Swordfish, Tarpon, Tilefish and Snowy Grouper during this -Office Party- Episode

On this episode of Bass to Billfish, Peter Miller is in the Florida Keys with the winner of the Bass to Billfish office competition, Kate Stewart. Welcome aboard, Kate. Thanks, Pete. Staying at the palatial Casa Erosi, I'm never going to want to leave. Peter and his assistant will tame tarpon in the shallows. And with the help of Captain Nick Stancic, deep drop for trophy game fish. Hey, congrats, Kate. Yay! And through it all, Peter will show Kate how to make a splash in Florida. Florida, the fishing capital of the world. With over 2,000 miles of pristine shoreline, join three-time World Sailfish Championship winner and pro angler Peter Miller as he takes these lucky winners on a once-in-a-lifetime fishing adventure. From freshwater to saltwater, ocean to Everglades, come join us for a fishing experience like no other. This is Florida's Bass to Billfish with Peter Miller. Presented by Yellowfin and by Florida, fishing capital of the world. Must be the sunshine. This trip was really, really unique and really fun. We got a chance to take out the Bass to Billfish employees. My name is Kate Stewart and I am Peter Miller's assistant for Bass to Billfish. I work in the office. I do a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff with the shows and the shoots, so I've always been on the other side of everything. It's really neat to give back to the people that help you a lot. You know, you don't always have time to say, hey, you know, thanks for everything. I like to do that, and I try to always say thank you for everything everybody does. It was a stiff competition with my coworkers. I mean, there's a lot of people in the office who work very hard. I was not aware that I had won anything, but Pete surprised me and said, you won the office contest. To be able to take them out and go fishing and just have a good time it really means a lot. I've been doing a lot of traveling around the state and I've been putting off putting new tires on, but I decided I better stop off at Pep Boys and get some new tires. Want to take a look at your car? Okay. We'll get you in and out. I brought Louis out to the car to tell him what was going on. I thought I needed new tires. You're getting there, right? They're three years old. Uh-huh. They're starting to already show some dry rotting on it, so... Okay. Yeah, we'll get you inside. Let me get the keys. All right. Thanks, man. Appreciate it, Louis. So he recommended the tires that I should get for my car. You got the Dueler HLs. They're the good tires. Nothing's too good for the family. He took me into the bay and he went over my brakes. Brand new. Never been rolled. Huh. Never been taken down. Yeah. And recommended that I just get the tires, get them balanced and get them aligned, and that's exactly what we did. He did a fantastic job and it was real quick and very efficient. I was very happy with the service. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. All right. Pep boys, they do everything for less. I guess it's true. When we got down to Alamorada, I met up with Carrie, who handles my buddy Scott Robin's properties, and she showed me around the property and it was just absolutely beautiful. This is Casa Arosa. It's a four-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath home. Uh-huh. She gave me a tour of the house. Jukebox. Pool table. It's a nice little getaway. Perfect. It was kind of amazing to walk around and see all the amenities. Wow. The views are stupendous. Yeah. You can't get nicer than that. It sleeps 12. Gorgeous kitchen. Just a fabulous location. I highly recommend it. Check out Casa Arosa. Thank you so much for showing us. Oh, thank you. It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope you catch him up. As we were getting ready to head out on the elephant, we were walking down the 300-foot dock and on both sides, I'm seeing little schools of tarpon. There's two tarpon right there. Oh, look at that. Those are like 15-pounders. Those are perfect. So naturally, we tried to catch them. See if we can light them up and catch a couple. The first bait I tried was a pilchard, 30-pound floral leader, little circle hook. This is so cool. Madison's got a bonita strip. Kate's got a goggle. Everybody puts something else on. I'm going to go down this way a little bit. So I wind up hooking a nice tarpon, like 30-pounder. Got them all. That fish was out there a little further in that school of pilchards. That was cool. He's jumping like crazy, going wild, I'm thinking. I'm at the end of a dock out in the ocean. I'm going to kind of free-pull. We wind up having to work this fish, pass it around. Okay, ready? I'm going to touch the leader, okay? Got it. We wind up getting a release on this tarpon. Yeah! Good job, guys. I think we got a lot of excitement out of that. Coming up next on Bass to Billfish... Madison winds up hooking up. Nice one, Madison. Oh, yeah. Madison, you did it, buddy! I never caught a tilefish. Nice, Kate. She brings