Tyler Kapela | Hit and Run Charters and a Life of Fishing | Tom Rowland Podcast Ep. 687

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 687 with Tyler Kapela, captain and owner of Hit and Run Fishing Charters out of St. Petersburg, Florida. Tyler and Tom talk hurricanes, red tide, a career built from scratch into a globe-trotting fishing life, and the giant tarpon that nearly broke the state record.

A Career That Started With Tarpon on Campus

Tyler Kapela: You know, it's kind of funny — I took a tour of the campus, and we were walking around talking about the dorms and all that stuff, and there were retention ponds on campus. I saw some mullet jumping out of one of the ponds. It was landlocked. I asked the guy, "What's the deal? Why is there mullet in here?" And as soon as I asked him, a tarpon came up and blasted the mullet. The mullet all showered, and I was like, there's tarpon on campus. Oh my God. That was, I mean, I wanted to study marine science anyway, but that was the deciding factor — I could fish for tarpon all day in between classes. So that was really cool. I got the marine science degree, and I had a goal. They ask you when you're a freshman where you see yourself in ten years, and I said I wanted to be a professional fishing guide and have my own fishing TV show. And I made it happen — I was the host of a show on NBC Sports for four years and on the Discovery Channel as well.

Tom Rowland: This is the Tom Rowland Podcast. Well, I am Captain Tyler Kapela, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast — thanks for having me. Tyler, what's up, man? How are you?

Tyler Kapela: I'm doing great, man. I just got a couple days off the water. I've been going pretty hard — after I got back from Australia on the tenth, we'll jump right into the charter business, but the fishing's actually been incredible here in Tampa Bay. I'm a fishing guide out of Tampa Bay, Florida, out of St. Pete, actually. Been doing that for fourteen years. Ever since I've been back, the tarpon fishing has been insane.

Hurricane Milton, Red Tide, and Fourteen Years of Watching the Bay Change

Tom Rowland: So in your opinion, when you got back — you said you got back on the tenth — when was the hurricane?

Tyler Kapela: I was gone for that whole thing. It was supposed to make a direct impact on St. Pete in early October. I was watching it from the other side of the world thinking, oh my God, what's going to happen to my city? My fiancée evacuated to Orlando where my parents are, and then it took the turn and went into Fort Myers, and we've all seen what happened down there, which is pretty terrible. But it spared St. Pete — all we had was some wind damage and minimal stuff. The tide actually went out about seven feet — we had a negative seven-foot storm surge.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I saw Ed Walker had a video that went super viral of him just walking out in Tampa Bay, dry. It's incredible. We've seen the same kind of thing happen in the Everglades before, where basically Flamingo was just dry like that.

Tyler Kapela: It's crazy, man. So when I got back, about a week or so after it passed through, the water had a chance to settle. I was twisted sideways with jet lag — I've never been so jet-lagged, they say going east is worse — but I jumped right back into chartering the day after I got home. I went out and loaded my livewell with giant magnum whitebaits, and the first spot I went to had no bait at all, but I was marking tarpon on my side imaging. I threw those whitebaits out and had the tarpon chummed up right behind the boat. From then on, every single day after that, we whacked them. I think that negative storm surge pulled a lot of those juvenile tarpon out of the Manatee River and other rivers, out near the mouth of the bay, and we had the big adult migratory fish mixed in too — I was seeing schools on the beach, big schools plowing down the beach on the outgoing tides. We jumped fourteen fish one day, then went to a nearshore reef that was stacked with big Spanish mackerel and bonito, some sharks the first day. After jumping all those tarpon, we caught a sixty-pound cobia out of the middle of nowhere. It's just been going off ever since.

Tom Rowland: So in the fourteen years you've been guiding, what's your experience with hurricanes and how they affect the fishing?

Tyler Kapela: There are a lot of variables, but once a hurricane rolls through, it basically shuffles the deck and resets everything. Once it's all stirred up, it's not great fishing — the fish are freaked out, they've been tossed around, they're on the move. But once it settles, it can be really good, just like it was in this instance. It changes the bottom out there, moves the water around so much. And of course, a big issue we're already seeing down in Fort Myers is red tide popping up now that the salinity is coming back up — that's been a big issue on the West Coast here for the last fifteen, twenty years because of runoff.

Tom Rowland: And so you think that's been supercharged by the hurricane and all the water that got pushed down?

Tyler Kapela: I absolutely do. For years they've been saying red tide is a naturally occurring thing, and that's true. But when you take a match — which is red tide — and pour a bunch of gasoline on it, which is the nutrients it feeds on from sewage and fertilizer runoff that humans are introducing into our waterways, it turns into a raging inferno that spreads down the coast, when it would normally just be a small, localized thing. I was pretty vocal about this last year — I kind of became the voice of the red tide resistance, trying to get real information out there instead of what the phosphate industries want to keep hushed up. There was finally a peer-reviewed study by the University of Florida and some of their affiliates confirming that the nutrients humans are introducing to our waterways are supercharging the red tide.

Tom Rowland: It seems like it shouldn't be a huge jump to say that. But I guess it's hard to say that without hard science — otherwise it's bro science until you get the real science. That study came out last year from the University of Florida?

Tyler Kapela: Yes. They did a six-year study and determined that it significantly supercharges red tide. They'd thought for a long time there was a correlation between hurricanes and red tide — Hurricane Charley back in 2005, the next year we had a massive red tide. Hurricane Hermine in the Gulf, 2015 or '16, the next year we had a red tide. Then Irma in '17, and in '18 we had a massive red tide. They think the storm surge stirs the organism up off the bottom with big wave action, putting it into the water column, and then it interacts with the nutrients we're putting into the waterways, and boom. There's one blooming right now, not in my area, but down around Fort Myers — and it's not a coincidence, it's exactly where the hurricane impacted the most. There are sewer mains broken and farm runoff coming out of the three rivers down there — the Caloosahatchee, the Peace, and the Myakka — and it's all gone into Charlotte Harbor. Red tide doesn't like fresh water, it needs high salinity, so now that those salinity levels are coming back up, it's meeting all those nutrients and there's a big red tide starting down there in the last week.

