Elliot Sudal - Viral Shark Video, The Raft Survival Show & Shark Conservation

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 66 with Elliot Sudal.

Elliot Sudal: Hey, this is Elliot Sudal, also known as ACKSharks. Welcome to the Tom Rowland podcast.

Tom Rowland: Today, I have an amazing, awesome conversation with a really cool guy. Elliot Sudal is ACKSharks on Instagram. He is a guy that is obsessed with shark fishing, and he has achieved national notoriety through some viral videos. And, man, we find out how this one viral video has really sent him on a different path down his life, and he's following along. This guy finds himself in some crazy situations, and he's a great storyteller. I think you're really, really gonna enjoy this conversation. I did. I really liked it.

Tom Rowland: Right before we get there, I just wanna tell you about a couple of things. We've been working a lot on the podcast, the Tom Rowland podcast. You can go there and be part of our book club. There's tons of books. Any book that I'm reading, I throw it on the book club list. You can buy those books right there and participate in the book club. Send me an email at podcast@saltwaterexperience.com. So many of you have, and I really appreciate it. Guest suggestions, show suggestions, any of that is welcome there, as well as just telling me what you're up to. So many of you have told me how the podcast has helped you decide that you're gonna follow your dreams, man. You're gonna make them a reality, and that's really very cool. So many of the guests that we've had on this show have done exactly that, all with different paths to being able to do what they love for a living, whether that's hunting, fishing, being outdoors, physical training, whatever it is. Most of these guests have taken an unconventional path. Elliot is no exception to that. He's definitely taken an unconventional path, and we're gonna learn about it right now.

Tom Rowland: Alright, man. Elliot, I'm glad you could come. I've been following you on Instagram and very, very happy that we could make this happen. You just happen to be in the Keys. Here we are in Key West.

Elliot Sudal: Well, yeah. Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to be here. This is awesome. Thank you.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, man. It's fun. So you are Mister Shark, Mister Beach Shark, from what I can see.

Elliot Sudal: I guess I kinda fell into that.

Tom Rowland: So how does that happen for you?

Elliot Sudal: Well, it's a pretty interesting story. It's a long story.

Tom Rowland: We got a lot of time.

Elliot Sudal: Over the last five years, I kinda fell into this whole land-based shark fishing, I guess, shark guy kinda thing. But it's really transformed a lot now towards the research side of it and building social media, and I'm finally at a point where it's kind of my full life. It's what I do full time now. Right now, I'm traveling around Florida sampling different sharks and taking blood samples and tagging and tracking how they move and learning a lot about them. So this is like my life now. It's pretty cool.

Tom Rowland: That is cool. So a professional shark fisherman, did you ever think that that was a possibility when you were growing up?

Elliot Sudal: No. I mean, I grew up in Connecticut, man. There's no sharks there. I always liked to fish, though. I had a pond in my backyard, and there was bass and trout and stuff like that. It evolved over time.

Tom Rowland: So what's the fascination with sharks? How did that happen? There's always something. Like, I got fascinated with trout first and then permit, and then sharks are in there for sure. When you see this path of certain fishermen that leads to specializing in something, there's usually something there that was a catalyst for that being your target, the sharks. What is that?

Elliot Sudal: Mine was a viral video.

Tom Rowland: Oh, really? Which video?

Growing up fishing and heading to Alaska

Elliot Sudal: Alright. So I always liked to fish. I grew up at a pond in my backyard in Connecticut. Bass and trout in the streams and stuff like that. I would actually ride my bike around as a kid and catch all these largemouth bass and put them in a bucket with an aerator and bring them back to my pond.

Tom Rowland: Oh, cool.

Elliot Sudal: And so I had, like, the biggest bass in my pond. So that's kinda how my fishing addiction started. But I bought a one-way ticket to Alaska when I was 18. I was in between college. It was my summer thing, getting out there. I wanted to get out of Connecticut, see what's out there. And I was driven with the whole fishing side of it. I wanted to catch a giant halibut. I wanted to catch some salmon. I'd always liked trout fishing. So I went up there and kinda found out that I could follow my dreams, explore the world a bit, see what's out there. You really build a sense of confidence around it once you see that you can go somewhere and make money and have fun and meet people.

Tom Rowland: How did you make money in Alaska? Unloading fishing boats?

Elliot Sudal: And overnighting the fish back to the Lower 48, as they call it up there.

Tom Rowland: And these are full-on commercial boats, like halibut boats and salmon boats?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. A lot of recreational boats too. Charter boats. I was in a town called Homer, 220 miles south of Anchorage.

Tom Rowland: That's made famous by Tom Bodett, I think, who wrote a book about Homer, Alaska, right?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. It's a beautiful place. I lived on the Homer Spit, which is a four-mile peninsula, quarter mile wide, thousand-boat harbor right at the end of it, and 360 degrees, 4,000-foot mountains coming out of the water. It's just so amazing. Twenty-two-foot tides, huge tides, salmon. They actually make these artificial holes, they dig these big holes, and they put the salmon eggs in them. And the salmon come back four years later, and then they just swim in circles, because it's not like a river that they can go up. So it's like these artificial salmon fishing holes.

Tom Rowland: Wow. I wonder how they figured that out.

Elliot Sudal: They normally return to the same river, but they come back to where they put them in these ponds, and they just swim in circles and you kinda catch them and snag them out. So that was really cool seeing that.

Landing on Nantucket and the first viral shark video

Elliot Sudal: But the whole shark thing, my parents moved down to Florida, South Florida, and I was visiting on winter break. And I took a tour boat out to Cayo Costa. I really liked it, and I didn't know exactly what I was gonna do with my life. I went to school for biology. I was at UConn, and I was at Central Connecticut State University. So I was doing biology and environmental science. I had worked with fish and wildlife service for two years out of college in Connecticut in Long Island Sound, and all I did was fish for stripers and blues and stuff like that. But, anyway, long story short, it was so hot and so buggy and horrible in Florida in, like, May. And I'm thinking, I gotta go somewhere else. I gotta get out of here. So I packed my car, and I took a job online on Nantucket. And I didn't really realize what Nantucket was. Have you been to Nantucket?

Tom Rowland: One time. My sister worked there. Actually, both my sisters worked there when they were, like, college age.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah.

Tom Rowland: And I think they worked in some kind of tourist sweet shop or something there. We went and visited them. Definitely a different kind of deal. Very cool in the morning. I remember it being very foggy.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah, it's always foggy. I have never really fished there. It's awesome. It's really good fishing, but it's a really, really wealthy place that makes Captiva or Sanibel look like a ghetto. It is so much money out there. I ended up leaving my car for the first part of it. You have to take a ferry to get over there. But I took a job driving a boat in the morning, kind of, I have my captain's license. I was just showing big yachts into where they would go when they'd enter the harbor. So three weeks into being in Nantucket, I'm surfcasting for blues and stripers and trying to figure out the scene over there. And I'm bringing in a bluefish. And this huge shark comes over, like a nine-foot, or eight or nine-foot sandbar shark, brown shark. They call them brown sharks up there. It just bites the fish in half. And I just put on a little wire leader and threw it back out there, and I hooked the shark. It comes right back and bites the other half of the fish. So I fight this thing for, well, it was like an hour. And this huge crowd of people comes around, and everyone's freaking out about what's going on. I had no experience doing this. I had no idea what to expect. I just saw this shark. And obviously I was on, you know, 30-pound test or something. And basically I just ran in and grabbed the shark by the tail and pulled it up on the beach, like you see in all my photos now. Someone videoed it and sent it to the local newspaper there, the Inquirer and Mirror, the old-school Nantucket newspaper.

Elliot Sudal: And three hours later, I guess they put it on their website, I start getting all these phone calls from blocked numbers. This was in the heyday of viral videos. Remember when they really went viral? And it was just call after call after call. "This is Bill from CNN, and we'd like to get an interview about your shark experience on Nantucket Island." And then six hours later, Good Morning America flies out a crew. So in between this, I had taken three scoops of pre-workout and gone to the gym. So I'm all hyped up, freaking out. And I'm getting these phone calls, super excited, but obviously acting like a total weirdo because I'm so hyped up at the gym. But, yeah, they fly out and do an interview. I end up doing 80 interviews, all sorts of radio stuff, they fly me to New York.

Tom Rowland: I saw all this. Somehow, I mean, it went so viral that basically everyone saw it. I remember seeing it. And I think part of the lure of this is that you had your shirt off and you're jacked as hell. I mean, you're in really good shape. And I remember this. They were like, this guy goes in and he gets this shark, and, of course, then it didn't hurt that you were jacked and looking ripped. And then it goes super viral on things like Good Morning America and all of the things that you're talking about. So I'm just now putting two and two together because I'm following you from Instagram, not even thinking about that.

Elliot Sudal: That's back when my Instagram was, you know, 300 followers. And it was really the first big shark I ever landed. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what I was talking about in these interviews. I sounded crazy. I didn't sleep for, like, three days. So by the end of it, I'm repeating the same story over and over again. Oh, the shark swims over and bites it in half. It was a bluefish like what I just told you, but getting sloppy. And you do these things called radio tours where they book you for an hour, and you'll do, like, 20 radio stations. And they just rapid fire. You go through morning radio.

Tom Rowland: Are you going to 20 different stations, or you're just doing it at one place?

Elliot Sudal: You're on your phone. And they wire you through to different radio stations. So it's rapid fire, the same questions and interviews. Anyway, so that was my first viral video. That's what kinda got this whole thing started, and a lot happened from that. Like, I happened to be in the biology field, and people from NOAA reached out and said, hey. You got all this attention right now. Try to spin it towards conservation and tagging, and try to do some good with all this.

Getting into shark tagging and conservation

Elliot Sudal: So they said, let's send you some tags. They sent me some shark tags, three tags to get your starter kit, and a little thing you put them in.

Tom Rowland: Is it like a fish tag? Like, it looks like a piece of fly line, or a piece of monofilament that's got some numbers and stuff on it?

Elliot Sudal: These things. Yeah. Now I get 250 a year, but they start you with three. So I didn't know anything about shark fishing. I was using, like, a six-foot St. Croix boat rod. I had no idea what was going on. But I fell into it. I liked it. I started getting a lot of followers, and I ended up catching 19 sharks that summer.

Tom Rowland: Nineteen. You know, that's you working at it.

