, is taking too much bait and causing a problem. The first time I heard that 15 years ago, I thought it could be a big problem. You go to a bait flat on a Saturday morning and there's 30 or 40 boats taking 500 to 1,000 sardines off that flat in the spring while they're trying to spawn. But over the years, bait populations rise and fall tied to something completely away from how many are being caught by a cast net. I'm not going to say one particular flat that's hammered really hard won't be decreased, but overall throughout our fishery it's not the cause.
Rhett Morris: For instance, when 2018 happened, that was the largest loss of marine life in Florida's entire recorded history. That was a super red tide. Red tide is measured in cells per liter. Until 2018, the greatest red tide on record was around five million cells per liter. In 2018 it was over 40 million cells per liter, and it occupied depths of water over 50 feet deep. That blew every record we had out of the water, literally. When that happened, it killed a lot of marine life, and as that rotted, we had an influx of nutrients — all that organic matter jamming the water with high levels of nitrogen. We already had the nitrogen and phosphate from the dumping of the river, which helped blow up the red tide in the first place. What we all saw was fascinating. There was a microalgae bloom from the unbelievably high level of nutrients, which fed the micro-marine organism that the baitfish feed on. For the first time in my life — say there are 20 spots throughout the harbor where the bait is; it's there all year, but it'll only ever be really thick in three or four of those 20 spots, and it rotates seasonally — after the red tide, there was as much bait, if not more, than I had ever seen in my entire life, in every place I'd ever seen bait, all at the same time.
Tom Rowland: Really?
Rhett Morris: We were catching bait in the mangroves while we were snook fishing. I'd never in my life seen whitebait in continuous massive schools, hundreds of yards in all directions, inhabiting the place they used to be so effective from because it didn't live in there. You catch the whitebait and sardines in the open water and take them into the mangroves and they're great, because the fish don't see many. It really slowed down our catch rate, too, because the fish already had all that bait around where they were naturally hanging out.
Tom Rowland: Now that you've had time between that event and now, can you make any correlations to why that bait exploded like that?
Rhett Morris: I truly think it was the high levels of nitrogen fueling the micro-marine level of life. Baitfish are feeding on a micro-marine organism of one kind or another, and that level was supercharged, so the bait was also supercharged. Since then, Captains for Clean Water has done a phenomenal job using public awareness to create political pressure, and public pressure on the politicians creates political will. Since that year, we've seen about a 39.5 percent reduction in overall dumping allowed out of the Caloosahatchee River. Lake Okeechobee is now top three, if not the most polluted large inland lake in the nation.
Tom Rowland: And that pollution is fertilizers and other things?
Rhett Morris: Predominantly fertilizers. You've got all the fertilizer runoff coming down from the Orlando area through the Kissimmee Chain, which feeds Lake Okeechobee, and then you've got the spraying done by FWC, which has gone spiraling out of control. They're spraying all the vegetation, which is being grown by the pollution coming from Orlando — the invasives are growing much higher than normal, so they're out there spraying, creating more biological fallout. When they dump that lake down the rivers, it causes catastrophic damage. But because of what Captains did around 2018, it's been phenomenal to see the ever-decreasing presence of red tide on our coastline, and that has helped our baitfish populations basically go back to exactly what they always have been. I would say the baitfish situation in our area right now is as it was 30 years ago.
Tom Rowland: So that would not be an indicator of why the fish have declined. Whenever somebody says there's been a decrease in fish, that's the first thing I think of — well, what do they eat, or has their habitat changed? But you're noticing the bait population is very healthy, and yet we're having a decrease in the number of fish you're catching.
Rhett Morris: Correct. That is absolutely the case. I think our overall fish decrease in redfish and snook, which I'm most concerned about — and trout, but not as much, because trout rise and fall much faster than snook and redfish do. Trout breed throughout the entire year if the conditions are right. Snook and redfish only breed in their seasonal spawning periods. We noticed years ago that trout always have eggs in them, even in wintertime; the roe sacks lie dormant until the weather gets right, and then they'll spawn repeatedly throughout the summer. Snook it's spring into mid-summer, and reds is in the fall.