Captains for Clean Water and the Everglades

Tom Rowland: Wow. I'm actually going down there today — there's a Captains for Clean Water event this weekend, so I'm going to check it out.

Tyler Kapela: I'll actually be down there as well.

Tom Rowland: Nice to meet in person, then. My experience with hurricanes here in the Keys has been that anything natural benefits and anything man-made gets destroyed — the fishing's been very good after a lot of the hurricanes we've had. But that red tide thing is a whole different animal, because we don't deal with freshwater intrusion. In fact, our problem is that we don't get enough freshwater coming into the Everglades, so even a hurricane can seem beneficial, pouring a ton of freshwater into the Everglades.

Tyler Kapela: Right. I went up to Tallahassee with Captains for Clean Water in January for that whole thing — all the fresh water is going out both sides of the state and not reaching the Everglades. In the last decade especially, the seagrass has been dying in Florida Bay because it needs that fresh water and isn't getting it.

Tom Rowland: It's such a complicated thing to explain — there's too much fresh water a short distance from an area that has none. Over here it's super high salinity, and over there it's way too much fresh water. It's hard to wrap your head around if you're not familiar with the state, the Everglades, and what's happening with Lake Okeechobee. But Captains for Clean Water has done a really good job educating people not just on what the problem is, but on the solutions — that's what I've enjoyed about working with them, that they're solution-based rather than just pointing fingers and screaming, which, for sure, you want to do.

Tyler Kapela: I remember going down to the Ten Thousand Islands when I was fifteen — that was the trip that changed my life. I'd always loved to fish, even though my dad isn't a fisherman — I just loved it since I was a little kid. I went on a guided trip to the Ten Thousand Islands with a guy named Scott Hughes, out of Marco, into the Everglades, and it blew my mind. That's the day I decided I wanted to be a professional fishing guide and be one of the guys on TV, like Jose Wejebe. I remember those grass flats out there were crystal clear — off Cape Romano and around the Ten Thousand Islands, it went from tannic to clear, and you could see the grass. Now you look at satellite imagery down there and that grass is either gone or the water is really murky. It was never like that before — that starvation of fresh water over time just keeps doing it in.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting. You were fourteen on that trip — did your dad take you, or how did that come about?

Tyler Kapela: I probably begged him. It was around my birthday, and he asked what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to go on a guided trip — actually I wanted to go to the Keys, but they decided that was too far, so I did some research and picked an area that looked cool. This was twenty years ago, before the internet had really taken off, so I didn't know exactly what we were getting into. I hadn't caught a snook yet — I was a bass fisherman — and I caught my first snook on that trip. But just being in that area, feeling like you're the first person that's ever seen it, immersed in the raw nature of it all, really hit home with me. It was like an epiphany — this is what I want to do, this is my calling. From then on I was laser-focused.

Bass Pro Shops, Eckerd College, and Becoming a Guide

Tom Rowland: How did you direct your life toward being able to do that? Were your parents supportive? Did you think about what you could do in school to support it, or was it just single-minded focus?

Tyler Kapela: At first, of course — I was actually the youngest person hired at the Bass Pro Shops in Orlando, where I got my job. I was fifteen, and I got special permission because you're supposed to be eighteen. I was sitting behind the fishing counter all day talking about the newest gear with other fishermen, and I learned so much there. One of the guys was a guide over in Mosquito Lagoon, and whenever he wanted to do a scouting run, he'd recognize my passion and take me along — I'd be on the front of the boat, poling him around Mosquito Lagoon and the North Indian River for tailing reds and giant trout. I fished a lot on the East Coast, up the Banana River and Sebastian, obsessively watched all the shows, read the magazines. Then I went to Eckerd College, right here in St. Petersburg, for marine science — which is where the tarpon-on-campus story happened. I got the marine science degree, but I graduated right in the recession. I was so broke, going from crappy job to crappy job, but I stayed in the industry — working at marinas, working at a tackle shop. I didn't go work at a bar. I stayed around it, and eventually met a guy who loved to fish, had a boat. I told him about myself, he let me use his boat and helped me market myself and become a fishing guide once I got my captain's license. That's how I got my start, and it took off from there.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man. I love hearing stories like that. So many people ask me how to become a fishing guide, and the advice is always the same — you just kind of have to do it, whatever it takes. You keep knocking around these marinas until you finally get an opportunity, and you have to be ready to take it and jump. And you've done it.

From NBC Sports to Mozambique — Building a Traveling Career

Tom Rowland: Scrolling through your Instagram, man, you have really been around — fished all over the world. How have you been able to do it? The trip I was most interested in was your recent trip to Australia, but looking back through your history, you've been all over the place.

Tyler Kapela: It goes back to the first fishing show I did, which is really where I started being able to travel the world and do some crazy stuff. I became a guide in 2010, and in 2012 I became the host of North American Fisherman Television, right after Bill Dance, on NBC Sports — it was my dream job. I'd been writing magazine articles for them, hustling charters, and they liked what I was writing, sent a camera crew down to have me guest-host, liked how I was on camera, and asked me to be their saltwater cohost. They were in a prime spot four times a week for six months out of the year on NBC Sports, and I just fell right into it. I was twenty-six at the time, single, could just travel on a whim. It opened up such amazing opportunities — we went to Mozambique, Africa, fished on the coast there, on the inside of Madagascar, on the Indian Ocean. That was the first really crazy place I went. We flew sixteen hours to Johannesburg, then another three-hour flight to a tiny town — the airport was like a tiny house — and then you're in Mozambique, which is just so crazy. We stayed on top of a little compound, handmade log houses up on a sand dune looking out over the Indian Ocean. That prevailing wind has built this gigantic sandbar — up and down the coast it goes straight up four stories and then straight back down, and then you're in the bush of Africa. There were humpbacks everywhere, and it's tropical — a warm water current coming down from the equator. There were giant trevally, Indo-Pacific king mackerel, tropical reef groupers and snappers, a lot of the same stuff that was in Australia, actually.