Elliot Sudal: Figuring it out. It's weird, man. It's like you have an hour window right before slack tide in the spot, and they all come through. It's like clockwork. You get there, throw a chunk of bluefish. I mean, I figured it out now, but at this time, the learning process of getting it down and figuring out how to land them with the right hooks and using circle hooks. So that's how this whole shark thing started, that original viral video. And it was funny because I knew nothing about Nantucket. I knew no one there. I was living in my car. I was driving a boat, and all of a sudden everyone on the island knows me. "Hey, Shark guy." I mean, most famous guy from Nantucket, limericks, all these newspaper articles were going crazy. And I'm living in my car, showering at the beach shower thing that they have there. But it was cool. Met a lot of people through that. Got a lot better at it that year.

Tom Rowland: So you're still driving the boat and trying to make a living there and also catch sharks? And at what point do you kinda think, maybe I can spin this into something that I can do?

Elliot Sudal: Two years before. So over that year, I got so many DMs about people wanting to go out and shark fish. So I said, okay, I'm not gonna drive the boat this year. I'm gonna see if I can make a living off doing this, just taking people from the beach, charge 200. Meet me at the beach, and I'll take them out. And the first year, it worked out really well. I did, like, 30 trips, which is definitely not enough to survive on Nantucket. But it was my first taste of being like a charter type guy, kind of fishing full time. It was fun. I think I caught 60 sharks the second year, and got better at it. Tagged a lot of them. Got into the tagging thing. Did some more new stuff. Got bigger rods. Now I use 15-foot rods and these ridiculous ugly sticks that are literally 15 feet.

Comparing beach sharks to boat sharks and big hammerheads

Tom Rowland: So how do you start splitting your time between Nantucket and Florida? Nantucket dies out in October. By October, there's guys out there bluefin tuna fishing, which I did a little bit of.

Elliot Sudal: I caught, like, a 500-pounder this year. That's a workout. No, man. I'd catch a hammer over a big bluefin any day.

Tom Rowland: Really? You'd rather? The hammer off the beach has gotta be one of the most challenging fish, I think, because we've caught big ones out of the boat. And it's a whole different deal. I've never done it off the beach. I want to.

Elliot Sudal: I caught one last week up in the Jupiter area. About an 11-footer. I sent you the video. We caught another one. But there are such big hammers out there. I've gotten spooled on these 80-wides. These hammers can be 15 feet. They can be over a thousand pounds. It is scary, the amount of drag. That reel puts off 130 pounds of drag. If you're in the harness pushing over, you know, like a hundred pounds of drag on the beach. I've had to tie people to trees, like a rope around a tree and then to the person. And like, okay, hold on. They're so strong. But with a boat, you move with them. So it's a very different feel than the whole beach aspect of it.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. There are challenges, though, with the boat too. Where we have done the very best is at Long Key Bridge for the really big hammers when they come in for the sharks. And they tend to go back through the bridge and then back through the bridge again. So you have a 13-foot hammerhead and a 24-foot bay boat, and then there's countless spans. There's so many bridge spans, and there's two different bridges. So the new bridge, the spans are way far apart. The old bridge, everything has to line up. The tide rips through there. So the shark's fighting and fighting, and then he decides, okay, I'm going through this one, and now we have to go through the same one. And oftentimes it's not the one that the tide's telling you you should go through. So it can be very challenging, but I really don't think fishing out of the boat for those big sharks is anywhere nearly even close to being as challenging as catching them off the beach. And I've never done that. I've caught small sharks off the beach.

Building a following on Instagram

Tom Rowland: But so I wanna get back to your story about how you end up in Florida. You're kinda getting this thing going, and it's dying out for you in October. This time, you're now successfully guiding. You're the Shark guy on Nantucket. People are looking for you. Your social media following has grown considerably by this point. Right? A hundred k the other day. But that's now. Back when you're just doing this, are these people finding you all through social media, or your advertising, or what?

Elliot Sudal: No, I never advertised at all. Honestly, all through Instagram. Everything has been through Instagram. Direct messages there, what I've been posting. Instagram has done everything for building me here. And I've actually had three viral videos now, but those helped as well. Those bursts where you're on the news and you get a lot of coverage definitely grow your page. I got a thousand followers in a minute one time. Recently, when I caught a big hammerhead back around Easter. Anyway, I got a lot of followers from that.

Tom Rowland: That's when your phone just literally explodes.

Elliot Sudal: You scroll up and you're like, is that right? Did that just go? So it's really cool how that worked. It was on Shark Week this year. I did a little thing with that. So my following's growing. I'm realizing I really like this. I like fishing all the time. It's so much more fun than working in an office. I was counting horseshoe crabs in Long Island Sound before that.

Tom Rowland: That's much slower paced. I mean, you gotta wait for the sharks for a while. I would imagine there's some dead time. But counting horseshoe crabs, that's pretty slow too.

Elliot Sudal: Well, you go to school for biology and you wanna do something cool, you wanna be outside, and it's like, okay, but you're not gonna make any money if you're just sitting on some island counting crabs or analyzing whatever. You really gotta make your own way. Fishing for a living, figuring out how to do it is pretty wild.

Tom Rowland: You know, that's such a theme. I've chosen guests for this podcast that have basically done that. Everybody from a Bill Dance or Roland Martin, who figured out this whole industry as one of the pioneers of it and are just hacking their way through the jungle the whole time, paving a road for everybody else to come behind them. But now there are all kinds of young people that are doing things that simply didn't exist before. And I was just talking about this the other day with another guy on this podcast about how, at one point, it would have been very, very difficult to say, I'm going to be a professional shark fisherman. That's before Instagram, before YouTube, before ways that you could monetize what you're doing. So you had to be a shark guide, or you had to provide a service for other people to do what you're doing. Now that has really changed, and really, there is no blueprint for that. It's like, now you're just making your way, and every day is a new adventure almost.

Elliot Sudal: Right. And the social media side of it almost gets to a point where it's like, what can I do so differently that people are gonna watch it? Because, honestly, the more people see your stuff, that's how you kinda pick up sponsors and make money and get the clicks. It's like, how crazy can we get with this? Which is sort of fun in a way. I'm making slingshots, literally water balloon launchers shooting mullet out there 300 yards and catching sharks that way and giant rods. Stuff that's not necessarily necessary, but it's entertaining to watch. And there's that whole game too. But yeah, it's the wild West. Just figuring it out and fishing with people that also have big pages, and you can kinda link it together. My experience is through Instagram. That's how I grew what I did.

Chasing sharks in Florida and a year in the Caribbean

Tom Rowland: So we still haven't crossed from Nantucket back to Florida. How do you end up in Sanibel?

Elliot Sudal: So my parents lived in Fort Myers, and they had a house down there. At this point, I graduated from college and was still trying to figure it out. I really like the sharks stuff, and I'm getting involved with the tagging. In Florida, it's so much harder to make money doing this than Nantucket, in my experience. In Nantucket, you can charge anything, and there are so many sharks. You don't have to sit out. You don't have to drop a bait and wait hours. You don't have to deal with no seeums. I go to the beach. I cast the bait. It's five minutes. I have a shark gun. I bring people. We have our sharks. It's not like guiding from a boat where you can say, oh, well, the permit aren't biting, let's go get something else. In Florida, it's really a waiting game trying to catch sharks. So my whole guiding scene from the beach doesn't really work out so well down here. I've definitely tried. We get them here and there, but it's just not as fun.

Tom Rowland: But at this point, you basically learned how to shark fish off of that viral video. You're fishing for one species of shark up there. You come to Florida. Now 20 species. So what was that like, learning about all these different species and how to catch them and where to target them?

Elliot Sudal: So much fun. So it was three years, I'm just putting it all together now. It was three years of me figuring out what baits catch what sharks in what spots in different locations and figuring out this rig. Just all these little things that go into successfully targeting these giant hammerheads and bulls and tigers and lemons, and fishing the blacktip run. We even get sandbars. There are 20 species you can catch down here. I've caught 32 between everywhere I've been.

Tom Rowland: Thirty-two different species of sharks. So did you have to go out of the country to catch some of those?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. So I spent a year in the Caribbean. I went all the way down to South America. I was on a 92-foot catamaran sailboat, 38 feet wide, private boat. I was the first mate on that boat.

Tom Rowland: Now is this in pursuit of sharks, or is this just an opportunity you had and took?

Elliot Sudal: I just had that opportunity and took it. This boat got their anchor stuck in Nantucket Harbor. They anchored in a horrible spot, gigantic boat, 150-ton boat. They couldn't get their anchor out. I was in that little guide boat showing people around. And I come over, and they're like, we can't figure this out. So I helped them get out. We pulled the anchor, and they said, do you wanna check out the boat? It's like a $12,000,000 boat. So I check it out, and they were really nice. And they're like, hey, what are you doing in a week? I'm like, I don't know. Why? They're like, well, we're looking for a first mate. We're gonna be in Annapolis, and we're going to the Caribbean for a year. Are you down? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I packed everything into my car, drove to Florida, and then flew to Maryland. And then spent four weeks getting the boat ready and sailed to the Caribbean.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Elliot Sudal: And I was on this yacht for a year. Let me tell you. I caught blue marlins off the back of that thing. I packed up three Avet giant reels. I brought all these, and these people were not about fishing, but I got them into it. So that was a really fun year.

Tom Rowland: So you're down there for an entire year, and you're catching all these new fish, right? Blue marlin and stuff like that? But still, you have this tendency towards the sharks?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. So what happened was the owner was on the boat 17 days the entire year I was on there. The owner was a Brazilian guy. He invented the Brazilian equivalent of PayPal. So he's this young dude killing it. He's got this beautiful boat, never there. So he's like, yeah, you guys can run charters if you want. If you guys need to keep busy, go for it. So we ran charters, and it was, like, $60,000 a week to charter this thing. And I would take people tagging sharks on this charter boat. We had a little tender. And take people out. We even fished off the back. I used to hang these rods off the back of the boat at night. We'd be anchored off somewhere crazy. And I would tie a string to the line, and then to a pillow, and then I would fall asleep. So then when the line would go off, the pillow would pull out from my head, and I'd wake up and be like, oh, man, we got a tiger shark on or something crazy.

Tom Rowland: How many pillows do you go through?

Elliot Sudal: It was all sorts of crazy stuff like that. But this boat was beautiful. Man, that was a fun year. We didn't catch as many sharks in the Caribbean as you'd think though. It was a lot of reef sharks, a lot of nurse sharks, a couple tigers here and there, but it seemed kinda fished out in a lot of these places. Like, Southern Caribbean, we didn't see tons of sharks. Which was weird.