hers up, I bring mine up. That's a nice. Getting that first glimpse of the fish, you know, really a cool feeling. So pretty. Pretty fish for a pretty young lady, Kate. Bass to Billfish with Peter Miller is brought to you by Florida, fishing capital of the world. Must be the sunshine. Mercury, number one on the water. Bass Pro Shops, your adventure starts here. Pet Boys, does everything for less. Peter Miller is in the Florida Keys with his assistant and office competition winner, Kate Stewart. There's two tarpon right there. After checking into the majestic Casa Hirose, Peter showed Kate the tarpon action right off their private dock. Got them all. Nice, Kate. Got them. And then Kate winds up hooking up. Her fish is jumping all over the place. Pete! And she's screaming, and it was a really neat fight. Good fish, very acrobatic fish. Pull up. Wind down. There it is. Nice tarpon. There you go, there you go. Nice. Fish is going all over the place. We wind up getting a release on this tarpon as well. He was big. Yeah, he was. We were able to release him to where he could live and grow a little bit bigger and have someone else have a chance to catch him and kind of have the same experience that I was able to have. It was awesome. It's our first tarpon. He's about to eat it. He ate it. Get ready, guys. Madison winds up hooking up off the tip of the dock, which is about 300 feet away from the house. Got him on. So beautiful. The fish is jumping, going crazy. Nice one, Madison. What is that, a largemouth? Nice jump. But being high up on a dock like that, there's no way to really land it. Maybe I'll go down the ladder. I'll help you land him. So I kind of climbed down this ladder, and he was able to pull the fish out from under the pilings a few times, and he was able to direct the fish over to me. Oh, yeah. Madison, you did it, buddy. It was really fun to catch tarpon light tackle out here in the ocean. Really neat. I think we're going to eat a little swordfish stuff, maybe a little tarpon stuff, maybe some deep drop stuff. When you come down to Alamorada, you have to stop off at Worldwide Sportsman, which is Bass Pro Shops. It's a great store. After you. HB for beauty. Wow, look at this. Smells nice. So we walked in. We wound up getting everything we needed for fishing, a leader, hooks, gloves. All right, let's go over to the fishing section. Basically, everything we needed, we got. Yeah. Oh, wow, now they're using this one, too? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's not a bad one. That's cute. Yeah. These are good when you grab the sword, you have a little extra in there, you know, shaking your knuckles down on the ground. You know, sometimes when you catch those swords, you know, it's not necessarily a big one that makes a difference. It's catching a sword. 2,000 feet of water just to get a bite. It's pretty epic. That was great, guys. Hey, buddy. How you doing? What's your name? Hunter. Hey, Hunter. Nice to meet you. I'm Peter. As we were getting ready to head out of Bud and Mary's that morning, a father and son walked up, and the son was a big fan of the show. Hey, nice to meet you. He told me that he came down specifically because he knew we had done a lot of fishing in Alamorada, and he's watched the show quite a bit. If you could name any fish right now that you want to catch, what would it be? Bonefish, really. Yeah, we had a moment, we took a picture together, and it was really cool. It was a pleasure meeting you. Maybe we'll see you on TV one day. You'll be catching some fish, and you'll be showing me how to do stuff. Kate's coming with us today. She won the office raffle at Basta Billfish. She's usually working hard in the office and helping us hold down Basta Billfish, and today we got her fishing, which is cool. Another cool thing is we got Nick Stanzik over here. Nick Stanzik and his family kind of pioneered the daytime sorting. In 2006, we really figured them out and started catching good numbers of them and started making it like a regular thing and been out there having a lot of success. So it was really cool to meet someone that invented, more or less, this type of fishing. Looks like we're in store for another Alamrata adventure with Captain Nick Stanzik from Button Mary. Nick had some spots that were great for deep dropping for tilefish. I felt a little something there. He had never caught a tilefish, and I had never caught a tilefish, so we thought this would be a really cool opportunity. Kate, you want to catch a fish? When you fish for tilefish, it's usually deep water. You can use a chicken rig. It's a rig with three multiple hooks kind of coming off a main line, and you have squid. Drop it down 700 feet with a conventional. Most guys will go there with electrics, but we dropped down with about 30-pound braid down the bottom and you just kind of drift this one section, and all of a sudden, you know, little bumps. I'm thinking, I can't believe it. What do you think it is, Nick? I think it's a blue line tilefish. Tilefish? It was almost instant that