Tyler Kapela: I was a bit unprepared — we were told we'd go tiger fishing in the Zambezi River and might go to the coast, but we ended up not going to the Zambezi and went to the coast instead. So I'd brought bass stuff, kingfish-size stuff, tarpon stuff, and a fifty-wide for marlin and billfish — I needed something in between the tarpon and billfish gear, because I got my tail kicked by GTs ten times a day and other unstoppable reef fish that would blast me into the volcanic rock and bust me off. I hooked ten GTs a day and didn't catch one the whole time I was there. But I caught all kinds of other stuff — a seventy-pound Indo-Pacific king mackerel, which has tiger stripes on it, kind of like our Atlantic king mackerel but different.

Tom Rowland: I noticed the same thing in Australia — I think I caught the same fish there, and they were calling it a Spanish mackerel. I was like, this isn't going to be great, and then it's the size of a wahoo. It was an amazing fish to eat, too — like a wahoo. When we went to the reef in Australia and really got the numbers up, I think we caught close to fifty different species. The only one that was exactly the same species we catch here was the cobia — I looked it up and down and there was no difference. We caught permit that had slightly different noses, barramundi that were very similar to a snook but different, and everything was kind of similar but different — except for something like a threadfin salmon, which was just weird looking.

Tyler Kapela: Aren't they so weird? I guess they have them on the west coast of Africa too, in the Atlantic, but we just don't have them on this side of the world for whatever reason. Man, those things fight — we were in the middle of a school of those things for hours in Brisbane, unseasonably cold, knocking them over the head with baits, couldn't get bit for hours, then all of a sudden one would hit inexplicably.

Tom Rowland: I didn't have that experience — we only ran into a few, never saw a big school like that. The thing we really stuck on was queenfish — amazing fishing, I'd never seen a queenfish before. They look just like our leather jackets, but huge. I kept catching these fish thinking they seemed unusually big and mature, and it turned out — we went back to the boat and they had a world-record book there, and everything we were catching was a record if we just used the right pound test. We stuck on the queenfish a little bit, but otherwise we'd catch something and move on, chugging away at different species.

Tyler Kapela: The biodiversity out there is insane. Going back to Mozambique — Jacques Cousteau, the famous naturalist, went to that same region and named a bunch of those reefs, and he's quoted as saying that area of Mozambique is the most biodiverse region of the ocean on Earth. It's because you have a coastal ecosystem, then right off the beach this volcanic coral reef, and a few hundred yards off that, three hundred feet of water — billfish, reef fish, and coastal fish all melding in this one tiny little area, which is wild to think about. What's crazy is they call the king mackerel or Spanish mackerel in Australia "kucha" — all these different regional names for the same fish. The guys there troll big grouper plugs up and down the reef and catch bonefish on them — ten, eleven kilograms, twenty-two, twenty-four pounds. The world record is nineteen pounds, and they were showing me pictures of twenty-plus-pound bonefish caught trolling, inexplicably. They keep everything to give to the villagers, but they're catching world-record bonefish.

Tom Rowland: That's amazing. Do you think there's a place there where they might come into shallow water, or is it a deepwater bonefish?

Tyler Kapela: I think there are big sandy shoals — not big grass flats, but sandy shoals they probably come up on near the beach, and some river mouths, but it drops off pretty quick.

Tom Rowland: What was the setup like there — were they set up for tourism, or was it pretty rough?

Tyler Kapela: Not really. The Chinese had just come in and built a highway system when I was there in 2012 — other than that it was dirt roads, no infrastructure. We were with a bunch of wealthy landowners from Zimbabwe, farmers with big plots of land, and this was their vacation house in Mozambique. Absolutely gorgeous — it used to be a Portuguese colony, so there were all these old Portuguese colonial buildings, completely run down. Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, and they'd had a civil war there about twenty years before we visited, but it was very peaceful. It's where a lot of South Africans go to vacation because it's beautiful — we were driving on the beach for miles and miles without seeing another person. The way they'd fish was with these twenty-four, twenty-six-foot catamaran-style boats, and there's no boat ramp — they do a full beach launch on rollers. They'd put the trailer nose on the truck, deflate the tires, go twenty miles an hour, and slam on the brakes right before the water, and the boat flies off the trailer into the water with people in it.

Tom Rowland: How do they get it back on — similar deal?

Tyler Kapela: Also similar — after the day of fishing, they gun the boat full speed onto the beach, the motor kicks up, and they slide fifty yards up onto the sand. Then they roll the truck right back onto the rollers and take it away. That's how they do it every day.

Tom Rowland: That is awesome — I love seeing things like that. We were recently in Alaska, and they had this big Russian piece of heavy equipment with tires like eight feet tall — they'd hook the trailer to the front of it and push the boat out as far as possible. These are big thirty-foot halibut boats, and when they come in, the boat and trailer and this heavy equipment are already out there, and they run the boat right onto it, almost simultaneous. There's this one kid in waders and a neoprene jacket and hood, basically a wetsuit, whose job is to hook the boat to the trailer, standing on the tongue of the trailer getting soaking wet. I asked somebody if that's how you work your way up to being a guide, and they said, no, man — that job sucks, nobody wants it, it's the worst job in Alaska.