Tom Rowland: Did you go to the Bahamas? Because there's a lot there.

Elliot Sudal: Oh, yeah. I've been fishing over there lately.

Tom Rowland: You can go yellowfin tuna fishing over there. You can see as many sharks as you want.

Elliot Sudal: So I fish on this, I'm the tower guy, on a 61-foot Viking. And they do a bunch of tournaments over there. And the sharks, those oceanic whitetips, when they come up, I was throwing tunas and mahis at these oceanic whitetips like they were footballs, trying to keep them away from the marlin. Some of that stuff is so wild over there. But they have sharks over there for sure. But anyway, so I was working on that yacht and doing these charters and taking people out, spearing for lionfish and all sorts of different stuff. I was on there for a year. Wow, I haven't thought about all this in a while.

Surviving eight days on a life raft for National Geographic

Elliot Sudal: So I forget how it happened. My captain was talking to some guy who had just heard that National Geographic was casting for a show, something to do with ocean survival. I'm like, okay, sounds cool. Long story short, I ended up on this show called The Raft. I was on a life raft for eight days, a four-person life raft with two people on it for eight days, 30 miles off Puerto Rico. That was the pilot episode to see if the concept was possible. They didn't know how long they were gonna keep the people out there. They didn't know anything about the show. They were just doing it. They had their 54-foot cat tender, and then they had the life raft with three cameras mounted on it. And they're like, okay, let's see how this goes. So eight days in, they're like, okay, I think this is enough. I had lost 15 pounds. I couldn't see. They wouldn't let you wear sunglasses because your eyes are the gateway to the soul and they wanna see the emotions. And as far as who they paired you with, you would do all these personality tests beforehand, and they would pair you with the person you clashed the most with because they want drama.

Tom Rowland: Wait, hold on. You could wear a hat? Couldn't wear a hat?

Elliot Sudal: I had a hat.

Tom Rowland: What about, like, were you wearing clothes, like long sleeves?

Elliot Sudal: So you could pick your outfit.

Tom Rowland: What'd you pick?

Elliot Sudal: Like a PFG shirt.

Tom Rowland: So you knew enough about cotton. You'd already spent a good bit of time in that kind of environment because, man, that sun will eat you alive.

Elliot Sudal: My lips were falling off. I was so red and disgusting. I couldn't see for two weeks.

Tom Rowland: The other person, did they pick the right outfit? Because that's huge. And then what'd you do about water?

Elliot Sudal: Katadyn six water desalination pump. So it's six hours to pump a gallon. It's like doing reps, man. That's what killed most of the people. So the show went to air, and I worked on it. And no one could do the water thing. It was such an issue for people. I would pump it at night when it wasn't as hot. But I would get hypothermia every night. I found a trash bag floating by, which I would curl up in at night and just shiver. You're always wet. There's always waves crashing on you. We were 30 miles offshore. And they had an infrared camera. It didn't light it up, but they could see what was going on the way the camera technology worked. And after it was over, they showed us these clips of 10-foot tiger sharks just circling. We had no idea. It was nuts.

Elliot Sudal: I saw a marlin eat a wahoo next to the boat. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen. This giant blue marlin eats an entire wahoo that must have been just circling the raft.

Tom Rowland: Like an 800-pounder, a grander. It was amazing. Right up to the other person there, what did they see? Did it freak him out?

Elliot Sudal: No. He was also a boat captain from California. It'd be funny if you heard this. Can you? Never know. We didn't get along. We ended up talking for, like, four days in the middle of it. He was just a tough guy to get along with, man. At night, he was talking about aliens and UFOs all the time. He was trashing the director, who could hear everything we were saying. It was just bad etiquette.

Tom Rowland: How is that possible that you're with only one person 30 miles offshore on a raft, and you choose to be a jackass? Is it an ego thing that he just wants to one-up you all the time? I mean, you're out there. Why not just gel? I just don't understand that. Why would you not want to get along? And especially, was he fit?

Elliot Sudal: Not really. No.

Tom Rowland: So you're pumping water. You're able to do this. Couldn't you just work together as a team? I just don't get it.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. He was on the lousier side of the raft. The way the raft was, we had a sea anchor to keep us out there. So the way it was turned, he was getting splashed way more than I was. So maybe that put him in a bad mood. I don't know. But one night, they would put like a 500-yard rope and tether us to the boat so they didn't lose us at night. And one night, when I was kinda sleeping, he pulled the whole thing in and started cussing out the director. I'm thinking, this is really bad etiquette for TV. This guy determines how you're gonna look on TV. This is your employer. Really unprofessional. And after that, I tried to disassociate from them a bit because I wanted to make a good impression with these guys. And I did, and they hired me on to work for the show. And I ended up doing Swamp People through these guys and a couple different shows. So I think that was the right move. But overall, this guy was just super out there. Sailboat captain from California. Knew everything there is to know about the ocean.

Tom Rowland: So the whole thing is designed to be eight days long?

Elliot Sudal: They cut it down to five for the production of the show.

Tom Rowland: So the idea is that you're gonna see if you can survive for five days on this raft with one other person. And all you have is this desal. And do you have any fishing gear or anything?

Elliot Sudal: Neon yellow, 50-pound test line, and, like, a hook. They gave you a couple little things.

Tom Rowland: And nothing to eat? So did you catch fish and eat them?

Elliot Sudal: I ate raw remoras.

Tom Rowland: A raw remora. Pretty good after day four, I bet.

Elliot Sudal: No. Never good. Even after day four, I'd eat it and throw up. It was disgusting. It tastes like fishy rubber bands.

Tom Rowland: And no mahi or anything? Nothing came around?

Elliot Sudal: One guy caught a mahi, a little mahi. One guy on one of the episodes. But you know what I did catch was triggerfish. I caught two triggerfish by the end of it. So here's what I figured out. I took the garbage bag that I found that I was sleeping in. I took that, and then I cut one of the black straps off our life jackets. We had life jackets. The way this whole thing started was they kinda just push you off a boat, and we're like, okay, simulated plane crash. Swim to that raft. And, like, welcome home. So I cut off the black strap and wrapped it around the fish and then put it in the bag and left it in the sun, and it cooked the triggerfish.

Tom Rowland: Wow. So did you have a knife?

Elliot Sudal: No. You could never get to it without one, but when it cooks, it kinda flakes off.

Tom Rowland: So did you share it with your friend?

Elliot Sudal: I did. It was like a high point. That kinda brought us back together. I caught one in the beginning. Like, the first day I caught a triggerfish, he's like, those are the worst fish. You can't eat those. Throw that back. That's disgusting. I'm like, I'm pretty sure these are good.

Tom Rowland: Better than remora, probably.

Elliot Sudal: Way better. And then we went, like, four days, didn't catch anything. Absolute misery. Don't get stuck in a life raft. I'm also pretty sure anywhere else in the world, you would die of hypothermia. I was in Puerto Rico in May, 30 miles offshore. The water was 80 degrees, and it was still, at night you are freezing.

Tom Rowland: That's what surprises so many people. I think Florida has the most hypothermia of any state in the country, and it's mostly because there are more people around the water than any other state. But it does surprise people that at 80-degree water, you can easily get hypothermia. I mean, if you're getting wet and the wind's blowing, forget it. It sucks the heat right out of you.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. And you're always wet, and on this raft, there's always waves.

Tom Rowland: And are you managing sunburn? Because that seems like you were just getting hammered.

Elliot Sudal: Horrible. I found some rags and towels floating, and bags here and there, and kind of accumulated all this stuff. Built like a thing for my head. I lost 15 pounds.

Tom Rowland: How did the other guy tap out?

Elliot Sudal: We swam to an island. We made it. We made it together. We stayed the longest. I don't know if he technically got disqualified for pulling stuff in. They found out he snuck some stuff in too. He was bad news. There wasn't a prize. It was a social experiment. But it was eight days. For the show, they cut it down to five. And they ran all sorts of sets of contestants, and most people lasted a day. And they had to produce it, put them back together.

Tom Rowland: When you get on an airplane and you look around at the group of people that you're paired up with, you're thinking, that person's not gonna make it. That person, there's no way they're gonna make it. Can you pick out the person that you think's gonna make it?

Elliot Sudal: No. Because, and this is the weirdest thing, the guy who did almost the best was this dude from Oklahoma who had never seen the ocean. Never seen the ocean. He did the full five days. He didn't even wanna leave. He's like, I could stay here for another two weeks. It was crazy.

Tom Rowland: So he's not having trouble with dehydration, hypothermia, and sun exposure?

Elliot Sudal: No. He just did great. He killed it.

Tom Rowland: You never know, man. You do something like a GORUCK where they send you off and you're supposed to do all this crazy stuff with all these people you never met before. And it's funny how that happens, where you're thinking, man, I just don't know about some of these people if they're gonna make it. And then they're the ones that turn out to be the superstars, and then this big dude that looks like he could do anything taps out in five seconds.

Elliot Sudal: They flew in a professional spearfisherman from Hawaii thinking this guy was gonna spear wahoo and do all sorts of cool stuff. No. Two days, he missed his family.

Tom Rowland: So much of that is because maybe he's already got a good amount of experiences, and he doesn't need this. Don't you think? I mean, he's probably plenty tough.

Elliot Sudal: No, man. You're out there. They flew him all the way from Hawaii. You should wanna do this challenge. You're here. It's TV. It's airtime. There's a lot of things that go into it. They're paying you to be here. You should try to do it. That's how I thought. I was not giving up. That was my mindset. I felt my stomach just being salty. Your skin is just cracking, and you're always wet.

Tom Rowland: You know, right now, as we speak, I've got a friend, we did a podcast a long time ago, Tim Crockett, and he is rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, 3,000 miles, to raise money and awareness for PTSD. He's doing that right now. And one of the things he was talking about, and maybe you know about this, when you're rowing and moving, he was talking about one of the biggest challenges for prior contestants of this race that he's in was getting chafed by the salt. Like, if you're wearing a T-shirt and it gets all salty and then you're rowing, you're just chafing the crap out of the underarms and everything else. So he was talking about rowing naked, but this guy was an Englishman. And I was like, dude, you're pasty white. What are you gonna do about that? And he was like, I wanna row at night naked. So that's what he's doing right now.