we were hooked. First tilefish on the show, if it is a tilefish. They're really good to eat. It's only about 1,000 feet of line out. Not a big deal. Whether it's a 70-pound fish or a 5-pound fish, 700 feet down is still a long way to reel. Your fish just get bigger there for a second? Kate winds up catching the first one. We got a tilefish for dinner. All right! Nice, Kate. She brings hers up, I bring mine up. That's a nice. All of a sudden, we got table fare. Blue line tilefish, they had a blue line underneath their eye here, right in front of it. They were really good fish to eat, so that sounded like a really good dinner for us to have. Cool. I'm excited to drop down again. You know, we threw it in the Yeti Gouler, and I'm thinking, this is fantastic. After Kate and I caught ours, Cap drops down, he catches a nice one. That's a good one, man. Nice one, bro. And Madison gets in, he catches one. There you go, I got color. Nice job, Madison. Tilefish sandwich for Madison. It was really neat seeing a tilefish kind of look a little bit like a wrasse, and they have really neat little blue stripes coming off their forehead there and the sides down the cheeks. They look good, and they taste good. There you go. I just wanted to drop one more time, and sure enough, I got a bite, and I knew this fish was a little bigger. It feels like a tilefish. It's not fighting really hard, but it just feels heavier than the other two or three I caught. After fighting it for about 20 minutes, bringing it up to the surface. What do you think, Nick? Is this a tile? More than likely, but you never know. Maybe it'll be a grouper for us. He's pinwheeling, guys. He's pinwheeling. Uh-oh, you got your grouper. Yeah, baby! My first snowy grouper, too. It's really unique. A very good eating grouper. Got all these little white dots on them. That's why they call them snowy groupers. Oh, okay. Tilefish, snowy groupers. It's unbelievable. Put through it in the Yeti Gouler, and I'm thinking, this is fantastic. Thanks, man. Enjoy the day. Good job, Kat. Way to go, Kate. Way to go, Madison. Coming up next on Bass to Billfish... We're hooked up. I think he's kind of coming out this way. We're kind of used to seeing him, but it never gets old. So pretty. Pretty fish for a pretty young lady, Kate. Bass to Billfish with Peter Miller is brought to you by Yellowfin, choice of champions. Yeti Coolers, wildly stronger, keep ice longer. Kershaw Knives, Kershaw Pro Grades, the thrill of the strike. Ray Marine, world leaders in marine electronics. Closed captioning for Bass to Billfish has been provided by FishingCapital.com. Peter Miller is in the Florida Keys with Bass to Billfish employee, Kate Stewart. It's our first tarpon. Peter and Kate have caught a variety of fish. Blue line tilefish, they had a blue line underneath their eye here. And filled their Yeti Cooler with dinner for later. Nice job, guys. Now, they move to deeper waters in search of daytime swordfish. So we finally get out to the sword grounds after about a two and a half hour trip. And, you know, we're like little kids, we want to drop instantly. But it's a very technical drift when you're dropping down, you know, 1,700, 2,000 feet. It's an interesting method, you know, with the current, letting it out and then falling back on it to get straight up and down on the bait. You've got to really think about it, rather take your time and get it down there instead of trying to race and save a minute. We discussed who was going to possibly wind on the fish. What do you think? Want to catch one? She's like, yeah, no question about it. I mean, she was all in. Kate's like, she's up for it, huh? So we fit the harness to her and the fighting belt so we had her all set up. And sure enough, we get the bite. We're hooked up. I think he's kind of coming out this way. I was getting a little nervous, but I was also really excited because, you know, it's always something that I wanted to do. Okay, you ready? Ready. Start winding. We'll hook you up. Good. I had never seen her fight fish. There you go, Kate. Look at this, everybody. She was working it like a pro, you know, squatting down with the harness and winding it back and forth. Look at this, huh? Kate's hooked up on a nice swordfish. I don't know how big it is, but they're all nice here in front of us. We're making headway. Now, the only time we might freak out is if he comes up and he starts coming at us. We're going to have you wind like a maniac so we don't get loose on him. They come up to the surface. They don't know what's going on. They're a little disoriented. And they'll sometimes come right at you, jumping or swimming fast. Okay, Kate, come back with me. As you back up, keep winding. So she was ready, and sure enough, starts coming at her. We'll back up to the corner here. Very good. She wound probably for, I don't know, a good 35, 40 minutes. It was tiring at times, but I was like, you know, I'm going to fight this fish, and it's going to be mine. There he is. He looks pretty lively. You got a sword, girl. Getting