Bora Bora, French Polynesia, and a Fish Caught From the Bed

Tyler Kapela: I'm not a big cold-weather guy. Right after Mozambique we went up to Northern Quebec, near the Arctic Circle, fishing for Atlantic salmon for one of the shows — remote out there, saw the northern lights, absolutely gorgeous. But if I'm traveling somewhere, I like to go tropical. We went to Costa Rica, Panama a couple of times — Tropic Star Lodge — and I recently went to Bora Bora.

Tom Rowland: Tell me about Bora Bora — that's a place my daughter has wanted to go her whole life, ever since she saw pictures on Instagram as a little girl. What can I catch there?

Tyler Kapela: Man, I'll tell you, you can't describe how beautiful it is, and everyone there is unbelievably friendly — you've never experienced that kind of friendliness. You fly to Tahiti first, then take a puddle jumper to Bora Bora, but there's a whole island chain in French Polynesia. Bora Bora is one of the most beautiful, but the other islands rival it — they're just not as famous. It's a big atoll with one entrance, which is why the US Navy used it during World War Two as a supply area, easy to defend. The other islands, like Raiatea and Taha'a, have multiple entrances but are just as beautiful. My fiancée and I stumbled into a local market with all the fish, vegetables, and French cuisine — French Polynesia is still under the French government, so they have good healthcare and everything else. The vegetables were like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory — enormous, incredibly tasty. The soil is so fertile and the growing season is year-round, mid-seventies at night, mid-eighties during the day, always.

Tom Rowland: You must get some decent rain there.

Tyler Kapela: About five days a month during the dry season, eight days during the wet season — intermittent rain. The island shape means there's usually cloud cover on the island itself; the moist tropical air rises and cools, so it's always raining right on top of the island, watering the farms without needing fertilizer, and the water is super clear. The food was incredible on top of all the fish you catch in the South Pacific. We took a catamaran with a sailboat captain around Bora Bora and the other islands — such an incredible experience. Our captain said he'd sailed around the world three or four times, and that in French Polynesia and Samoa, people will take the shirt off their back and give it to you and not expect anything in return. We went out on a tour with this guy, and when I mentioned I was a fisherman, he said, "I got a boat — come fishing with me after the tour." We fished for hours, probably ran fifty miles, and at the end of the day I tried to give him gas money, and he refused — just met the guy, and every single person was like that, not transactional at all. Our captain said the reason is the soil is so fertile and there's so much fish in the ocean that they've always had everything they needed, and never needed to stockpile for hard times. It's a totally different mentality than anywhere else in the world.

Tom Rowland: Do they have coffee there? It sounds like the climate — the way you describe it — is similar to what I saw in Hawaii, where the fog rises up the mountains and condenses, and that's where they grow pineapples and coffee.

Tyler Kapela: Yeah, they grow coffee, and they're famous for vanilla. We went around a farm and it was every vegetable I could think of, plus tropical fruit I didn't even recognize — lush, growing year round.

Tom Rowland: This is going to be my daughter's favorite podcast episode I've ever done, not that she's ever listened to one, but talking about Bora Bora is getting me excited to go there someday.

Tyler Kapela: I caught my first GT in Bora Bora — for ten years, ever since a taste of it in Mozambique without landing one, GTs had been in the back of my mind. This whole trip was basically about going to try and get one. My fiancée and I did the over-water bungalow thing Bora Bora is famous for, for a couple of nights — not cheap, but amazing. You're literally over a reef in some cases, with a glass table you can slide back to look straight through into the water and feed the fish. I took a bucktail on a spinner — there were blue trevally everywhere, all sizes, swimming around a manmade rock pile right under the hut. It's almost impossible to cast in that little area, but they'd come up to the lure. There's a fish called a cornetfish — like a flute fish or trumpet fish, really long and skinny, a suction feeder, probably four feet long — and it sucked the bucktail in. I reeled it all the way into our room, and my fiancée was videotaping, and I pretended I was going to put it in the bed, and she screamed. Then I took it outside and let it go — caught a fish out of our bedroom.

Tom Rowland: That's the first thing I thought when my daughter showed me those pictures — I bet we could catch a fish right off there. It looks like there might be some flats around too.

Tyler Kapela: Bonefish — big-time bonefish. The amount of blue trevally there is staggering, they're everywhere, on the outer reefs and the flats, along with little groupers and snappers, and a whole family of fish called emperor fish that we don't even have — they fight hard and are super fun. We'd been on the catamaran for about eight days before we went to that resort — it wasn't even that expensive, about five or six hundred dollars a day for a big catamaran, all inclusive, which by the time you factor in hotel and food is a pretty good deal on a fifty-five- or sixty-foot boat, just you and your party and the captain. They cooked five meals a day for us, and we ran about thirty miles across to two other islands, Raiatea and one other. Bora Bora, relative to other places, isn't touristy — there's no one hawking t-shirts on the beach. Go to the other islands and there's no sign of tourism at all, no fancy resorts, nothing like Cancún or Panama City Beach. You really felt like you were on an adventure. We could pull the catamaran up to a reef edge, and I'd throw a giant popper and see what we could get, and they were totally fine with that.

Australia With the Cast Angling Crew

Tom Rowland: That sounds like a trip my family needs to take. But before we run out of time, I want to talk about Australia — I've been following those guys, the Cast Angling guys, Mickey Guthrie and the crew, for a long time on Instagram, though I don't know them personally. I saw you'd just been with them and had to find out what it was like fishing with those guys, because they look like serious fishermen. Where are they based out of, how did you get this trip together, and what did you catch there?

