Captain Kit Carson

Why a captain built this

FishIntel exists because its founder was already doing the work by hand. Kit Carson is a licensed charter captain running offshore out of Islamorada in the Florida Keys, and he is also a full-stack developer with 25 years and more in digital media behind him. That combination is unusual and it is the entire origin of this product: a captain who reads satellite charts every morning before running offshore, who got tired of doing it manually, and who could build the tool he wished existed.

The reports FishIntel sells are built on the same ocean analysis Kit uses to run DirtyBoat Charters. That is the honest version of the claim, and it is worth being precise about it: this is not a captain endorsing software somebody else wrote, and it is not a software company that hired a captain for the photograph.

What his calibration actually changes

Satellite data is free. Anyone can download a temperature grid. What no dataset publishes is which fish are worth forecasting in a given piece of water, what temperature band each one is actually fished in there, and which season discriminates more than the thermometer does. That table is the captain's work, and in FishIntel it is a real file that the report reads on every run.

In July 2026 the Atlantic and Gulf bands were rebuilt against the Islamorada fishery specifically, replacing generic western Atlantic figures that ran too cool to be useful in Keys water. Two things went into that: a hundred days of the zone's own recorded sea surface temperature, and the seasonality a captain knows from working it. Sailfish peak December through April. Wahoo November through March. Mahi April through August. In subtropical water that calendar tells you more than the temperature does, and it is not in any feed.

The same knowledge sets the limits. The report can speak with local authority about the run from Alligator Reef to Tennessee Reef because that is Kit's backyard. For a region he does not fish, the system is built to refuse the same tone: it will not name a landmark or claim a distance to a current edge it cannot source, because that would be a fabricated claim of local knowledge, and the honest thing is to describe what the data shows instead.

Where the species bands have not yet been calibrated against observed water, the report is told so and passes that on to the reader. A band is direction, not a verdict. That rule comes from the captain's side of the project, not the engineering side.

Eleven years on the same boat

Kit holds a USCG Operator of Uninspected Passenger Vessels (OUPV) license, the six-pack credential, with no tonnage rating and no towing or sailing endorsement.

He came up as a mate under Captain Joe Saba starting in August 2015, and became owner of the boat around 2018. DirtyBoat Charters runs out of Robbie's Marina in Islamorada, at mile marker 77.5, aboard a 42-foot Liberty Express, the same boat Kit has worked since 2015, first as mate and now as her captain.

Beyond the boat

Kit serves as vice president of S.A.F.E., an organization of more than 460 members, and sits on the board of the Islamorada Charterboat Association.

His tournament record includes a 463 lb swordfish, and he holds two patents.

Where to read the work

The method behind every report, including what happens when an upstream source goes stale, is written out in full on the methodology page. Every satellite, buoy, tide and forecast source it reads is named, with its update cadence, on the data sources page.

FishIntel is built in Islamorada, Florida, the sportfishing capital of the world. Questions for the captain go through the contact page.