that first glimpse of the fish, like when it's coming up to where you can see him, it's, you know, really a cool feeling. There he is. He's shaking his head. Oh, yeah. It's really something that you can't describe. Hey, congrats, Kate. Yay. I was proud of her. She did a really, really good job. She's so pretty. A pretty fish for a pretty young lady, Kate. Congratulations on your first tour. Give me a kiss again. Thank you. You know, I've been working for Bastille Fish for so long, and I've kind of made a family out of it. So for everyone to be there and enjoy it with me was actually really cool. Here we go. One, two, three. Look at that. Bring it in, Kate. Bring it in. It's coming in. Great job. Kate, we're throwing your cut in tonight. Coming up next on Bass to Billfish. Keep going, Madison. Keep the turn. Keep the turn going hard. So it's true what they say. You know where these things live, huh? I get thrown in the water. Bass to Billfish with Peter Miller is brought to you by Mazda Zoom Zoom FWC There's only one season in Florida. Fishing season. Gaff Magazine Your coastal lifestyle, angling, and destination publication. Fish Hard Gear Official apparel provider of Bass to Billfish and Peter Miller. Peter Miller is in the Florida Keys with the winner of the Bass to Billfish office competition, Kate Stewart. Welcome aboard, Kate. Thanks, Pete. After catching tilefish and snowy grouper Yes, a snowy grouper. Peter and Captain Nick Stanzik put Kate on her first swordfish. Coming in. Now, Peter is trying to get another boat side before heading in to feast on the day's bounty. We released Kate's fish. We wound up running south again a few miles. We dropped everything back down to the bottom. Oh, there he is. Boom, we're hooked up. Like a tiger. I harnessed up, clipped the rod in, and started fighting the fish. Kate, my arm gets really tired. What am I supposed to do? Keep winding. All right, that's what I like to hear. Pete's a pro, obviously. I mean, he did really well fighting the fish. Yeah, he's feeling good right now. Felt a nice head shake there. You know, we couldn't tell, by the way, that he was hooked on the fish if it was a bigger one or a smaller one or about the same size. There's a double line. Right out here. No telling how big he is. He could be big, he could be small. Tell him it's quick. Tell him it's quick, Madison. Be prepared. It turned out to be about a 40-minute fight. There he is. It looks like a decent fish. So we were all kind of curious if I had caught the bigger one or who knows. Turned out to be another swordfish pup, as we call it. You did it, Nick. So it's true what they say. You know where these things live, huh? Sometimes. It was kind of small, probably 55 pounds. I like these little guys. I say we let him go, you know, after we get the hook out. We wound up releasing that fish, too. Even a fish like that, I mean, gives a pretty decent fight. Yeah. After releasing that sword, we were really content with that. We went out there and got our target species. So we decided to pack it in. Hey, what were we telling Kate yesterday? I think there's a little tradition we have to take care of. Well, it was time to make good on throwing Kate in the water. Yes, I remember. And what's her tradition? I get thrown in the water. She was starting to resist a little bit, but she knew it was coming. Look at her preparing. Glasses off. I think we pushed a little too hard because she wound up going into a full belly flop mode. Oh! Belly flop. That was like belly flop. That was awesome. All of a sudden, I saw everyone look at me. Pete, let me see your phone. What are they thinking? I've caught swordfish before. I did a cannonball in. I bounced bottom right on my butt. It wasn't very deep, but it didn't hurt. Great tradition. Hook and cook. So we decided to go over to the Isla Morada Fish Company, which is part of Worldwide Sportsmen in Isla Morada. Hi, how's everyone doing? Good, how are you? We caught some tilefish and some snowy grouper. And they have a hook and cook where you bring your own fish, and they bring rice and beans, french fries, whatever you want. Oh, that looks good. We had it fried, blackened, and grilled. Dig in, man. Family style, baby. No rules. We all sat down, had a fantastic meal, and they cooked it perfectly. The fishing down in the Keys is second to none. I mean, you can come down here and virtually catch anything you want. And to see Kate catch her first swordfish, it was a really nice experience. I never thought that I would be the one that would be in front of the cameras on the TV side of it. You know, we cooked our catch. We went to Bass Pro Shops. We're staying at this massive house on the water with a 300-foot dock. The boat's docked up. It's just fantastic. It was really cool to be able to have that experience and something that I'll never forget. Go to BassToBillfish.com and find out how you can audition to become the next guest on Bass to Billfish. The Bass to Billfish mobile app is here. Go to BassToBillfish.com to get your free app today.