Tyler Kapela: They're based out of Brisbane, Australia, and they have a company called Cast. I brought a couple of props — this is one of the lures we were throwing in Australia, a hundred-fifty-gram Cast stick bait, and with the hooks and everything it's almost thirteen or fourteen inches long — a big bait. You can see this one got beat up a little, this is one that didn't make it, looks like a GT pulled a hook right out of it — this is after about nine GTs, one finally busted it off. The way I got hooked up with them — Ben Jones is the other half of that company, he's "GT Buster" on Instagram, and he's obsessed with tarpon the way I'm obsessed with GTs, since we don't have them here. He started following me on Instagram seeing all the tarpon stuff I post, and they happened to be opening a distribution center in Clearwater, trying to break into the American market, so they reached out wanting me to try their lures and line. The stuff they make is designed by fishermen who actually fish all the time and use their own gear — it's not cheap stuff designed just to be sold. Their braided line is the best I've ever used, not even close — I highly recommend it. It has twelve strands rather than the eight most other brands use, and it's about sixty percent of the diameter of other braid for the same strength. Unbelievable stuff. So we built a relationship, and I mentioned I'd always wanted to go to Australia, and they said, you pay for your plane ticket, we'll take care of the rest. I was like, done, let's go — I'd barely talked to Ben a few times. Me and the other guy, Ryan, who represents Cast in America, went over, met up with them for the first time, and they were so hospitable, took us right under their wing. The day we landed, 8 p.m., they said, we have a weather window, fifteen-hour drive north starting now, because if it's windy up there you can't get out to the reef. So we slept about three hours, then drove fifteen hours the next day.

Tyler Kapela: We slept on the ground in something called a swag, basically a one-man sleeping bag with a zipper over the top — in Australia you can just pull over on the side of the road and put the swag out anywhere. We slept at a boat ramp with animals crawling around, pretty noisy. The boats they took out were seventeen-foot Sportsmans — tiny, I wouldn't even consider taking that offshore, but that's what they use, because they can drag them up dirt roads way up in Far North Queensland where you can't bring a thirty-six-foot boat. So they send these seventeen-footers a hundred miles offshore.

Tom Rowland: Is this the area they call Cape York, or the other part of Australia?

Tyler Kapela: North Queensland is the horn that runs up the east coast, and Far North Queensland is the tip of it — we were about halfway up Queensland, which is the state. It's a bigger country than people think, about the size of the Lower 48.

Tom Rowland: That's the same area I fished — I went out of Cairns and we kept flying north, kind of like Florida, all the way up almost to Cape York, then got on a boat and went down through all these river mouths. It was the most incredible trip I've ever taken, and that peninsula is almost exactly the same as Florida is to the U.S. — it hangs out, similar vegetation.

Tyler Kapela: They do take those little boats way up there, on the dirt roads — once you get past Cairns, the last real city, and a smaller town called Townsville, you're in some of the most remote area on the planet.

Tom Rowland: I agree — we flew over that at night, and there wasn't a single light anywhere. We were on a mother ship with skiffs on board.

Tyler Kapela: That's incredible — it's just unbelievable how much raw nature there is, more than even the American West. We wanted to go up there, but it was windy the entire time, thirty or forty miles an hour humping at the cape, the northern tip, and you just can't go for weeks. So they watched the wind app and picked a weather window for that part of the coast. We went out on the seventeen-foot Sportsmans and slept sixty miles offshore on the boat for three days — an air mattress on the front deck over a cooler and the seats, one guy down by the console in a sleeping bag. We were sixty, seventy miles offshore on the Great Barrier Reef. The first night was so uncomfortable — I'd forgotten my blanket, had one little crappy one that was too small, my feet were freezing, but you'd see the Milky Way. It was just coming into spring there, a little chilly, and there were birds doing laps at one in the morning trying to land on your head, since we were the only piece of anything out there — so jet-lagged, tossing birds off yourself at 1 a.m. Then you'd wake up to a beautiful sunrise and go fish for GTs with giant plugs and an 18,000-size Stella, the biggest spinning tackle known to man, blasting them as far as you can all day.

Tom Rowland: What was that like — was the action amazing, being in an area where nobody's fishing?

Tyler Kapela: The current was ripping through some of these cuts at four knots. The first day we were there I got thirteen GTs — in French Polynesia I'd only gotten two, fishing hard all day. We got the Spanish mackerel, coral trout, a fish called a Chinaman, a crazy reef fish that's all over the place.

Tom Rowland: That looks similar to a mutton snapper. Is that a barramundi? If so, that's the biggest barramundi I've ever seen.

Tyler Kapela: That's a ginormous barramundi — sixty-eight to eighty pounds. That one was in an impoundment lake — we didn't actually catch that fish, we found it floating alive on the surface. It measured a hundred forty centimeters, which with how deep-bodied barramundi are put it close to eighty-something pounds. It was dying of old age, floating on top, full of air — we thought somebody had caught it, but we'd have heard about it from the guys drinking beer at camp. We vented it and sent it back down, just like you would a grouper. But we caught plenty of barramundi ourselves too — I love those fish. Sleeping out on the reef in those tiny boats was quite an experience.

Tom Rowland: And it never got windy on you? What would have happened if it did?

Tyler Kapela: If it had, you're kind of screwed — but those boats are small enough that they ride over the swells, which is why they're so meticulous about the weather windows. They brought fuel cans out there for three days, and we fished all around, did some jigging with slow-pitch and vertical jigs. My next target is a dogtooth tuna — I've had some close calls, hooked some in French Polynesia, had one hit my topwater in Australia that I missed, which is part of why I'm going to Vanuatu next September to check that off the list.

Tom Rowland: It's an amazing fish — there was a kid from Key West on the podcast who got stuck fishing and spearfishing in Fiji during COVID for almost two years and couldn't leave.

Tyler Kapela: I think I know who you're talking about — big spearfisherman, free diver, has his own spear guns.

Tom Rowland: Cole, that's it. Really cool guy, had some amazing experiences over there, kind of similar to you — finding yourself in these amazing places. Are those Cast guys coming over to tarpon fish with you?