Elliot Sudal: I remember at night, as the sun was setting, it was always this very distinct feeling of terror because the night was so bad. You know you're in for ten hours of just suffering. Daytime was fine, man. I'm just hanging out. I'd jump in the water. I would try to swim laps around the raft, tire myself out so that I could sleep through whatever came my way. And on top of not eating, barely drinking water, you would still be up all night just hating life.

Tom Rowland: Man, that's a hell of a story. I had no idea that you did that. And so then you do well on this one, and then you said that you got hired for the next show and you're helping them film this?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. So the show got picked up on the Nat Geo channel, The Raft. And every episode was a different set of contestants in the raft. So I would run the boat that would change out the camera cards. There was an aluminum frame mounted on the raft with three cameras, and we changed out the cards. That was my day.

Tom Rowland: Could you talk to them, or you were instructed not to talk to them?

Elliot Sudal: They're dying for someone to talk to. It's hard not to. The medic would go out, and he said, basically, unless you're close to death, I'm not gonna pull you off here. You have to make that decision yourself if you wanna quit, but I know what's gonna kill you here. So it was nuts. The whole experience was really cool. It's based out of Puerto Rico, lived in Puerto Rico for a while. But then I was on that boat, the big cat that would monitor the raft. All I would do is fish. Deep drop and trying to troll up stuff. It was so fun.

Tom Rowland: Did you get any of those big tigers that were circling the raft?

Elliot Sudal: I did not. But sometimes we'd come up to the raft and there'd be mahi. You'd see them circling the raft because it's floating out there and it's the only obstruction. And I remember one time I brought a rod and a plug and I was trying to fish the raft. And the producer's like, what are you doing? Absolutely not. Oh, yeah, I did catch a shark, and they wanted me to bring the shark to this girl to act like she caught it and eat it raw. She did it, dude. It was nuts. Oh, man. I forgot about that. They didn't air it though, or maybe they did. I forget. But, dude, this girl just ripped into this thing, ate the liver. She read somewhere that you're supposed to eat the liver.

Tom Rowland: Did she know where to find the liver? Like, this was an experienced person?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Beautiful girl too. This whole thing, just seeing her rip this thing apart, oh man. It was very savage.

Tom Rowland: And it was days into this deal. You could be pretty hungry.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. But it's like your stomach shuts down. I was okay with not eating at that point.

Swamp People and chasing bull sharks in the bayou

Tom Rowland: So after you work on several of these, then you get on some others. You mentioned Swamp People?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. I was catching bull sharks in the bayou. I was down there for a while trying to catch bull sharks in freshwater. The whole concept of the episode is bull sharks eating the alligators off their line because bull sharks can actually go into freshwater. So they called me in to track these things down.

Tom Rowland: Well, does that happen really? I mean, a bull shark, I know they can go into freshwater, but is that really a problem for the alligator hunters?

Elliot Sudal: There are recorded bull sharks, like, a thousand miles up river. But no. It's a problem for producers in season nine of a show looking for a new topic. No, absolutely not. That doesn't happen. So I was down there doing that. Man, the bugs down there in Louisiana. The water is pretty gross, by the way. I don't know if you've ever fished the Mississippi River. That area is pretty gross.

Tom Rowland: Well, I'll tell you what, man. That area is prolific. I've never seen anything quite like that. When that Mississippi River dumps out, there's just so many nutrients and everything coming out of there, and it is a fish factory. The sea trout there, one time we went there right after Hurricane Katrina. We were one of the first crews of any sort to get in there, and we went in with my friend Anthony Randazzo when we filmed some shows there. And we were literally one of the first people. The destruction there was unbelievable. There were, like, 18-wheelers stuck on top of trees. They had floated up, and then the water recedes, and then they're just dangling up there on top of these trees. A full-on 18-wheeler. There were barges, giant barges that had come up and over the levee and then were sitting on the road. Giant barges. It was unreal. And even at Anthony's lodge, there was a house sitting out in front. Never seen that house before. You had no idea where it came from. It just floated up off the foundation, and it's just down there in Venice, Louisiana. But we spent a lot of time there. That's an incredible factory for fish.

Elliot Sudal: Were you fishing it right after Katrina?

Tom Rowland: Yeah. It was amazing. It really was. The fishing was fantastic. It was absolutely incredible. We went into the Mississippi River, and we're looking on the sonar. And the thing is just lit up deep, and Anthony's like, that's all trout. And I've never seen anything like it before or since. It's just a school of trout 10 feet off the bottom for as far as you can see. And you can fish for the trout and for the redfish. The best thing is just a bare jighead. They don't even need anything on it. And you're right over the top of them, and you're just catching one after another, as many as you can catch. It's crazy. That area, the fishing there is remarkable, inshore and offshore.

The Mike Pence sawfish story

Tom Rowland: So you work on Swamp People some. Is that the extent of your television, or have you done more?

Elliot Sudal: So I was on Shark Week for a little bit, a show called Sharks Gone Wild. My second viral video, I took out Mike Pence, the vice president. He rents a house in Sanibel around Easter every year. And this is a crazy story. This is the craziest fishing story. I mean, you probably have some crazy ones, but this is my craziest one.

Tom Rowland: It's crazier than the raft. I'm in, man. Let me hear it.

Elliot Sudal: Okay. So there's a raffle. My mom's part of this group on Sanibel, Zonta, and they were doing a charity auction thing. And they were selling tickets for different events. And I donated a shark tagging experience to raise some money. And I ended up raising, like, $11,000 in raffle tickets. They sold all these tickets, and some grandma with three kids won. And she didn't wanna fish in the night. They weren't hardcore fishermen. They just wanted to see what was going on. So the day we agreed to do it, I get out there real early and I set up two big rods and one spinning rod with a Saragosa and 500 yards of, like, 65 braid on it. Just a little chunk of mackerel. Eight in the morning, the rod goes off. They're not even here yet. The close rod, the spinning reel goes off and immediately gets spooled. I almost got spooled. I'm right at the end. I have, like, 10 yards left. So I'm fighting this thing for like an hour, barely gaining. I don't know what it is. I think it's a big tiger or bull or some kind of crazy ray or something. And so they show up. I'm like, I don't know, this isn't a beginner fish here. You probably don't wanna take a couple cranks here, this is something nuts. An hour-long fight and I have no idea what it is. So five hours go by, gaining, losing.

Tom Rowland: These people are still hanging around?

Elliot Sudal: Oh, yeah. They're hanging out. And so then I get spooled, and I had reeled in this rod and ended up hooking this rod to the back of the kayak. I get in the kayak, and then we lift the line out. So I'm fighting this thing, I have no line on my spinning reel, and then I have this attached to the kayak. And a guy on the beach, I'm like, okay, when I give you the signal, start to reel me in.

Tom Rowland: So he's pointing at this rod right now, which is an 80-wide giant thing with basically weed eater cord on it, a lifetime supply of weed eater cord.

Elliot Sudal: Well, it's 1,100 yards of hollow core, 200 underneath it.

Tom Rowland: And then the rod is quite a bit bigger around than a pool cue. So you have a guy, you don't wanna get pulled out to sea by this thing, so you have this rod on your kayak.

Elliot Sudal: Well, it's attached to the kayak, which is on the beach. So then I get, I'm doing that for another hour and a half. Whenever I finally get back to the beach, I got a little bit of line on my reel. I still don't know what it is. I'm thinking tiger. At this point, this is just a huge, lazy tiger. So then a little while later, I figure out that I have set up right where Mike Pence has rented a house. Two houses down, and the security guards have been watching the entire time. So then two gunboats show up on either side. I'm on the beach, and there's these two coast guard boats with gun turrets and all this stuff on either side. And then six Secret Service guys descend from the house and come over. And they take my fillet knives and everything, and they're like, the vice president of the United States is approaching. I'm like, okay. Wow. So Mike Pence and his family come down for, like, a couple hours. And they're like, what is this thing? What's going on? And I'm like, I honestly can't tell you. So he's like, alright, let me make a call here. So he calls the gunboat, and he says, hey, put on the sonars and see if you can figure out what this thing is. So they're like, we have no idea, but it's 15 feet long. It's near the bottom. It's 15 feet. We don't know what it is. We can see the shape. It's huge.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Elliot Sudal: So I'm like, alright, that's what I got. And it's not fighting. It's kinda always moving. I'm on 65-pound braid. I swear I'm putting as much drag as I can possibly put on this thing. So I keep going, keep fighting. Eight hours in, still going. Huge crowd, news, everything. Everyone's around. Mike Pence had to go to dinner, so he left. But we got, I got a DM from his security guard after. Anyway, eleven hours. It's starting to be sunset. Huge crowd. Hundreds of people. I see this thing finally. I see three fins poke up, and I'm like, oh, it's a lemon? No way. No. It was a sawfish. It was a gigantic sawfish, like 14 or 15 feet. But the way their fins are, it looks like a lemon because there are three fins.

Tom Rowland: They're very soft yellow.

Elliot Sudal: And I'm so bummed. I'm like, how could this be?

Tom Rowland: A 15-foot lemon, though, that'd be pretty good.

Elliot Sudal: Be a world record and a half right there. But anyway, get the sawfish in.

Tom Rowland: Have you messed with a sawfish before on the beach? Because, man, dude, I think that thing has a potential of wrecking the crap out of your leg.

Elliot Sudal: Oh, yeah. Scarier than heck. So I didn't know all the laws that go around a sawfish. I had never caught one. Never even seen one this big. It was a male too. It was a real big creature. The saw was probably five feet of it. I had a 12-foot tape measure, and you never need more than a 12-foot tape measure. I'm like, oh man, this thing is way bigger. So I ended up putting a tail rope around it, which I got in a lot of trouble for. Eleven hours and ten minutes. Got it to the beach. There's a bunch of people around, and these three real jacked dudes put a tail rope around it, and then they got knocked over by this thing just flailing all over, freaking out. We never pulled it out of the water completely because I knew that was the law. And then I tagged it, with one of the NOAA tags. I had no idea that I would get in trouble for that too. And, yeah, let it go. But got the whole video, got everything. I got a DM from Mike Pence's security guard after. Like, what was that thing? I'm like, you'll see it on the news tomorrow. Don't worry about it. Sent him some pictures.

Tom Rowland: Any way you can get me out of trouble?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. So then check this out. The next day, two blacked-out SUVs show up at my house. And it's NOAA. They saw it on the news, and it was like NOAA police. They're like, you can't do that. You cannot do anything to a critically endangered species. You can't touch it. As soon as you identify it, you're supposed to cut the line. I'm like, I had no idea. I thought the tagging was a good thing. I genuinely just thought the rule was you can't take them out of the water. And obviously, I wanted to get the hook out or whatever.