Rhett Morris: What I believe, along with some other area biologists I've been talking to, has caused our fallout is, first off, habitat loss. I've got some data here from FWC's records that in the recorded history of seagrass meadow abundance in the Charlotte Harbor area, we have lost over 25 percent of what we started with when they began keeping records approximately 35 years ago. It is the lowest level of seagrass abundance in Charlotte Harbor's recorded history.
Tom Rowland: How does that affect the water clarity and quality?
Rhett Morris: As long as it's not raining hard where you're getting a lot of dirty runoff, you wouldn't notice much difference. But when we do have dirty runoff, the seagrass beds — these big turtle grass blades 18 inches long — have a huge effect, because that's a massive gamut of micro-marine filters. Whether it's the barnacles on the blades, or the crabs and shrimp, everything that's part of that ecosystem is a natural filter.
Tom Rowland: And that loss — how much of it is attributed to the red tide, that massive 2018 event?
Rhett Morris: That's an interesting question, because red tide itself has nothing to do with destroying grass flats until you have a gigantic red tide that caused the largest loss of marine life, which caused the largest level of nitrogen infused into a water system in history. That started a macroalgae bloom of a material called filamentous algae. It's a thick, hairy-looking algae. It grows in big balls, the size of a basketball and smaller, and comes together in a huge mat. It blew up right after our red tide started. By the fall of 2018, around September, our red tide had kicked off in its early severity by June, and it kept accelerating. By September there was so much nitrogen in the water that this filamentous algae, which is actually a freshwater macroalgae not really found in estuarine environments, gained an ability to live in an estuarine environment like it had never been seen or recorded in our bay before. That stuff grew so thick over the seagrass beds that it literally blocked out all ability for photosynthesis, and that was it. You have the Caloosahatchee on the south, the Peace River and Myakka on the north, and all of that polluted water came together and just nuked the entire eastern shore of Charlotte Harbor. The algae beds were so thick they wiped out the seagrass, and then every summer when the water got over 80 degrees, it started to rot, and it turned thousands of acres of flats into a giant hypoxic death zone. Any juvenile snook and redfish that live in the mangroves and edges of the grass flats were pushed out to the edge of that hypoxic zone to find enough oxygen to breathe, and they got massacred by any larger snook, red, jack, shark, or tarpon that came swimming by. It really started us into a downward spiral even greater than the one that started around 2005.
Tom Rowland: From there, what did the recovery look like today for your fishing?
Rhett Morris: The biggest positive I've seen was caused by Hurricane Milton. Milton beat a surge record that had broken a 100-year record before it. Fourteen days after Helene came Milton. This was different because we had the wind, which agitated the water and the bottom, which lifted up all that algae and pushed it onto the land, onto the mangrove islands, which is again a natural filter. I would say well over 95 percent of all existing macroalgae was trapped inside the mangrove islands and on any land mass. That was a huge help, because it gave any place that still had a seagrass root a chance to grow back. We have actually seen quite a few areas growing seagrass back. This summer, starting in late April is when the algae would begin to rot, and we had no rotting algae, no hypoxic zones. It was literally like time-warping back to the '90s. Sadly, some areas like the upper northeastern side of Charlotte Harbor, an area known as Pirate Harbor up to Alligator Creek — somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 acres — was hit so heavily by the algae bloom that it wiped out the seagrass to a level where it's about 95 percent gone. There are little patches trying to come back. What also helped the effect of Milton is that this is the largest drought we've seen in southwest Florida in maybe 100 years. Our rainfall is down excessively. The largest drought in the past 50 years happened five years ago around 2020, and now we're in a drought that beat that. That drought is helping not push dirty water out to start regrowing our algae. The hope is that maybe, now that we've had this reprieve from Milton, the new influx of whatever dirty water comes off the land won't be enough to fire up that algae, because there is plenty of algae left. It's just not near as robust as it was before all that infusion of nitrogen from the red tide in '18.
Tom Rowland: I've always thought that a hurricane is very bad for anything manmade, but very good for anything natural. It's like flushing the toilet almost. Not something you wish for, but in this case it seems to be beneficial. I've seen it be beneficial in the Keys too, where a hurricane comes through and changes everything around. For several hurricanes we had virtually no redfish in the Lower Keys, and then a hurricane would come through and they were everywhere, and they stuck around for a couple years. It's such a displacement event for the fish and the bait that it can be beneficial, but you never really know what's happening. Really, the only way you can tell those kinds of things is somebody like yourself who has kept records all along.