Tyler Kapela: Yeah, we were there almost three weeks — fished the reef, fished our way back down, hit multiple impoundment lakes for barramundi on the way to Brisbane. We were going to head back out to the reef, but the wind was humping, so we fished around Brisbane quite a bit, which is where we got that threadfin salmon. Those are super fun, and then there's a big giant golden fish that fights incredibly hard, such a crazy fish. We got more GTs and all kinds of crazy stuff around Brisbane, plus some freshwater fishing — we caught Australian bass, which was fun.

Tom Rowland: Is Australian bass the same as a New Guinea bass, you think?

Tyler Kapela: No — Australian bass is a type of perch, a different family than our bass, but they call them bass. It looks just like a little white bass, doesn't get very big, but man, they pull — super fun on light tackle. Everything was brand new, just checking species off the coast.

Tom Rowland: There's another fish they call a New Guinea bass — I went to a talk years ago that Lefty Kreh gave after he'd gotten back from a crazy trip to New Guinea, and he said you couldn't catch the big ones — even the tackle he brought, you think you're prepared and then you go down there and you're way undergunned.

Tyler Kapela: It's like a big cubera snapper that gets huge. If you look at New Guinea on Google Earth, not only do you have all the rivers, but going east there's some of the most primal reef in the entire world, completely untouched, looks super healthy.

Tom Rowland: And it's really not that far from where you were.

Tyler Kapela: No, it's not — Vanuatu is very close to that, it'd be like the equivalent of Cuba to Florida. We're going to be getting amongst it there, but I want to check off the big blue Napoleon wrasse — that's my next one, along with the dogtooth, wherever I have to go to catch those is where I want to go.

A Barn-Door Napoleon Wrasse on the Great Barrier Reef

Tom Rowland: Did you ever get one of those Napoleon wrasse? They get so big. I did not — I got stuck in Cairns once. I was supposed to go to a place called Lizard Island with my group, but my plane was late because of a lightning storm in Memphis, which put me late getting to California, and I missed the connecting flight. The next flight wasn't for twenty-four hours, so the rest of my party went on to Lizard Island and I never could catch up with them — there wasn't another flight there. So I hung out in Cairns by myself and went out to the Great Barrier Reef on a dive boat. I had a Del Brown permit tournament hat on, because I'd gone to Australia with the idea that the fish I really wanted to catch was the Indo-Pacific permit, since very few people had caught both the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific permit at the time. I told the captain I was looking for this fish, pointing at the permit on my hat, and he said, we don't really see those here. This was a tourist diving operation, but even a tourist operation on the Great Barrier Reef is pretty sophisticated. I showed the guide going out with us, and he said the same — didn't think he'd ever paid attention to it. We get there, everybody gets in the water, and I go down and there's a school of permit right there — probably fifty of them. I went up and showed the guide, and he went down and said, yeah, we don't really see those that often on a reef like this. I still have the video, because they had an underwater videographer you could buy the tape from — me swimming with that school of permit. It's funny because the fish you go looking for is the one you see immediately. But while I was looking at those permit and turning around to check on the guide, there was one of those giant Napoleon wrasse right behind me — the size of a barn door, the biggest thing I'd ever seen. It scared the crap out of me, because I thought it was going to be a hundred-forty-pound dive instructor behind me, and I turned around and it's this wrasse the size of a barn door. It scared me to death.

Tyler Kapela: I hear you — I saw a really big one when I was there too. I jumped in the water while Ben was fighting a GT, got some underwater footage of the fight. I'd loaded into a school of bait, which is a little sketchy on the reef because of the sharks, but I went down anyway, and there was so much light down there. Ben had a big GT on, the biggest of the trip, and I swam down with the camera to get him, and there was a wrasse down there the size of a door. That's the one, I thought. They're totally harmless, apparently — the guys said, oh, that's like Oscar, he's here every time we stop. They look like big, lumbering giants, but they're fast — I saw them up on top of the reef one day when we spooked some, fifty, sixty pounders, good size, and they were flying. Ben and Mick said those things go hard, almost impossible to stop because they go straight into the reef edges, so powerful.

Tom Rowland: I didn't get to see one go fast, but I did get to see the thing up close — it was like looking through a magnifying glass, because everything else is a regular size fish and then here's this thing that's like a whale. Totally harmless, just sitting there.

Tyler Kapela: That's top two on my list. They're an endangered species, plentiful on some reefs but it's a delicacy in places like Indonesia and China, so they're harvested too much and they're slow growing. Up and down the Great Barrier Reef they're completely protected; in other countries they're protected too, so there are lots in some areas and none in others where they should be.

Tom Rowland: Well, that's an incredible trip, man — I hope you get to go back.

Tyler Kapela: Yeah, man, they want to make it a yearly thing. I don't know if my fiancée will let me go three weeks at a time — I didn't bring her on this one.

Landing a State-Record-Class Tarpon in the Intracoastal

Tom Rowland: Three weeks is a long time to be away, sleeping on a seventeen-foot boat sixty miles offshore — no wonder you were tired when you got back. So when you did get back, you caught a giant tarpon. Tell me about that.

Tyler Kapela: That's kind of what I've built a name for myself doing over here, being one of the better tarpon guides around — that's how Ben found me for Cast in the first place. They want to come tarpon fish with me, but they actually can't come to the States for a while, because they went fishing in Sudan. If you're not an American citizen and you go to certain countries — Sudan, Afghanistan — you can't come to the U.S. for two or three years afterward. That's why they didn't come to ICAST. Same stuff drew them there — the big GTs. But whenever they can come, I'm taking them tarpon fishing for sure, as many days as they want, because they hooked us up so big in Australia.