Tom Rowland: Not getting the hook out of that thing, by the way.

Elliot Sudal: There's just the way their mouths are. This could be up to a $10,000 fine and six months in jail. I was freaking out. I had no idea. And they're like, we'll be back in touch with you in two days after I filled out my whole report thing. And they never got back in touch with me. So I wonder, you think Mike Pence maybe made something happen there? I have no idea.

Tom Rowland: Well, to your credit, you had the world's greatest sonar, probably. The most advanced sonar trying to figure out what it was. They couldn't tell what it was. So you kept going.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. And they said on those boats, the camera on that boat, they can tell everything about you from a mile away with facial recognition, triangulating your cell phone, or whatever.

Tom Rowland: I'm almost surprised that it's a mile. I would think it might even be more because we have these blimps here. Fat Albert, they call them, and I always heard that they could read a cigar band in Havana from those things. That's the conch telegraph. The coconut telegraph says that. But they put them up there, and they can see all the, I don't know what they use them for today, but the thought was they were using them to monitor all the boat traffic, and they can tell when people are running drugs or whatever.

Elliot Sudal: Is it tethered to something?

Tom Rowland: Yeah. It's definitely tethered. It's tethered to a truck. When you get up there, the whole thing is on a big military-looking truck, and there's a whole big wheel on the back, a spool basically, and it pulls it in, but it's on a truck. I don't think that truck could ever take it down the road, but the truck holds the giant spool. And it certainly used to when you fish right around there, because I fish around there quite a bit. You follow that thing down, you're like, shit, that's on that truck.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah, I've always wondered what it was attached to.

Tom Rowland: But occasionally, over the years, there's been two and then there's just one. And then they add another one, and then there's just kinda one. And I don't know if they lose it, if it pops or falls or what. But that's an interesting thing. There's some really incredible camera equipment. That is an amazing story with Mike Pence.

Shifting to shark research: blood samples and tagging

Tom Rowland: So you have a really interesting way of just finding yourself in these crazy situations. Has that been your entire life or is that just happening once you get fishing?

Elliot Sudal: No, just with everything. Crazy girls, crazy, oh man. You have no idea, man. Just the weirdest situations over and over again. But it's so fun. At the end of the day, it's been really fun. And I kinda built this whole career around it at this point. So now, it's been years. I've spent tens of thousands of hours. I used to be so obsessed with figuring this out. I would sit out all night every night sitting on big baits, figuring out different rigs. I would dream of what rigs would be a little bit different. I would try to make almost like clotheslines so I could change the bait at night and not have to paddle out there. I would just constantly shark fish. Shark fishing, shark fishing, everything. Trying out different everything. And I'm past that now. I got to a point where I figured it out, and now it's more about catching sharks at the right time for filming or with clients or whatever. But I got past that obsessed stage. And now I'm really fascinated by the research side of it. With the attention I've been getting for this, I've been working with a few different organizations. And my newest thing is taking blood samples and fin clippings from these sharks. And it's really cool stuff. You can learn so much about a shark from their blood. They analyze basically their diet, how stressed they are. So land-based shark fishing, shark fishing in general, is sort of controversial. People wanna know what stress hormones are building up or how much lactic acid is building up, especially with beach stuff. There's not a lot of research on it. It's a hot topic in Florida right now, establishing laws for land-based shark fishing. So many people are trying to do it now, and they're just figuring out how bad is it for the sharks. At the end of the day, is it worth it? So, essentially, that giant syringe, I gotta fill that with shark blood once I catch them. And you pull it from the base of the tail. There's that funny little notch right before their tail. And you go right in there, right down to the spine, and there's a vein or an artery that flows right there.

Tom Rowland: So if you get next to that artery, no blood's coming out, and then you move around a little bit, it really pops.

Elliot Sudal: It's incredible. I've only been doing this for a couple months now, and it's harder than you think. You can't just stab it anywhere and pull blood. It just doesn't work like that whatsoever. It's actually very difficult to find that one little spot.

Tom Rowland: Did the organization tell you where the target spot was? Or you just kinda have to figure it out for yourself?

Elliot Sudal: Right. But then, you know how sharks freak out near a boat. It's actually a little easier on the beach because you can maneuver them in such a way. But from a boat, man, you gotta get a tail rope on them. They're thrashing like crazy. You're trying to get this needle out. It's pretty chaotic. So basically, you fill that and you put it in this anticoagulant tube. The blood will actually coagulate if you don't; you have minutes to put it in this tube or else it hardens up. It's useless. And then from there, you have ten hours to separate this down into these little capsules, which then you put in the centrifuge.

Tom Rowland: Okay.

Elliot Sudal: And you spin it out for five to eight minutes, and it actually separates the red blood cells from the plasma. So you're left with this clear plasma separated out from the top. That's what they want. They want that plasma. That's the most valuable, as far as analyzing what toxins are building up in the shark, how stressed they are, how reproductively healthy they are. All these different things that they analyze come from that plasma. So you pull that out, then you freeze it, and I ship it to them on dry ice.

Tom Rowland: So how long does it take you to get any kind of data on this? And how long have you been doing this?

Elliot Sudal: This is new. This is, like, two months.

Tom Rowland: So in two months that you've been doing this, do you get any data?

Elliot Sudal: I haven't got it back yet. No.

Tom Rowland: Okay. And what about the tagging? You got this other bag here that's full of all these tags. And you've been doing this longer?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. I've been doing that for years.

Tom Rowland: This is just like the fish tags that we have. And what information have you gotten from the shark tagging?

Elliot Sudal: Which is migration stuff. That's basically point A to point B, where the shark goes. But even knowing what sharks are in what place at what time has value, just to see where they're going. But there are other much better tags that we use, satellite tags or spot tags, which are expensive. They're, like, $2,000 apiece. Plus the satellite time is, like, 500 a year. And then there's also acoustic tags, which are cheaper. They're 400 apiece. But they correspond to beacons all up and down the East Coast.

Tom Rowland: And they'll do that with bonefish too. They got that whole thing set up in Biscayne Bay. When the bonefish swims by, when it gets to a certain distance, it will ping. And they know that that particular fish has gone by. So it's giving you some information. I'm not sure that it tells you which direction the fish is headed or how fast it was moving or how long it stuck around.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. The spot tags are definitely the best one.

Tom Rowland: Have you caught a previously tagged shark for yourself? I'm sure you have, because we fish for sharks quite a bit down here, and you'll see the same shark over and over. They're in the same spot, and you catch them, and they got your hook in them or somebody else's hook in them. And you can check out their haywire twist, and it was kinda crappy.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. You know what, man? The hooks don't rust out nearly as fast as people think, by the way.

Hooks, rigs, and the weak link in land-based shark fishing

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I know.

Elliot Sudal: I mean, that thing would never rust out.

Tom Rowland: No. We're looking at, like, I don't even know what size.

Elliot Sudal: That's a 27-ought right there.

Tom Rowland: A 27-ought hook. That's massive. I don't use them this big. Why would you use a hook that big?

Elliot Sudal: So I'll drop a 15-pound stingray whole. The way this works is, basically, I'll kayak the bait out five to seven, eight hundred yards. And then there's a sliding swivel here, which I'll attach a cinder block or a heavy rock with twine. It'll break away eventually. So then I'll have the leader attached to the swivel, and then I'll put a giant stingray on. I would rather go with one big hook than a tandem hook. Because with those huge baits, you can't just put one small hook or else it doesn't sit right. It's not as secure as I want it to be. So with something like that, and you twine it on or rubber band it in place, that's not going anywhere. Keep in mind, when I'm targeting these giant sharks, their mouths are this big. If you scale it down, it's not really that much different than any other hook. It's just a bigger fish.

Tom Rowland: Big bait. But a different thing here is that when we're going for the big fish that we fish for, the hammerheads or the tiger sharks, we're doing it primarily out of a boat. And we don't have to put anywhere nearly close to the amount of pressure that you're putting on these fish because we can follow them. So you're tiring the fish out by following them and then lifting them at the boat and finishing the job. Land-based, this is the weak link. Because there's plenty of strong line, and you got great wire, and you're obviously very particular about your rigging. So the weak link is the hook. So often, you may not need a hook that has this much gap, but you need a hook that is this thick, this strong.

Elliot Sudal: You have no idea, I'm sure you do, but when a hook bends out, on those fish of a lifetime, when I'm putting 100 pounds of drag on it and the hook bends, even a 16-ought hook bending, you're like...

Tom Rowland: Right. So you've worked out the hook manufacturer, the hook gauge, everything to where you've got your stuff dialed in. You wouldn't believe the lightweight rigs that I use for sharks. For really big ones out of a boat, you just don't need this. But for a 13-foot hammerhead, we can do it on a much smaller hook. But I've always found that it's the hook, man. That's the thing.

Elliot Sudal: Oh, yeah. I've got a pile of just bent-out hooks. It's crazy to see.

Tom Rowland: And you spend, you're talking about eleven hours fighting something that you don't know what it is. In hour ten, the hook pulls. You know you're closing in. That's not a good feeling.

Red tide, water quality, and Captains for Clean Water

Tom Rowland: So one of the things I definitely wanted to ask you about was this whole operation here, Beneath the Waves. Is that what the organization's called? So you're getting all of this blood information and sending it to them. And then what do they plan on doing with the data?

Elliot Sudal: Well, one thing that's really interesting is, as you know, Florida is dealing with a lot of red tide issues and water quality stuff. And where I'm from in Sanibel, it's like the epicenter of it. There are no fish right now. There are no sharks. Well, there's some fish. Certain fish do okay, but the sharks are really pushed out. I went out 16 miles the other day, chumming like crazy. I caught three groupers, not one shark. It's bizarre. So they really wanna get blood from those sharks that are near the area and analyze what toxins are building up in them from eating the fish that have been in this red tide zone. There was a line where the bad water kinda meets the open blue water. There was a lot of dead stuff, and there was just a pile of tiger sharks sitting out there, and getting samples from those.

Tom Rowland: How big are those? Are they real big ones?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah, the apex. Giant ones just eating all that dead stuff. Turtles and all that dead everything. So stuff like that. A lot of the fish have been pushed down to the Ten Thousand Islands in the Everglades. I've been fishing over there and getting samples from those blacktips and lemons. Sharks are more tolerant to red tide than most fish are. You drive through red tide, your bait well dies in a minute. It's horrible. But seeing how this is affecting another part of the puzzle for this whole red tide thing. It's such a big issue. I don't know if you've seen what it looks like when you're on Sanibel and there's 10 dead Goliath groupers and 50 tarpon washing up. It's just so horrible.