Tom Rowland: Through your records, noticing a decline in the numbers of fish caught — what that means for anglers today is it's gotten harder, and you want to do something about it. Explain your thought process, first of noticing there's a problem big enough to bring up, and then thinking about what the right thing to do would be.
Rhett Morris: It's pretty simple, Tom. All of us find ourselves complaining on the dock more than we are high-fiving at the end of our charters these days. Nobody I know who fishes around here a lot is happy with the daily. You see some good stuff here and there — the fishery's still a wonderful fishery — but the overall abundance that was once here is not here anymore. If you look at the facts of what's happening today: in Florida's recorded history there has never been this level of coastal development happening at the rate it's happening today. There's never been this level of water-quality decline statewide, and there's never been this level of habitat loss, which is tied directly into the prior two. On top of that, we have a level of fishing pressure statewide that's never been seen before. These are problems we're not going to touch tomorrow. But we have another tool available to start tomorrow, which is fisheries management. The last time management for redfish was changed substantially — a slot size, or possibly adding a closed season — was 37 years ago. Snook management, updating anything substantial for them, hasn't happened in 20 years. If we've had so much incredible change, why are we not looking at fisheries management? I talked to a few area biologists, and we came up with a rough start of the conversation. This isn't the law that we have to have. It's the start of a conversation we must begin.
Rhett Morris: We're talking about a 25 to 27-inch slot on redfish. The guys who want to fill their freezer will have a knee-jerk reaction and say that's not cool, they only have a two-inch window. But think about it. At this point in time, the redfish slot is nine inches wide. It takes a redfish two and a half to three years to grow through that slot, so the escapement rate — how many fish make it through to become a big breeder — is low. Because of that, the sub-adult population is low and the actual adult population is low. If you've ever seen the giant schools up on the Gulf Coast, 500 to 1,000 fish, 40 inches or bigger, coming in to spawn in the fall — that used to be a regular thing. On a calm day you'd go outside Boca or Stump Pass and find three, four, five acres of redfish on top. I haven't seen that in a decade. If we change the slot, the sub-adult population within our inshore fishery is going to dramatically increase, and when you do get to keep one at 25 to 27 inches, there's going to be some meat on the fish. These guys keeping 18-and-a-half-inch redfish, there's a ridiculously low amount of meat. It'll only take the average redfish six months to 12 months to grow through that window. So we'll increase our available sub-adult population to catch within the harbor, and at the same time recharge the adult population offshore, which allows our over-pressured fishery to cope with today's reality.
Tom Rowland: The way you just described that sounds completely reasonable to me, and I'm a person who has made a living taking people fishing. Who would oppose that?
Rhett Morris: We've been putting this up on social media, trying to get some traction, because we have a petition on the website. You'll get one out of every 30 or 40 comments where someone says this is all because there are too many charter captains, we should limit the number. I haven't had any negative comment come forth with any validity to their argument. I'm waiting to hear back from a biologist at the Florida Wildlife Research Institute, Sarah Burnsed Walters, and another guy locally from Florida Wildlife Commission, Dave Blewett, because I haven't discussed this with them directly yet.
Rhett Morris: When you move up to snook, the slot is now five inches wide, 28 to 33. The biggest problem is that the fish cannot make it into the adult class. The fishing pressure is so high that as soon as they hit that 28-inch mark — between 26 and 30 inches, the fish turns into a female fish. When that happens, they benefit our fishery because they can begin to spawn. If you take it up to a minimum of 35 inches, you dramatically increase the number of snook that become positive influencers of the fishery, because they'll be breeding for years before they're allowed to be kept. With a short two-inch window, it'll take a snook a year to two years to grow through, and they'll become super breeders after that. Here's an interesting fact. If we implement this 35 to 37-inch slot and, over the first few years, by not eliminating them at 28, the first class of fish can grow all the way to 35 inches without being harvested, the potential reproduction contribution to our fishery just here in Charlotte Harbor is over 75 billion eggs. And that's looking at a base test zone with, say, 30,000 snook overall.