Tyler Kapela: So, back in May, we were getting crabs at this local bridge that everybody fishes — right by the marina, in the Intracoastal. It's a brand-new bridge; they tore the old one down and built a new one, so the spot's kind of blown up a bit since everyone knows we caught fish there. There were thirty or forty boats around dipping crabs, and I heard a big explosion, a giant splash. I thought it was a ray — you know how rays jump and splash — but I looked and asked one of the other captains nearby if he'd seen it, and he said, yeah man, that was a massive tarpon that just came up and ate a crab. We had one ready to go, sitting in a bucket, and I flipped it right in front of the splash — instantly hooked up. This thing cut across from the right side of the boat to the left, right under the trolling motor, around the fender — I never saw the take. We had my angler open the bail, got the trolling motor out of the way, worked around which part of the fender the line was wrapped on, and thank God it was around the outside, not through the bridge. We blasted out and chased it down, screaming drag the whole time. It never jumped once, which is insane — you know how brutal that can be when they don't jump, they just stay down and run. It went down a whole row of houses with docks and pilings, and at one point it was two feet from wrapping around the pilings. I was trying to coax it out with the boat, not pissing it off, because if you pull too hard it surges and goes wherever it wants. Eventually it got clear and out into open water, but it was a Friday or Saturday with boat traffic everywhere, so the fish was getting run over by boats and we're honking at people. We finally settled into the fight out in the middle of the Intracoastal.

Tyler Kapela: About fifty yards from the boat, an hour into the fight — I put a lot of pressure on fish, I'm not one who likes to let them fight for two and a half or three hours, we use heavy tackle and max it out. But forty-five minutes in, this thing blows a hole in the water — I thought a bull shark was chasing it, but it wasn't — and dumps the entire reel of backing, three hundred yards, an hour into the fight, when it's supposed to be getting tired. I was thinking, what is happening, this is insane — maybe a really strong hundred-sixty- or hundred-eighty-pounder, but nothing close to what it actually was. Eventually we got it over toward the seawall with a big crowd of boats around us by then. It came up and rolled, but at a hundred yards out there's no perspective on size. When we finally got it to the seawall and I saw it up close for the first time, I could not believe it — a foot longer than any tarpon I thought I'd ever see, and the girth on it. I'm thinking, this is the biggest tarpon I've ever seen. We slowly wore it down — my angler did an awesome job fighting the fish, probably a hundred fifty pounds soaking wet himself, in his mid-twenties, not a big guy, but he fought it for an hour and forty-five minutes with no jumps, which is brutal. We got it in close to the seawall, decided to land it in three feet of water, and as soon as I grabbed it, it just gave up — best thing ever.

Tyler Kapela: It measured eighty-six inches at the fork of the tail with a forty-five-inch girth, which puts it right around two hundred forty pounds, give or take ten, using the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust formula — the state record is two forty-four, so it was within range of that record.

Tom Rowland: I wonder where the previous state record was caught — there's still a sign hanging in Garrison Bight for one around two forty-three, called Coupon Bight.

Tyler Kapela: That might be the one — I believe the state record is around 243.8. My first measurement actually put this fish at forty-six inches of girth, which would put it at two sixty, and I didn't even want to say that number, because social media would blow up with people saying no way. So I remeasured to make sure, and it was just a little over forty-five — once you add even a tenth of an inch to the girth, the poundage jumps quite a bit. We never took the fish out of the water. If you look closely, it was blind in one eye — missing its lens — but even with one eye it was unbelievably fat and girthy. It was button-hooked, hooked straight through on a circle hook, and hadn't even chafed the leader a little bit, which is unusual because a big circle hook often just sits in there rather than penetrating all the way through. The fish felt kind of soft to the touch, like the bony plates were starting to wear down from age. Because of the one eye, I started calling it One-Eyed Willy as a joke, and Florida Sportsman ran with it, and a bunch of people wrote articles calling it that, which I thought was funny. We took the pictures, everybody clapped, there was a crowd on the seawall watching us catch and release it, and it just shot off like a rocket, like nothing had ever happened to it.

Tom Rowland: What was it like grabbing the jaw of that fish?

Tyler Kapela: My angler was still fighting it when I jumped out, and as soon as I grabbed that front jaw to try and stop it from going forward, the fish just let me get it, which was really weird.

Tom Rowland: The biggest fish I've ever been able to handle, when you grab that jaw, it's just massive — like a tarpon's mouth, but bigger, like a dragon's. I've never caught a fish that big myself, not anywhere close, but a couple over two hundred, and grabbing a two-hundred-pounder compared to a hundred-pounder, the jaw and the whole head structure is just so much bigger — it's hard to even describe. You're holding it differently, almost with your hands out like this. A hundred-pounder, an eighty-pounder, you can grab by the jaw with one hand and have a pretty good idea of holding on. But one of those big ones — I can only imagine it's like grabbing a goliath grouper's mouth, something so different.

Tyler Kapela: The jawbone coming out of its mouth was only as big as my neck.

Tom Rowland: It's massive. Catching that fish on a rod and reel would be really special — you could fish a lifetime for that. But as a guide, handling that fish is something else. That distance between the front of the jaw and the dorsal fin is bigger than most tarpon people ever catch — that whole front section, there's length there that's abnormally big.

Tyler Kapela: Right, and the length was what really got me — you can't fully see it because it's magnified underwater, but it was very deep-bodied too. The length, when I first saw how long it was, I thought, what? It was seven-two at the fork of the tail with the jaw closed, but if you press the tail down it's over eight feet — an eight-foot fish. And a forty-five-inch girth — my first measurement put it at forty-six, which would've made it two sixty, and I didn't even want to say that, because then social media blows up with people saying it's not. So I remeasured and it was just over forty-five. Once you add even a tenth of an inch to the girth, the poundage jumps quite a bit.

Tom Rowland: You should talk to Mike Larkin about this — he's a scientist I did a podcast with who has a slightly different formula, where length times girth divided by eight hundred is accurate for something like a bonefish, but for tarpon he had a different one, which might be closer to the one you're using.