Tom Rowland: It's really horrible. And this year, I've been more interested, concerned, aggressively trying to do something than ever before. I've gotten to know the guys at Captains for Clean Water quite a bit better. And I had Daniel down. We did a show. We went into the Everglades, and it was great because the fishing was really good there, but it gave us an opportunity for him to talk about how, one of the things that I couldn't get my head around is that there's too much freshwater in certain places, and then there's not enough freshwater in other places. And you're having complete freshwater in areas that should be saltwater. And then here, what we have right behind us, in the Florida Bay, it gets hypersalinity there because it basically is like a saltwater fish tank. There's not a lot of tide flow there. And so just like a saltwater fish tank that you don't add water to, the water level drops. It gets more and more salinity until nothing can live in it. He described it as an ice cube tray. You have Rankin Bight and Snake Bight and all the different bights up there. And there's not enough water exchange going on. And when you cut the freshwater supply off moving down, your only source of freshwater is rainfall. So if you don't get a lot of rainfall, it gets hypersaline there, and so much so that you're having grass die-offs and fish kills. On the other side, if it's not raining, it's beneficial to other areas that are having different issues. Like, too much freshwater is really bad because it goes down the Caloosahatchee River, and then it causes all kinds of problems. So it's almost like, I just couldn't get my head wrapped around how one area is hypersaline, the other is the exact opposite, and it all stems from the same problem. So I really spent a lot of time with Daniel and Chris up there and understood it a lot better. We've done two podcasts with Daniel. It's been incredibly educational. We're gonna do more, learning about this deal. Even talking to you, it's given me even more of an understanding of what's going on. And I just think it's so important that we talk about it because ignoring it or pretending like it's not happening may have been a solution at times because certain areas are like, well, we don't wanna talk about it because it might affect the tourism. Well, it might, but not talking about it is gonna affect the tourism long term. And that's where I think a lot of people in South Florida, in certain areas like where you're talking about Sanibel, it just all of a sudden became, you could not deny it any further. There's a dead manatee on the beach. There are dead tarpon.

Elliot Sudal: Front-end loaders. I mean, the horror stories of just summer, I wasn't here for the summer, but that's when it was the worst. These guides didn't work for four months, man. People are getting all sorts of weird infections in their hands and the fish are just not there. Right now, the water is crystal clear. I've never seen it so clear. But from what I understand, it's very unhealthy. The bottom is like dead. There are blue crabs everywhere. But the fish, it's just not a healthy ecosystem. And the water offshore, you go five miles, and the water is brown and green and dead, and there's no fish in it and definitely no sharks around. I don't know. It's bad. I'm more concerned now than I was hearing about it over the summer. It's like, it should be back by now.

Tom Rowland: Well, I think some big things have happened, with Captains for Clean Water having some really big wins on a political front, getting the okay for this EAA reservoir, which was a huge deal. And that could really, really help as long as it actually happens at this point. So it's been okay, but it was okay thirty years ago for the most part, and nothing happened. So now there has been some legislation passed, which hopefully is gonna have a major effect on improving the water quality for the future. Nothing is going, it's not like you're gonna flip a switch just because the right people are in office, and all of a sudden the water problems aren't gonna exist anymore. But I think there have been some big wins this year, and I'm optimistic. And Daniel and Chris and the whole Captains for Clean Water, they're very optimistic. And that's one of the things that has been so interesting to me is that those particular people can work on this issue and remain very optimistic. And that's one of the reasons why I really got behind them, because just standing around, yelling and screaming at each other is just not getting anything done. And it's such an emotional thing. This is the place that you love the most, and you're seeing it in a very bad condition. And you are upset. But I think these guys are handling it extremely well and actually making strides for improving it for the future. But let's hope.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Let's hope. It's crazy just watching this all, but hopefully we fix it.

Tom Rowland: You're seeing all these big tiger sharks on this line where all of the dead stuff is going out there, and they're just munching on these.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. It was like twenty, thirty miles out. There's a ton of sharks out there. Once you get past this bad water, everything's pushed out there. And no doubt they're eating this dead stuff, but I think tigers eat anything. So it's crazy to see what's building up, what toxins. I think they can actually trace it back, what fertilizers or what toxins exactly are coming from Central Florida out to the water into the fish and then accumulating in these sharks. So it's all part of the puzzle, and they learn a lot about how healthy the animal is overall. Sharks live a long time. Some of these are thirty, forty years. That's a lot of time for things to accumulate and to assess the overall health. The fishing is actually really, really amazingly good once you get past this nasty water. Off the sand of Captiva right now, tons of kings and cobia and sharks and everything.

Tom Rowland: Well, in flats fishing, what we're always trying to do is, if it's high tide, that is always the most difficult time for me because it eliminates so many edges. It eliminates so many places that will offer any sort of a backboard for the fish. Once it gets up high, they just go anywhere. But low tide is also the same challenges: they're in the deep water where you can't see them, and that creates a problem. So there's this magic area of the incoming tide and also on the outgoing tide where all these edges are created. So it kind of concentrates the fish in places that, after a little bit of experience, you're kinda like, okay, well, they should be over there. And there's a much higher likelihood that you're going to see something because they've been constricted in some way, shape, or form. And that seems to be what's happening out there, that all of these fish are getting pushed out there because they don't wanna be in this water. But they wanna be as close as they possibly can to where they wanna be. It's offering a great opportunity for people to catch fish.

Elliot Sudal: My buddy's crushing the cobia out there. It's so cool, if you can get out there.

Loving the Keys and specializing in one fish

Tom Rowland: And so now you're spending a lot of time in the Keys right now.

Elliot Sudal: I love it down here, man. Especially coming from Sanibel, Captiva, we have a couple species, but there's a lot of fish down here. A lot of different stuff. I'm trying to figure out how we can spend more time here. But the whole beach aspect, the beach fishing here isn't really there.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, there's not that, but the boating and the boat access too is a lifetime of exploration. And sharks are just such a big part of our world. Maybe you're out there just permit, bonefish, and tarpon fishing like so many guides are, but the shark is still such a big part of that. If you go to a flat and you're not seeing any sharks at all, you're probably not gonna see what you're looking for. When you go to a place and it's just magic, and you're like, there's a giant lemon right there, two bulls, a blacktip coming in, there's gonna be, it's full of life, and you're probably gonna see bonefish, permit, tarpon, redfish, snook. You're probably gonna see everything that you're after. And then I also enjoy fishing for the sharks, man. I love fishing for the sharks.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. I mean, everything kinda looks like bait to me that's not a shark at this point. It's so weird how different fishermen get so specialized in certain things. Like, I have no drive to go snook fishing. No offense. It's just not something I'm into. It's so weird how you get so honed in on what you are into. That's it, man.

Tom Rowland: You know what I always think is, like, there's no reason to feel off about that in any way, shape, or form. Fishing's supposed to be fun. And if you're way into sharks and that's what you wanna catch, great, catch sharks. If all you wanna do is catch big snook, great, go catch big snook. If that's what turns your crank. And then fishermen tend to have this evolution of, maybe you're into big sharks right now, but that may turn into something else. Or it may turn into, okay, I've caught all these giant hammerheads, what's the next thing? Well, it's blue marlin, and what's bigger than a shark? Like, now you're talking about...

Elliot Sudal: I've caught some bluefins. I've caught some marlin. I don't know. And it's like, then you get to a point where you've caught 500 blacktips. If you don't catch a shark that's, like, eight or nine feet, it's not that impressive. And then with the social media stuff, I can't go and post a five-foot shark anymore. No one, it's like, what do I do next? I'm running down the shark.

Tom Rowland: I thought one of the coolest things, as we started planning this, I started looking through your Instagram. One of the coolest things I saw on your entire Instagram was the baby tiger that you just caught the other day. Because as a fisherman, I can appreciate and look at a giant shark. But honestly, I am way more likely to be able to go out there and find a giant shark than that baby tiger. I've never seen one like that.

Elliot Sudal: I was trying to catch a barracuda. I was in 60 feet of water right on the edge. I had a big chum slick going, and I wanted to catch a big barracuda. And, yeah, baby tiger.

Tom Rowland: That's super cool. And the funny thing was, I told the whole crew what I was doing, and I was like, I can't go to dinner. I'm gonna do this podcast. Oh, who are you doing that with? And I'm like, check this guy out right here, man. And they were like, dang. Does he always fish with his shirt off? That's what they say. But then we were looking through there, and all these big sharks, and these guys are world-class fishermen. They're like, yeah, nice, nice, nice. And they all went to, oh, cool, look at that baby tiger. That is cool. Where do you catch that?

Elliot Sudal: Isn't that crazy? It's interesting how that works.

Balancing fitness with fishing

Tom Rowland: So with ten thousand hours of shark fishing, and all these years of obsession, you also seem to be balancing this with what has to be a physical obsession with fitness and working out. What's the balance there?

Elliot Sudal: I mean, people think you do all your reps on these big sharks, you're gonna get fit. Not at all. Not even close.

Tom Rowland: Hours of the time you sit there eating Cheetos if you're not concerned about it.

Elliot Sudal: Doing nothing. But, yeah, tons of time at the gym. I've been working out since I've been, like, 19. I've never been regimented at all. I just sort of go and do whatever feels good.

Tom Rowland: Wait a minute. You just started working out when you were 19? You weren't a high school athlete?

Elliot Sudal: I ran track. I used to have dreadlocks, and I ran track and played soccer. And I was hippied out, whatever. But I was fit. I just started casually going to the gym, and I love it. I think the thing is I love to be there. I just enjoy how it makes my body feel. I like taking a scoop of pre-workout and going and feeling all into it. And you know how it goes. If you don't go, you feel horrible. You get almost addicted to how you feel, and you get used to looking a certain way. You gotta do it. But, yeah, I spend hours at the gym. Definitely, like, two hours, five times a week at least.

Tom Rowland: And what does your program look like?

Elliot Sudal: I've never had a trainer. I've never been too specific. I do a ton of core. I do, like, a thousand crunches, a thousand sit-ups every time. A lot of arm stuff, a lot of bench. I like to bench a lot. I'm not, I don't research much about it. I just kinda go and do what feels good. I run two miles about now.