Tom Rowland: Wow.
Rhett Morris: When I was a kid, fishing wasn't popular like it is now. In the early '90s, guys were like, 'Are you seriously missing so-and-so's party this weekend? Why are you always fishing?' And I'm like, 'Because I'm catching half a dozen snook in the 40-plus-inch range on top-water plugs every morning.' So few people who fish a lot these days have any clue what it's actually like to watch a snook in the mid-30s to low 40s come up and destroy a top-water lure. I know we can bring it back. It's a simple issue of letting the fish grow. People talk about hatcheries. Hatcheries are great, but they cost a lot of money and time, and you're introducing an offspring that didn't grow up wild. The most viable way to look at this whole project is to let the fishery become its own hatchery. It's free. All we have to do is change management and let nature do what it does best.
Tom Rowland: What kind of data do you think, from your discussions, FWC would need to change the slot to what you're proposing?
Rhett Morris: That's a very interesting question, because sadly, within our Florida Wildlife Commission, what has become very apparent over the last few years is that our entire commission board — all seven members, with the exception of one who's in the auto industry — is in the land development industry in some way. Because of that, they have no vested interest in doing anything proactive with our fishery, because it'll create more work for the whole organization. If they can keep the status quo rolling along, they're quite happy to. That's why there haven't been any big changes. Ten years ago, I was fighting like crazy to get regional management — no more blanket management, let's manage each individual estuary as its own. That was finally implemented three years ago, yet nothing's been done. Here we have a wonderful opportunity to take a place like Charlotte Harbor and make it a test zone. The answer to your question is a little scary, because I truly believe what it's going to take is not as much data-driven as it is public-pressure-driven. Captains has taught me that over the last decade. In Tallahassee, those people could care less about anything we go up there talking about, but when there's enough people talking about it, they cannot ignore it.
Tom Rowland: One of the things I've always been the most impressed with about Captains is that there are a lot of ways to handle a problem. The first way is the people using the resource get upset, start yelling and pointing fingers. That's a totally legitimate response — your fishery, your living, your identity is being destroyed. What's been one of the strengths of Captains was to remain calm, and to not do this strictly with fishing guides and customers, but to say to other people who have a vested interest, 'Let me show you what's going on' — the realtor, the restaurant owner, the person who makes a living with paddle boards. Anyone doing anything with the ocean, which is basically everyone in Florida. The water is the draw. If the water is toxic and there are dead fish all over the beach, people aren't going to want to come eat in your restaurant or buy the house on the beach. That was one of the biggest strengths of Captains — to include those people and educate them that this is much bigger than a couple of fishing guys losing their jobs.
Rhett Morris: You're exactly right, Tom.
Tom Rowland: Even if you have the development people on the board, they're trying to develop properties people are going to want. You're clearly saying there's more fishing interest now than you remember. If the fishing was better, the prices of those houses or condos would go up. If everybody who goes out catches a 35-inch snook, more people are going to want to go. That's an education piece — tying it back to a financial stake for people who currently might have zero interest, but if they see it affects their pocketbook or their development, they might think twice.
Rhett Morris: You're exactly right, and I'm glad you've taken the conversation there, because I've got some interesting facts. From the FWC's records, on an annual basis recently in 2025, over $497 million was generated in the pursuit of recreational fishing sports. Over 4,300 jobs are thought to be tied into that data. That's Charlotte County alone, the largest chunk of the Charlotte Harbor area. Next in line is Lee. So think about this. If your average day of success increases rather than decreases — you've hooked a couple snook over 30 inches and caught 20-something redfish because they were all around the way they used to be — you start thinking that was a solid return on what I invested in my day. A 1 percent increase, starting with the data on FWC's website, is an annual injection of over $5 million. In three years, almost $15 million of positive revenue. At 5 percent, $25 million a year, almost $75 million over three years. If it was 10 percent — and this isn't 10 percent more people, it's 10 percent more fishing trips with the existing population — that's $49.7 million in one year and almost $150 million over three years of new revenue that didn't even exist before, just because we're managing the fishery appropriately for today's reality. By the way, in the last 30 years, the fishing license numbers have more than tripled. The state's population in 30 years has more than doubled. So by record, we have that much of an increase in actual fishing pressure.
