Our Story
Built on generations of real fishing experience — this is who we are.
Where It All Began
Two South Bay kids raised on the water by parents who lived for the ocean. This is the story of how Flying Fish Outdoors came to be.
South Bay Roots
Both of the Stotesbury parents were South Bay natives. Their mother, Roberta, grew up in Redondo Beach and graduated from Redondo Union High School, where she was an All Bay League swimmer. Their father, Ross, grew up in Manhattan Beach and graduated from Mira Costa High School.
Both parents spent their youth at the beach — surfing, skin diving, paddling, and fishing. Ross competed in the Catalina to Manhattan Beach Paddleboard Race in the mid ‘50s and spent winters in Hawaii chasing giant surf. By the mid ‘60s he had become a commercial fisherman and abalone diver, spending years working the coastline from Cortes Bank to Point Conception, making a living capturing shellfish.
Roberta still holds the IGFA 12 lb. line class record for a 43 lb. halibut she caught with Ross off Torrance Beach. Michael and Greg both caught some of their earliest offshore fish aboard Ross’s old single-diesel 33’ Jeffries commercial boat, moored in San Pedro.
The Early Years
Michael and Greg Stotesbury learned to swim, dive, surf, and fish at a very young age. They fished in the surf, on local half-day and full-day boats, and traveled with Roberta and Ross to all the local lakes. Weeklong trips to the Sierras were an annual tradition — camping and fishing at pretty much every lake, bay, creek, river, harbor, and ocean shoreline within several hundred miles of home in Torrance.
Bass, halibut, bonito, sea bass, yellowtail, spotfin croaker, lobster, abalone, trout, catfish, stripers, perch, and panfish — Roberta and Ross taught their sons how to catch (and eat) pretty much everything that swam or lived in the water.
Both brothers owned boats from a very early age, rebuilding and resurrecting old aluminum skiffs, wooden dinghies, and beat fiberglass throwaway boats — pretty much anything that could get them on the water. King Harbor in Redondo was their home water. They spent many days there catching bonito, halibut, bass, and yellowtail in the fertile grounds in and around the area, and spent many weekends at Catalina Island diving and fishing, just as their parents had done before them.
Proprietary Intelligence
Fish Gouge isn't a data feed. It's the product of a living network — licensed captains reporting live from the water, interpreted in real time by FFO's team of marine scientists and oceanographers who've spent careers studying these fisheries.
Twice a day, our network consolidates what's actually happening out there: species movement, bite windows, sea conditions, and migration signals — filtered through expert judgment, not algorithms. The result is intelligence that no app or public data source can replicate.
Our methodology has been developed over years of on-the-water collaboration and expert refinement. It's one of a kind — and it's exclusively yours as an FFO member.
View Today's Intelligence