Elliot Sudal: How old are you?

Tom Rowland: I just turned 30.

Elliot Sudal: Just turned 30?

Tom Rowland: So you have a lot of the benefits of youth on your side. But I was a high school athlete and then stopped as I got into fishing more and was focusing on trying to be a professional fishing guide. Fitness fell off and I just didn't pay attention to that. All I was doing is fishing. Coming home, drinking some beers, going back, waking up for fishing again all day, back the same thing. Next thing you know, I was rowing a boat out west or I was pulling a boat down here. So you are physically active every day, but you're not paying attention to your diet. You're not getting a lot of exercise outside of those repetitive exercises. So there are problems with shoulder overuse injuries. There are problems with all kinds of back issues and stuff like that. And a lot of guides are the same way. And I just decided, it's funny, my son just turned 21. And when my wife got pregnant with my son, I was like, you know what? I'm getting it back. Because I just didn't feel good, and I also knew that we were having a baby. And, man, I'm gonna have to work a lot more than what I'm working. We were doing fine at a hundred twenty, hundred forty days a year. Now I'm gonna need to work way more. And the better shape I got in, the more days I could go on the water. It started like that for me. The better shape I was in, the more money I could make. And I found that if I was running more and I was paying attention to my hydration, my nutrition, everything like that, I was able to do better on the boat. And it was just a 100% correlation. I'm in better shape, I'm catching more fish. I'm in better shape, I'm fishing more days. I'm in better shape, I take fewer days off the water. And then it has just become this basis to everything that I do. Now it's every day. And as I age even more, I just turned 50, I just find it's almost more to me like a mental thing. It started as a purely physical thing. I physically felt better. Now the physical side seems to take care of itself, and the workout and the physical activity almost benefits me more mentally, I think, than physically. It's a very interesting thing because whatever obsession I have for fishing and hunting and outdoors, I have a mirror of an obsession for fitness and then also this obsession with spending time with my family. And I always call it the three F's: fishing, family, and fitness. That's my life. But you've obviously been able to balance it well, and a lot of people don't. You get so focused on one thing that the physical side is neglected, and that hasn't been that way for you. And it also probably helps that your viral videos may tend to have a little bit more appeal as you're obviously been at the gym a lot.

Elliot Sudal: For sure. There are guys out there catching bigger sharks than I am. There are guys doing what I'm doing. I think that's what kinda sets me apart, looking good doing it. My girlfriend's in it too. She looks good. But yeah, it's huge. Just being in shape, everything works better. You just feel better. You have more energy. It's a huge part of my life for sure, and I kinda agree with what you're saying.

Tom Rowland: But the beach shark fishing, though, catching a 15-foot sawfish or a giant hammerhead from the beach, that is not for the faint of heart, and you're single-handing that. Right? That would take some people two or three people. The grip strength, the lower back. On your Instagram, there are lots of pictures of you with your giant spinning rod. It's a 15-foot-long glass spinning rod. And you are unsupported. You've got that kind of below your belly button, pulling so hard that you are basically at 90 degrees. And that's gotta be incredibly taxing on your lower back. Not just for an hour, but, like, a three-hour deal.

Elliot Sudal: Insane. So the summer is my, in two months, six weeks in Nantucket when the sandbar sharks come through. These are huge sandbars. They're all six to nine feet. They're really big for a sandbar shark. But I'm catching, like, five a day. I'm taking people out all the time. And by the end of the summer, you know how sharks feel like sandpaper. I have no skin left on my legs, no skin left on my arms. My back is all thrown out. From handling it. My fingers are all cut up. I can tell how much I've been fishing by how many cuts I have. By mid-August, man, I am just a wreck. But those spinning rods, I'll put 130-pound test braid on there, and then I'll just crank down the drag. It's better for the shark if you land them quicker, but it's more intense. I think it's more fun. It's all casting there. I don't have to paddle anything out in that pocket. I actually caught a 10-foot dusky on a casting rod.

Tom Rowland: Really?

Elliot Sudal: It was the most intense battle of my life. Sixty-five-pound braid on that one. It peeled 400 yards of line in the first run. When I picked it up, I thought it was a great white.

Great whites and the culture of striped bass fishing

Tom Rowland: Have you caught a great white? Do you, like, you can't catch one, or you can't bring yourself to catch one, or you're not supposed to catch one?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Not supposed to. You're not supposed to.

Tom Rowland: But you would think with all of the fishing that you're doing that maybe you might hook one at some point without knowing. There sure have been a lot more showing up out here.

Elliot Sudal: Out here?

Tom Rowland: Yeah. They're showing up. They're here.

Elliot Sudal: So I tried out swordfishing. I did it totally wrong. I've never done it. I really wanna catch a swordfish. But I went out, like, 30 miles the other day, and I dropped down a huge jack, like, a thousand feet in the middle of the night just to see if there's anything cool down there. I was trying to get something weird in there.

Tom Rowland: They're out there. They are definitely out there, and people see them. And occasionally, they're really close to the boat. Close enough to where, you know, cell phone video and stuff like that, and you're like, that's a 100% great white.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Well, we had our first fatal great white attack on Cape Cod in eighty years this summer. A 26-year-old dude was boogie boarding.

Tom Rowland: Really?

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. And just, huge white shark.

Tom Rowland: T-boned him. Took his leg off. And how did they know for sure it was a white shark?

Elliot Sudal: Oh, there's 300 of them in the Cape and Islands now. You could see, I was talking to a pilot, and he counted 14 in a stretch of a mile. There are so many white sharks up there, this year particularly. There's maybe 30 videos of white sharks going airborne on people bringing in stripers off the back of the boat. There's, like, a lot. It's crazy.

Tom Rowland: I saw that going on there. Because for a while, people would say there were no white sharks here. And then it seemed to be that the OCEARCH team was tagging them, and they were showing up. It's like, no, they went right through Marathon, right past Key West now, and they're gone. And then people start seeing them more. So do you think that, with drones, helicopters, people actually looking for them, people tagging them, do you think that there are more, or do you think that we just know more about them?

Elliot Sudal: Combination of the two. There's definitely more. So what's happened in the Cape and Islands is the seal population has exploded. There's over 50,000, maybe 100,000 seals now in that area that weren't there. That's a primary food source for these white sharks. And they're finding they're reproducing off Montauk, so they're catching a lot of young of the year, little three, four-foot white sharks.

Tom Rowland: That would be so cool.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Can you imagine? Super cool. They catch them, like, mako fishing and stuff like that. They go after the same stuff. But when they get to be eight or nine feet long, they start targeting seals, the white sharks. I have so many pictures of seals washed up with shark bites out of them. I measured the bite on one of them. It was 22 inches wide. And the seal is like straight blubber. Six inches into blubber. These bites are just amazing. I saw it happen. I saw a seal get taken out, and it was just a real quick splash and then the amount of blood. It was like hundreds of yards of blood just trailing out of this thing. They're out there. It's crazy.

Tom Rowland: Well, there sure do seem to be a lot of sharks here in the Keys too. I don't see that there's any shortage. I hear that there are, from scientists, but my experience doesn't seem to be any shortage here or in the Bahamas.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Well, last week, I had the craziest shark experience just seeing sharks around me. I was hooked up to this giant, the biggest, 116-inch lemon shark, huge lemon on a spinning rod.

Tom Rowland: What do you think that weighs? Do you have any idea?

Elliot Sudal: Three something. It was a big nasty shark. He actually spun around and bit his own tail. It was the craziest thing.

Tom Rowland: Lemons are nasty.

Elliot Sudal: You know what I mean?

Tom Rowland: A lot of them. That's probably the most common shark that we catch when we go. The flats are loaded with them, and there are giant ones. And sometimes you get in these channels, and you'll see those really big ones.

Elliot Sudal: In these flats. Oh, yeah.

Tom Rowland: As shallow as you wanna go. We'll go. I'd love to take you shark fishing.

Elliot Sudal: That'd be amazing.

Tom Rowland: We do a lot of it, and it'd be a great show. We should do a show and do this tagging. We should do that. The best time is probably the springtime, but summer's good. I don't like to shark fish when it's cold because you don't get the best of the shark, and you see one or two kinda coming in. But we go out to the West of Key West or someplace like that, the Marquesas, all that area, all through the backcountry, lemons, bulls, blacktips, and then big hammerheads too in certain areas.

Elliot Sudal: They actually show up in the spring?

Tom Rowland: They do. They follow the tarpon.

Elliot Sudal: We get them up in Boca Grande Bay.

Tom Rowland: We see another group of hammerheads that show up in the fall too. Usually in October, you'll see quite a few more, and, like, the really big ones. Now the offshore guys will see hammers a lot more than we do, and they have all sizes. They have the really big ones, and then they have the smaller ones. Like, at the end of the bar, yellowtailing and stuff like that, and you can catch the smaller ones. We caught an awesome small hammerhead when I had Daniel Andrews. We were in the Everglades and caught a small hammerhead, and we were tarpon fishing. We thought it was a tarpon right up until we're like, what is that?

Elliot Sudal: They're the hardest-fighting shark. So the reason you need all this gear, these huge reels, all this stuff, is the pursuit of a giant hammer. Which is also bad because they fight really hard and they build up a lot of lactic acid, and they're kinda like the trophy land-based shark fish, so everyone wants to catch them. But there are a lot of rules around them. You're not allowed to pull them out of the water, almost like a sawfish. You gotta be cautious. You gotta quickly release them, almost cut the line if you don't know what you're doing. But there's this whole thing with getting that photo, holding the head, and everyone wants to catch them. I have seen, I've had hammers pull 300 yards of this lockdown. It's amazing just how strong those fish are. Holding this thing, the ones that got away. But, man, there are some strong fish.

Steering attention toward conservation

Tom Rowland: Well, tell me about the video stuff that you're doing. You sent me a couple of clips.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Right now, I'm going around Florida along with the blood sample stuff, sampling how these different, getting fin clippings analyzed, what subgroups of the sharks are around the state. Getting blood samples, comparing the health of the sharks around the state, and just traveling and making these videos. I don't know what I can say about this stuff yet. I'm working on kind of proving what I can do in the depth of, in the realm of shark fishing outside of just a guy catching sharks off the beach. You know what goes into creating content.