Tom Rowland: I wonder how productive it might be if you went the other way, because that's all optimistic. What if you took it the other way and said, if catches decline 10 percent, what does that mean in lost revenue for the county? That might be where you really get the attention. There are a lot of places people go fishing. Some people who don't understand fishermen don't realize you can go to the Bahamas, Nantucket, California, Alaska — anywhere. If they're choosing your county, it's because it means something to them and the fishing is really good. More people will choose it because it's centrally located, easy to get to, and you don't need a passport. That might be the angle that gets attention — we're going to sink a billion dollars into this development; how do we know we can fill it up?
Rhett Morris: That's a great point. If you look at the area's crown jewels — the clean beaches, the waterfront restaurants, the golf courses — the fishery is definitely one of our most prominent. When it comes to fisheries management, it's not legislature. It's literally the stroke of the pen of our commission board. In so many areas of the world where the population of people has increased, the ecosystem always suffers. It's happening here, and we have many more people coming. It's far beyond time for us to err on the side of caution. Why would we not want to move the needle the other way and give it a try? If it doesn't work, we move it back.
Tom Rowland: Your website where the petition lives is morefishflorida.com — Florida spelled out. That's the action item for this podcast. If it made sense to you, and it certainly makes sense to me. I've seen slot limits work — when they changed the slot for triple tail recently, it wasn't but a year later we were catching bigger ones.
Rhett Morris: Exactly. Speaking of slot changes and closures, there's another interesting piece of data on the FWC's website. After the 2018 fish kill, there was a four-year closure on redfish and snook, and during that closure they recorded the highest abundance of redfish in Charlotte Harbor ever recorded.
Tom Rowland: Really?
Rhett Morris: Yes. And there's another piece back in 2010 — you remember the snook fish kill from the cold? Their data shows quite clearly that snook of all sizes rose together in number, and when they opened it two and a half years later, only 28 inches and above, right where the slot starts, began to dramatically decline. That was the first time I'd had proof that there is a lot more hook-and-line pressure than we realize.
Tom Rowland: When you were saying some of the opposition cited too many charter guides — what do you think about that? Are there more charter guides than you've ever seen?
Rhett Morris: My opinion is they're right that the person who made the comment isn't talking out of imagination. There are way more fishing guides now than there ever have been. But good for them. At some point, maybe like Louisiana does, they charge a substantial fee to be an out-of-state guide. Maybe something like that needs to happen in Florida. The Florida Wildlife Commission has got to wake up to the fact that they cannot continue floating down the bay on that old mantra of Florida, the fishing capital of the world — come take all you want, we've got plenty. That was true for many decades, but it's no longer true. Our management organization is charged with ensuring the future of our land-based and water-based recreational hunting and fishing, and I feel they've really missed the mark. When you ask FWC what the mission is when it comes to the fishery, they say it's to provide access. Their version of providing access is how many fish can be kept and still have some left over for next year. That ideal has bitten us, because by staying with it they've actually reduced overall access — the fish stocks have fallen so low that the average angler is now restricted on access. I talk to people at the boat ramp all the time, clients of mine, who say this is the hardest fishery they've ever fished. They've got $180,000 in their boat and gear, they did what I told them, and they don't seem to catch much. Providing access now needs to be angled from actual opportunity to catch a fish, not how many fish can be thrown in the cooler.
Tom Rowland: There will be a time delay between whatever you're doing today and whatever is set forth in the future. What responsibility do you think the charter guides have? You're the captain of your boat. You can tell people they can keep the fish or not, but that takes communication up front. When somebody books, you can ask how important it is that they go home with a cooler full of fish. Maybe that's not the right customer for you if you're passionate about this issue. I understand some guides can't afford to turn down the trip, but others have a lot of people calling and can say, 'I run a catch-and-release outfit.' Do guides have a responsibility, and could they have a positive effect just by having that conversation?
