Intro Letter from the Author
New Year, new goals, new aspirations, new ventures, and other semi-clichés that come along with rolling the calendar to the next 365 days. For me personally, this means a new focus on my ever-growing passion for fishing and creating a new avenue to stimulate the creative juices – enter Seas the Slay journal. Specifically, Student of Slay – a journal to share my fishing adventures and experiences as an eager to learn but still a very green fisherman. The focus of this series will be to highlight my trips, continued lessons and progression along the way by fishing with small boat charter operations from the perspective of an eager to learn, novice small/private boat fisherman. But before jumping in headfirst, I want to use my first post as an intro and share a brief background of me.
I consider myself one of the very lucky few who was born and raised around the water, and the sports and lifestyle associated with. Fishing for me started at a very young age cutting my teeth on bass, pike, salmon and other species of my beloved home state lakes in Michigan. I was also very fortunate to have exposure to the saltwater fishing world at a very early age. My grandparents were (and still are) snowbirds between the mitten state and Florida where I would frequent over holiday breaks. My saltwater game started with chasing sheepshead off piers, breakwaters and rock jetties. I was also treated to an annual charter trip or two where I was exposed to the insane diversity of Florida’s backwater fishery. Sheepshead, Pompano, mangrove snapper, hammerhead shark and a wild variety of species were always on tap for these adventures. I was hooked, and the seed was firmly planted.
Fast forward a couple decades, and that seed has grown into a full-blown obsession. A bulk of my days on the water now consist of chasing local pelagic species in Southern California (San Diego) and Northern Baja Mexico. Which as a quick side-note, is not lost on me how lucky my timing is to be becoming entrenched within the sport during an unprecedented period of blazing hot fishing. No doubt my learning curve and success rate has been insanely boosted by my lucky timing. I’ve gotten to meet and fish with some of the local legends and charters recently and the story seems to be the same – Southern California hasn’t had this kind of fishing since the way back “good ole days”, if ever. I.e. our current, seemingly year-round bluefin bite.
So why am I deciding to jump on the journaling/blogging (only about 5 years late to this trend…) bandwagon? What’s the end game here? Well, to get a ton of epic sponsors and be instafamous in the fishing world, obvi. Ok, that’s not actually why although I’ll admit I do tend to inhibit a certain level of shamelessness and would be lying if there wasn’t a very very small level of self-rep promotion happening here. But at the end of the day, this is a platform for me to blend my growing passion for the sport of fishing, the people within it and experiences around it with my craving for creative expression and storytelling.
In reality, my hope is that my experiences, stories, and journeys as a still very novice fisherman can help inspire that next generation of eager to learn fisherman. I hope that my stories can display a high level of authenticity and excitement to create engagement in our fishing community. I’ll be honest that I don’t know exactly what the end goal is or what the exact roadmap looks like to get to it at this juncture, but I do know I’m in an extremely fortunate position to be able to take advantage of phenomenal fishing opportunities and would feel remised by not sharing my journey with our community. I encourage and hope to generate conversations, new relationships and if nothing else, provide somewhat well-written stories of my fishing adventures and the learning curve along the way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jordan Jennings grew up boating and fishing the lakes of his home state of Michigan. Cutting his teeth on the bass, salmon, perch, and pike of local inland lakes. His passion grew into saltwater fishing on the Gulf of Mexico when visiting family in Florida. He was lucky enough to come from a family of outdoorsman who taught him fishing, hunting and the beauty of nature. Now, Jordan is a fishing fanatic that spends as many days on the water as possible chasing new species, learning new techniques and enjoying the journey along the way.
Jordan is an experienced entrepreneur and sales and marketing professional within the boating industry. He currently works for Freedom Boat Club as their Global Director of Franchise Sales, which is just a fancy title that means he’s focused on starting and growing their network of boat clubs both domestically and internationally. He is a big ambassador and believer of promoting new boaters and fishermen into our sport.
Seas The Slay 