Tom Rowland: Well, I think what's cool about the direction that you're going is that you've gotten this attention, and now you're steering it in a direction for conservation and for helping the shark in some way, shape, or form. That's what the idea is, and hopefully all of this information will turn into that. Because you never know. You're dealing with science. What does this information tell you? So there's this fine line of, okay, I'll collect all this, and we'll see what happens. But I like the idea of taking the attention and steering it in this direction rather than just taking the attention and being like, how can I do something crazy? Which there is a fine line for that. You gotta do that a little bit.

Elliot Sudal: And the thing about sharks is you don't necessarily have to love fishing to be interested by sharks. It's like its own thing. I've seen a lot of my posts, I try to talk about the research side. I try to put little facts in about sharks' teeth and shark health and stuff like that. And most of my followers aren't necessarily hardcore fishermen. It's a lot of kids, and I get so many questions. I'm doing talks at schools in Miami tomorrow, like career day. Be a shark wrangler. Go for it. But just the message of conservation and that sharks are important and they're an indicator of how healthy an ecosystem is. And a hundred million sharks a year are killed for their fins or commercial long-lining bycatch. You don't see it as much around here, I guess, but a hundred million sharks a year. Sharks don't lay eggs. Sharks give live birth to small litters of pups. It's not like a mahi that lays a million eggs twice a year. It's a very slow process rebuilding the shark population. And just little facts like that, awareness to people who aren't necessarily fishermen, just to get a gauge of what's going on. Just an overall good message and try to be respectful of them. And if you're gonna fish for them, do it the right way and release all your sharks and get involved with tagging and research, and use the right gear when you do it.

Tom Rowland: Do you get any people that are not supportive of catching the sharks?

Elliot Sudal: Oh, I used to get it all the time. Now that I've worked with several universities and all this research and tagging, it's not so much. But, yeah, I used to get a lot. I was gonna write a book of all these crazy, uneducated emails people sent me about how sharks are endangered, and that's like saying birds are endangered, first of all. There are 500 species of sharks. But it's a touchy thing, man. And there are a lot of very uneducated people that just don't know enough about it. They read an article here or there, and they're just angry and on their computer and send these ridiculous emails.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. The Internet's a funny place, man. It offers so much opportunity, like we're talking about, for you to be able to do something like this for a living, but it also offers people the chance to just be in touch with you immediately.

Elliot Sudal: It's crazy.

Drones, flats fishing, and plans to fish together

Tom Rowland: Well, listen, man. We've been going for an hour and a half. I don't know if you realize that, but it's a great conversation. We got into so many other things than I thought we were gonna talk about. We gotta do it again. And we gotta go fishing. Because I love sharks.

Elliot Sudal: I was gonna say, I just did the coolest thing. We had a drone flying around the flats up in Nantucket. And Nantucket has flats. Honestly, you'd think you were in the Florida Keys.

Tom Rowland: I do know about that. I had a friend that guided around that area, and he was telling me all about it. It's beautiful.

Elliot Sudal: There are these drop-offs, and the duskies and the sandbar sharks, and even makos and white sharks come in. And you find them with the drone, and you hover over, and you throw a bait at them, and you hook up. It's so cool. And they have these giant stingrays called rough tail rays up there that could be 13 feet long.

Tom Rowland: Whoa.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. Unreal stuff. But there's some really cool stuff you can do with drones and flats and clear water fishing. If you're ever up that way, man.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I'll make a trip. I'll make a special trip. That's a great place for the family too, man. You take the family up there.

Elliot Sudal: On the beach, which is a really cool thing. Ripping down in jeeps and setting up, and you catch albies from the beach. You surf cast for these 15-pound albies.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Blues. And then that whole striped bass fishing, that's a crazy culture.

Elliot Sudal: That's a crazy culture.

Tom Rowland: My friend Jamie Howard, we did a podcast with him, and he did this whole movie, Running the Coast. It took him three years to do the thing. And the stories he had about these, it's a psycho, die-hard psycho culture.

Elliot Sudal: I just gave a talk at a striped bass convention, and it's, I think it's one of the crazier cultures of fishing, man.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Because you take it even further, and then there are the guys that fish in the wetsuits, and they're skishing, they call it. They swim out. And they're in white shark territory off of Montauk.

Elliot Sudal: It's at night. Dressed like a seal.

Tom Rowland: That stuff is just beyond me. I mean, talking about psychos, man. And I love it. I love people that are just totally into what they're into. It's cool to watch. I'm not sure I'm gonna dress up like a seal and go swimming.

Elliot Sudal: I did it for a couple years, man. That was my first saltwater thing. In Connecticut, I would drive 80 miles down to the beach, and then I would go to Rhode Island. I didn't know the spots, but it's all at night too. So you're in these weird places, and waders up to your neck. You have no idea what you're doing. Man, that was a phase for sure.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. It's cool, man. And you could see, there are all these little subcultures of fishing. You got the trout fishermen out west that are just as crazy. It's just a little different. They wanna go on these long float trips and do crazy things, get up super early, go out in the middle of the night, throw big flies for brown trout. It's interesting because it's the same kind of people that get drawn to these edges of what it is. Like you, man, with the giant sharks off the beach, what the hell?

Elliot Sudal: I know. I mean, it's the best sport. When you talk about it, there are so many different aspects to fishing.

Tom Rowland: It's almost like you get into, like what you're doing, giant land-based shark fishing, and then you take somebody else fishing for spring creek trout. The differences are far greater than any similarities that you're gonna draw, except that you're interested in this fish, and then you're completely obsessed by this fish, and you can't sleep. And everything is...

Elliot Sudal: Literally can't sleep. Thinking about rigs, thinking about what spot would work.

Tom Rowland: Exactly.

Elliot Sudal: Looking at the weather and the tides 400 times to be like, okay, I gotta be right there. It's just, I think it's all the same primal hunter instinct that's kicked in. It's like providing for the village or whatever it is that makes you click on it.

Tom Rowland: But I think there's this thing about learning. Like, you learn something about a rig which allows you to catch this fish that's been getting off. And now you do it and you open up this whole world of understanding. Like, oh, that's what's going on. And now all I had to do is this. And then it opens up this opportunity, and you just open this door and take off down this way. And it's the same for trout fishing or snook fishing or tarpon fishing or permit fishing. That's why I just love the whole thing so much. If you get tired of one little part of it, man, just try something a little bit different. And then here's this opportunity for learning again. It's cool, man.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah.

Tom Rowland: It's cool.

Tagging hammerheads and wrapping up

Tom Rowland: Well, you got a lot of cool stuff going on. We'll do another podcast, and we'll certainly see if we can get together and do a show or at least just go fishing.

Elliot Sudal: I would love to go after some of those big lemons in the flats, man. Or one of these hammers.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, we can make that happen. It's the hammers, that's when the tarpon are around in the springtime. And the more tarpon there are, the better the hammerhead fishing is. But then you also have the easier ones, the lemons and the bulls and blacktips.

Elliot Sudal: A guide was telling me that one time he was fishing here, and a hammer pinned the tarpon up against his boat and ripped it in half.

Tom Rowland: Really?

Elliot Sudal: I just can't even imagine that. Just a 15-foot fish. Their heads are four feet wide, just ripping this, pinned against your boat. Can you imagine?

Tom Rowland: Yeah. I haven't seen it pinned up against the boat, but it often happens very, very closely to the boat because what seems to be happening is that the tarpon's freaking out. And then it sees the boat, which it's been not so fond of until this thing's after it, and now it wants to get under the boat. And we've even gone to where a couple times we start running circles around the tarpon. And then for whatever reason, it scares the shark away temporarily, and then they usually come back.

Elliot Sudal: They get them. I'm sure they do.

Tom Rowland: But you know it when it's happening.

Elliot Sudal: It's cool to put a satellite tag on one of these things and see how frequently they, what their move is around the Keys.

Tom Rowland: Interested in not just the satellite tag for when they're around. Like, do they go from Long Key Bridge down to Bahia Honda and back and forth? And are they chasing these tarpon around? But it's like, come late June, July, now you're just not really seeing them anymore, and then they're just not there until February, March. I mean, they're going offshore, but I'm sure that's where they're going, or I think that's where they're going. But the interesting thing to me is that it seems to be the same sharks coming in, and there are lots of hammerheads out there. So is this a learned behavior that this particular group of sharks follows the tarpon? And do they follow the tarpon when they just go offshore? Or are they going offshore and following these tarpon all the way up the East Coast, if that's even where the tarpon go? Because we're still learning a whole bunch about tarpon, and the idea was that, oh, well, they migrate here and then they just keep on going. Well, as we're getting more tagging information, they do a lot of different kinds of stuff.

Elliot Sudal: Let's do it. I have all sorts of tags available. It'd be cool to put three satellite tags on three big hammers here. That'd be a cool episode. And just send it, see where they go. Tarpon and cownose rays, that's their major food source.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. That'd be really cool. Alright. Well, we'll plan on it, man. We'll plan on it, and we'll definitely keep in touch. Alright. Tell everybody how they can find you, follow you, see what you're up to.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. So my Instagram is ACKSharks, which, by the way, ACK is, this is like a marketing thing. So ACK is Nantucket's airport code. It's very widely used up there. Everyone's, you know, ACK Coffee, ACK Printing Press, ACK everything. So when this first happened, I switched my thing from Elliot Sudal to ACKSharks. Because, Nantucket, whatever. And, yeah, no one knows what it means. I should have done something else.

Tom Rowland: I don't know. It seems to be working for you.

Elliot Sudal: It's been working. But, yeah, Instagram, ACKSharks. I have a website, elliotsudal.com, with a little bit more about what I'm doing. The blood sample group is Beneath the Waves, and the tags are federal through NOAA and National Marine Fisheries Service. But, yeah, that's kinda where it's at.

Tom Rowland: Alright. Awesome. I love it, man. Thanks so much for coming. This was a really great podcast. We got way into more stuff than I thought we were going to, and it was really entertaining. I loved it. You have lived a wild life, my friend, and I have a feeling that it is only going to get crazier on the horizon.

Elliot Sudal: Yeah. It's gonna be good.

Tom Rowland: Well, come back and tell us what's on the horizon.

Elliot Sudal: For sure. Anytime.

Tom Rowland: Alright, buddy. We'll see you.

Tom Rowland: That was a great conversation with Elliot Sudal, ACKSharks on Instagram. Definitely go follow him there and check out all the cool stuff he's doing. Great conversation. I loved it, man. If you liked it, send me an email at podcast@saltwaterexperience.com. Also, if you could, go leave a rating and review on iTunes. And until next week, we will see you out there.