Rhett Morris: That's a great point. I've started close to 20 young guys in the last 30 years, and I realized the catch-and-release issue way back, before it was accepted by anybody. I was called a fool for a long time. I was getting trips from senior guides back then, and when they found out how I felt about catch-and-release, they kind of kicked me to the curb, and I lost a lot of business over that. Looking at our fishery today, my advice to these young captains is simple: you are the guide, and you have to make a conscious decision to guide your clientele in the right direction. Whenever you see an opportunity — and I believe it exists in most clients — tell them, 'I know this is your first time to Florida, the season is open, however the numbers are not what they used to be. We don't want to kill these fish that are extra fun to catch, the snook that pulled the line off the reel and jumped, the redfish we had to sneak up on while it was tailing. You're going to remember that a lot more than how they taste. Let's go get some sea trout and snapper, maybe some mackerel' — species whose populations aren't in as much trouble. Help guide people's understanding of our new reality rather than just say, 'Yeah, if you want to keep them, let's keep them.'
Tom Rowland: It seems like a culture thing, too. There's a lot of people who say they want to keep fish because that's just what they think you're supposed to do. They don't know you don't have to.
Rhett Morris: It's hilarious how many times people over the years got on my boat and said, 'I hope we get a snook, they're the best eating ones out here.' I'll say, 'How do you cook snook when you eat it?' And two out of three times the guy will say, 'Well, I've actually never eaten one, I just hear they're the best.'
Tom Rowland: Given the option of, 'We could fish for snook all day and might catch one, or I can take you over here and we can catch six snappers for dinner, then go try for the big snook' — sometimes people just don't understand there's even an option like that. Personally, I'd rather have gray snapper.
Rhett Morris: One hundred percent. That's what I really wish more of the young guides would do — just be more of a guide. Guide your anglers in a direction that makes more sense in today's reality. Luckily we still have enough viability within our ecosystem that I'm 100 percent confident we can turn this place around, because life always finds a way. Even if we didn't have the bait we used to have, and even with over a 25 percent loss of seagrass meadows, this place can still become 10 times what it is today. We just have to realize that the way we've always done it doesn't work anymore.
Tom Rowland: So morefishflorida.com is where you go to sign the petition, learn more, and watch the videos. If you agree with it, sign it, and then most importantly, share it. The share could be even more important than signing it.
Rhett Morris: Yeah. You get it to more people, and with social media you can get it in front of a lot of people that way. If you agree with what you saw on this podcast, check morefishflorida.com out. There's a little six-minute video that reiterates the facts we've discussed here. If that makes sense to you, please sign that petition, and definitely share the link with anybody and everybody who may want to see a brighter future here in the Charlotte Harbor region.
Tom Rowland: Do you have to sign the petition as a resident of Florida?
Rhett Morris: No, absolutely not. Out-of-state signatures are actually more important than residents, because our number one industry of revenue generation is tourism.
Tom Rowland: I appreciate what you're doing, man. It's great catching up with you. I'm going to sign the petition for sure. We'll be back next week. Just a little teaser here — I'm very excited about this. I've wanted to have the person from Oyster Rods on for a long time. I love their story. If you don't know it, they teach you how to make a bamboo fly rod in North Georgia. Rhett made one, and just like he decided he was going to shoot a turkey with a bow and arrow, then went deeper and deeper into the sport, this is about as deep into fly fishing as you could possibly go. He wanted to make his own bamboo fly rod for use in salt water, which isn't something that's been done since Lee Wulff, and then catch a permit on this bamboo rod. That's the story we're going to go over — building the rod, what it took to catch the permit, and why in the world you'd even want to do that.
Rhett Morris: Right on, brother. I get it, man.
Tom Rowland: Congratulations for that. It's an incredible goal, and then to have done it. He did it. He caught the permit. So good for you, man.
Rhett Morris: I really appreciate it, brother. I'm looking forward to that podcast.
Tom Rowland: All right, Rhett, thanks so much for coming today. We'll have another great guest next week. And if you want to do something — maybe you've never even been to this area — but there is something in your own area that's super important to you, I would encourage you to get involved. Write a letter to your congressman, write a letter to the FWC, write a letter to somebody. Get involved. Your voice actually matters, and that's what Rhett is doing right now with morefishflorida.com. Everyone's voice matters, so if you're into it, go in there and check it out. All right, we'll see you next week.
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