Subscribe to Marlin magazine and get a year of highly collectible, keepsake editions – plus access to the digital edition and archives. Sign up for the free Marlin email newsletter.
The ocean is wide. The world of sport fishing isn’t.
We chase fish across oceans, burn fuel across borders, and live half our lives on vessels far from home. It’s a restless rhythm, one that pulls us farther out while always pulling us back in. And when boat-show season hits, the stories, the scars, the friendships—they all return to the same docks.
Fort Lauderdale proves it. The boat show lights up like a carnival—towers, paint jobs, hulls gleaming under the Florida sun. But walk the docks and you see the shift: more outboards, more yachts, more new faces looking for their place in the current. The old guard still leans on covering boards and swapping sea stories, but there’s a new generation in the wings itching for their shot at the blue water.
And that’s what makes Fort Lauderdale electric. Ten steps and you’ll bump into someone you chased marlin with or who you’ll fish alongside tomorrow. The names change on boats, but the faces don’t. They keep circling back, like sailfish on a baitball.
The nights blur together—The Billfish Foundation, the IGFA, the Marlin magazine party, sponsors, vendors, and rooms thick with anglers, tournament directors, writers, builders and captains. You walk in and it feels like the cockpit after a good day offshore: noisy, close, everyone talking at once. Rivalries soften over rum. For a night, the tribe is under one roof.
Around the edges, the business gets done. Tournament directors whisper about next season’s purse. Fishermen talk shop. Vendors show the next tool for the job. Everybody’s got an angle, but nobody’s faking it. In this small world, your name matters more than your logo.
And always, there are stories. One of my favorites comes from Capt. Ron Hamlin about a time he was running from Venezuela to St. Thomas—no GPS, no loran that far south, only a compass and dead reckoning. He told his crew, “Keep your eyes peeled, boys, we ought to be seeing St. Thomas any minute.” An hour later, sure enough, the island rose on the horizon.
When they asked how he knew, he grinned and said: “Because we only had enough fuel to get there. And we were just about out.” That was Ronnie—part seaman, part gambler, all fisherman.
It’s that edge—that instinct—that binds this small world together. It’s the bond you only get offshore, when the sun rises and you’ve still got lines in the water and hope on the spread. It’s why the old stories keep rolling and the next ones keep getting written.
So, when I walk the Fort Lauderdale docks, I don’t just see boats. I see the brotherhood and sisterhood of the sea—those who came before and those who are coming up. We few, we happy few, are bound not by where we are but by what we’ve seen and done out there.
The ocean is waiting. The next band of brothers and sisters is already forming. Their stories will be the ones we trade at this show 10, 20 years from now. And that’s the beauty of this small world—it never stops moving forward, even as it keeps circling back.
