The Small World of Sportfishing

By Jim Turner

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.

It’s that edge—that instinct—that binds this small world together. The brotherhood of the sea.
When you’ve been out there long enough, you start to realize how small the world of sportfishing really is. Not small in scope—we chase fish across oceans, burn fuel across borders, and trade stories from Kona to Cape Verde—but small in the way a family is small. Tight. Interwoven. Full of ghosts and legends you never really stop hearing about.

The Docks at Lauderdale

Every fall, Fort Lauderdale becomes the epicenter of that world. The docks light up like a carnival - polished hulls, towers high as palm trees, paint gleaming under the Florida sun. But behind the shine, there’s something deeper.

You walk those docks and start recognizing faces. The captain who fished beside you in Venezuela thirty years ago. The mate who ran cockpit on someone else’s boat, now wearing the owner’s hat. The broker who used to scrub decks before learning the game from the bilge up.

You don’t just see boats - you see stories. You see the people who built them, ran them, broke them, fixed them, and made them legends.

That’s what Lauderdale really is: a reunion. A salt-stained class photo that keeps adding faces but never loses the originals.

What Keeps Us Coming Back

To outsiders, sportfishing looks like a competition of machines - bigger boats, faster engines, more tech, more chrome. But to those who live it, it’s something else entirely.

It’s about mornings that start the night before, diesel fumes thick in the air, coffee cups rattling as you idle past the sea buoy. It’s about lines in the water before sunrise, when the spread looks like hope itself glinting in the pink light.

It’s about the days that go dead quiet—when you start questioning every decision—and the single bite that changes everything.

Those are the moments that weld people together. When you’ve been out there long enough, it doesn’t matter whether you’re running a 36-foot walkaround or a 70-foot battlewagon. You share the same rhythm, the same obsession. You know what it means to push just a little farther, to chase a rumor of fish until the fuel gauge makes your stomach tighten.

And when you come back to the dock—win or lose—you swap stories with people who get it. Who’ve bled the same way for a release. Who understand why you keep doing it even when it doesn’t make sense.

That’s the glue of this world.

Boats With Souls

Every builder at the show will tell you they make the best boat. Some will talk about materials, others about performance. But what separates the good ones from the great is something harder to define.

It’s soul.

You can see it in the lines of a classic Merritt, the tumblehome of a Rybovich, the flare of a Bayliss. You can feel it in the way a Release rides through a head sea—tight, honest, confident.

Soul doesn’t come from a marketing department. It comes from the men and women in the shop, the ones who still fair by hand, who can read fiberglass like a map, who know when a hull “feels right” even before it’s wet.

That’s what we fight to preserve at Release Boatworks. Not just the art of building boats, but the pride that comes with doing it right. Because when the ocean tests you—and it always will—you want a boat built by people who understand what that test feels like.

You can’t fake that.

The Brotherhood of the Sea

Walk into any dock bar during Lauderdale week and you’ll see what I mean. Captains from Costa Rica, mates from the Bahamas, builders from North Carolina, owners from Jersey—it’s all one tribe.

Nobody cares what you drive or where you park it. What matters is what you’ve done offshore.

You’ll see a captain telling a story with hands the size of teak blocks, eyes squinting against a lifetime of glare. Someone else listening, nodding, knowing exactly what that kind of day feels like. You’ll hear laughter that comes from relief—the kind that only people who’ve run out of fuel, luck, or daylight truly understand.

That’s the magic of this world. It keeps circling back on itself. The stories get passed down, retold, and remade by the next generation.

You might hear a young mate talk about chasing his first marlin in Costa Rica—and across the bar, an old timer smiles because he remembers chasing his first one in Venezuela forty years ago. The places change. The names change. But the feeling doesn’t.

The Next Band of Brothers

Every show, I meet people who remind me that the torch is being passed. Young captains who’ve spent more time on YouTube than in boatyards but are hungry to learn. New owners who want something real - a boat built for the fight, not the dock.

They ask questions that matter: What’s she draw? How does she run in a following sea? How’s the wake at 7 knots? Those are the questions that tell me they’re serious.

Because the truth is, the next chapter of this world belongs to them. They’re the ones who’ll keep it honest, who’ll remember that it’s not about flash - it’s about fish.

I see that same hunger in every new build. Each hull that leaves our shop carries a little of the old world and a lot of the new. The craftsmanship is timeless, but the technology keeps evolving. We’re still fairing by hand, still sweating the small stuff, but we’re doing it with the best composites, precision molds, and digital tools available.

Because tradition only matters if it moves forward.

What Never Changes

Boats change. Gear changes. Even the faces at the bar change.

But one thing never does: the ocean doesn’t compromise.

It doesn’t care how much your boat cost or how many followers you’ve got. It only cares whether she’ll make it home.

That’s the standard we live by in this business. Every builder worth his salt knows it. Every captain who’s ever heard a bilge alarm offshore knows it.

The sea keeps us humble. It reminds us that we’re all apprentices, no matter how long we’ve been at it.

That humility is what binds us - owner to captain, builder to crew, one generation to the next.

Circling Back

So when I walk the docks in Lauderdale, I don’t just see hulls and hardware. I see a living timeline. I see the boats that carried us here, the ones that broke us, the ones that made us better.

I see the ghosts of the men who taught us how to build, how to run, how to fish. And I see the young ones coming up - ready to earn their own stories.

That’s the beauty of this small world. It keeps moving forward, even as it circles back.

Because every launch, every tournament, every bite carries echoes of the ones before.

When the sun comes up tomorrow, somewhere out there a captain will push the throttles forward, watch the wake stretch out behind him, and feel that same mix of hope and risk that’s been pulling us offshore for generations.

And when he gets back - fuel low, release flags flying, salt crusted on the bridge—he’ll tie up next to someone just like him, and the stories will start all over again.

Here’s the truth:
The ocean will always separate the talkers from the doers. It doesn’t care what name’s on your transom - only how you carry yourself when the bite’s slow, the fuel’s low, and the horizon’s still calling.

We few, we happy few, are bound not by where we are, but by what we’ve seen out there. And as long as there’s blue water left to run, this brotherhood of the sea will keep finding each other - at the dock, at the bar, and on the edge of the spread when the next fish shows up.

Because that’s what we do.
We chase.
We build.
We belong.