Tyler Kapela: I don't even know if I'd call it a poundage — I just say the thing was seven feet two with a forty-five-inch girth, figure it out for yourself. Try to catch one like that, and that's a massive, massive fish. It's a crazy thing to catch in a spot where everybody's just out there catching crabs.

Tom Rowland: Is that a spot you normally fish?

Tyler Kapela: It is — it's a spot everybody catches crabs at, but it's a really fishy spot, and I've caught some insane fish there. It's a few miles in from the coast. The biggest kingfish I've ever caught in my life was at that same bridge, which drains grass flats — not a big open-water bridge. We got a forty-four-pound kingfish there years ago, and literally three days before this interview I was out getting bait and saw a Spanish mackerel doing a death flop on the surface without its tail, and the biggest kingfish I've ever seen came up and smoked it — had to be a fifty-pound king.

Tom Rowland: What are fifty-pound kingfish doing a couple miles inland?

Tyler Kapela: That's what I said — in a little channel, not a big one, just a very fishy spot. We've caught the biggest gag grouper I've ever caught inshore right around there, the biggest snook on any of my charters was right there too, though I've caught bigger snook personally on the East Coast. Now it's changed a little since they tore the old bridge out and put in a new one with fewer pilings, which changed the whole dynamic of the spot — I'd say it's better for tarpon now and not quite as good for anything else, since there's less structure. But the tarpon really seem to like it — we've had multiples of ten fish there. That fish was really special, being able to get it in and, since it never jumped, not seeing it until it was right next to the boat. I've caught a couple over two hundred pounds before — we caught a two-eleven last year, and we usually hook a couple over two hundred every season, and seeing those big ones jump is unbelievable. But just being able to get my hands on a fish that big — there aren't many swimming around like that, at least not around here, maybe in Africa or somewhere else crazy, but not in Florida. That was really special, being able to get in the water with it. A lot of times you catch that fish out in the middle of a channel or a mile off the beach, so being able to get out with this one was super cool.

Tom Rowland: Your angler looked pretty excited — has he caught a lot of tarpon before?

Tyler Kapela: Believe it or not, that was his first tarpon ever landed — he'd hooked three or four before, he said, but that was the first one he ever landed. He booked five or six days with me for next year, tarpon fishing all day, which is a good chunk of change, but he's so fired up. He's going to have a hard time beating that one.

Tom Rowland: I'd go snook fishing, or permit fishing, or king fishing — something other than tarpon, because you've already done it, you're at the top, it's only downhill from here.

Tyler Kapela: I know, I know. But hey, whatever — that's good for him, he's hooked.

Building It From Nothing

Tom Rowland: Well, dude, you've got some crazy stories, you've been to some incredible places. This has been a really fun conversation — I'd love to do it again, because I don't think we even scratched the surface.

Tyler Kapela: Yeah, man, I've got all kinds of crazy stories from my travels. I'm going all over the place with Pelagic now too — I'm actually the MC for their tournament, so we go to Costa Rica and Cabo, traveling all around fishing for different stuff, and you never know what you're going to encounter. That's what I crave in my life — to go travel and fish and catch as many different species and experience different ecosystems as I can. That's what I'm all about.

Tom Rowland: You're doing it, man. And you set this in motion when you were fourteen — I think that's the coolest part of the whole story, that you didn't come from a fishing family, and you set this as your goal, and you're doing it. That's fantastic. I love seeing that — it's similar to my own story, coming from an unlikely background and just being determined enough to make it happen.

Tyler Kapela: Yeah, if I saw other guys doing it, I figured, why can't I do that? My dad can barely stand up on a boat, much less cast a rod — love him, but he's just not a fisherman. So I started with literally nothing and made it happen.

Tom Rowland: What's your take on that? I'd imagine for a good part of your journey, that felt like your biggest weakness or challenge — looking at other guides whose dad's a guide, whose uncle's a guide, third-generation guides who grew up in that lifestyle. For me too, for a long time, not coming from that felt like a disadvantage. I'm curious whether somewhere along the way that turned into an advantage — whether you look at things differently than other people because of it.

Tyler Kapela: A hundred percent. It's all about having a passion for it, but not having that prior experience gives you an untainted perspective on how to look at things. You're not getting something preconceived from your dad or grandfather about how it's supposed to be done — you're figuring it out yourself. It takes a lot of time on the water to work it out if you're doing it on your own, but you come at it with an open book, looking at things for the first time, from different perspectives. Maybe the way everybody else has been doing it for a long time isn't actually the best way, even if they all think it is — so you can think outside the box a little better than someone who's been doing it for two or three generations. There are plenty of awesome fishermen who've done it that long, but you can come at it fresh and maybe do it a bit differently, discover something no one's seen before. And all along the way, you take bits and pieces from the guys who've been doing it a long time — keep what works, leave what doesn't, and build it into your own thing. That's kind of what I did.

Tom Rowland: I love it. Well, Tyler, we'll do it again — I look forward to meeting you in person this weekend, and I'd love to have you back on the podcast to learn more about what you're up to. But thanks for doing this. Let people know how they can get in touch with you, follow you, or learn more about what you do.

Tyler Kapela: Sure, man. My Instagram is probably the easiest way to get in touch — just type in "Captain Tyler" and I'm the first one that comes up, or search captain underscore Tyler underscore Kapela directly. I post a bunch of photos, basically every couple of days, almost like a fishing report of what we're doing out on the bay. And Hit and Run Fishing Charters is my guide business — Hit and Run. The phone number is (727) 421-1051. Those three things will get you in touch with me — my website and everything else is linked from there too.

Tom Rowland: Awesome. Alright, Tyler, thanks, man — we'll be back with another awesome guest like Tyler next week, so we'll see you then.

Tyler Kapela: Thank you very much.