(link) Capt Dave's Redfish tapes
Yepper, that my Mom holding her largest ever Redfish, that had no less than 150 spots on it on the cover of that video.
Back in 2000, I made two instructional; type video's. Using the two day seminar I gave at the Florida Sportsman Magazine Fishing Expo, downtown at the Prime Osborne Convention center.
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Ohhhh....was that the good ole days.
Florida Sportsman would invite local guides to do seminars and at the same time, for doing so give you a booth to set up and talk to people about charters, techniques, show photos/videos, and just plain swap fish tales.
It was a really good time. So my dad set up a tri-pod, in the back of the crowd as I stood up on a flats boat floating in a fake pond, and talked about jetty fishing, from A-Z in 20 minutes or so.
We used the seminar as part of the video we produced. It took well over a year and we had tons of fishing footage. Then, we ran it all through Adobe Premier editing software and still had one big video. My dad got in touch with Bennett Marine Video out in California. And we used them as the video duplicator, and distributor. And Mr. Bennett suggested we take our "too long of a video" and cut it into two videos.
One on just Redfish, and another on Sheepshead, Drum, Trout and Flounder. The Flounder fishing section we did was my favorite, because by the time we got to covering the Flounder fishing in the late summer early fall, I was allot better at being on camera.
Can you believe, that this was all before super braid line? And back then, not everyone owned a cell phone!! Seems like 100 years ago. And many of the clients I take fishing are out fooling with their handheld computers while on the boat. And back then, no one had all that stuff. And in reality, it wasn't all that long ago.
Things sure change. It wasn't long after I did the expo's for two years, that Florida Sportsman Magazine started charging everyone for a booth at their sportsman's show. Local yokal guides doing seminars with free booths were replaced by the Florida Sportsman Radio Show team of hosts from around the state. And in my humble opinion, the seminars got really generic.
How's a guy from S. Florida gonna answer questions about "our" jetties.....the #1 fishing area in all of J-ville Florida???
You either had to be a radio show sponsor, a magazine advertiser, or in the right crowd to be invited to the Expo.
But hell, I squeezed everything I could out of what I did there. Probably way more than most Guides ever did. Thanks to my dad, business manager and best bud. He used the opportunity to learn how to edit video, market it, and made some money on it too. For the hours he spent working on the projects, the camera and sound equipment, and the software he bought, he probably earned about .50 cents an hour, with the royalties he received. But it was a great learning experience for sure.
Now, I see my old video on Ebay. And wow has the last 15 years flew by. Yes, I'm on my 16th year of being a 100% full-time fishing guide, in Jacksonville, Florida. NOT an easy task.
I've learned allot since those days, and things sure have changed allot too. I ought to sit down with Dad and watch our old copies of the video, which we also had made into DVD's...... again having to change with the times, over the years.
