Our Process: From the Florida Keys to Your Door

Most saltwater fish sold online travel the long way: ocean to holding facility, facility to wholesaler, wholesaler to store, store to your door. Every leg is another bag, more stress, more missed meals. Foxy was built to skip all of that. Between 85 and 90% of our Caribbean marine life is hand-collected by our own team here in the Florida Keys, one fish at a time, and it makes exactly one trip: the ocean, our tanks, your door.

The Day Starts in the Fish Room

Every morning I walk the fish room before anything else. No GFI tripped overnight, every pump pushing, nothing overflowed, every fish where it's supposed to be. Every tank gets a water level check and a light morning feed. Then we load the boat and head out for the day.

Three to Five Dives a Day

The ramp is a couple miles away, so we're on the water quick. The thing I check all week, over and over, is wind. Too much of it makes the boat ladder dangerous, wrecks the visibility, and sends the fish into the rocks to hide, the same way we hunker down at home when bad weather's coming. If it's blowing, we don't go.

We dive 10 to 25 feet of water on a hookah system, an air compressor on the boat feeding each diver 150 feet of hose. I catch fish with a drop net, the four-footer on our homepage. It drops over one fish, patience does the rest, and some days the fish win. Some fish practically pose. Others sprint rock to rock, grazing on the way just to rub it in.

Between dives we surface, compare notes on what we saw, and log what we caught. Fish that don't get along in close quarters ride in their own jars inside the livewells, and on hot days we swap the livewell water between dives so everybody stays comfortable.

A Medicated Bath Before Anything Touches Our Tanks

On the way in, we fill a few hundred gallons of ocean water to top off the holding systems. Back at the fish room, everything that came off the boat gets a 30 minute medicated bath, so nothing harmful rides in off the reef, before joining systems treated with copper and Nitrofuracin Green to stop infections before they start. The tanks run on a mix of fresh ocean water and RO water we mix with salt.

Nobody ships the day it's caught. New arrivals rest, and within a couple of days they're eating. We hold everything 7 to 10 days before it travels, and our team keeps the site inventory current: if you can add an animal to your cart, it's swimming here right now.

Packing Day

If a fish ships Monday, its last meal is Sunday morning. A full stomach in a travel bag becomes ammonia in the water, so we time feedings to keep every bag clean for the whole ride. Once the week's boxes are out the door, everybody gets a heavy feed.

We also pack roomy. Bigger bags and more water cost us more to ship, and I tried to pinch pennies there in the early days. My team broke me out of that mindset. A comfortable un-stressed animal is worth more than a cheaper box.

Everything ships UPS Priority Overnight, Monday through Wednesday only, so no animal sits in a warehouse over a weekend. We can usually have your box on a truck the next morning, sometimes the same day, and most deliveries land by around midday. Every animal is covered by our live arrival guarantee.

Why We Go to All This Trouble

Hand collecting is the whole reason I got into this business back in 2009, and it's a niche very few people in the country can fill. These waters are also home. I was born and raised in the Keys, and a healthy reef is the whole business, so we pick our targets, catch what we know we can care for, and leave the rest out there doing its job.

One short, calm trip means an animal that settles in and gets back on food sooner than one that's been bagged and re-bagged for weeks.

It's also hard to have a bad day with a mask on. The team handles more of the business every year so I can be out finding your next fish. Not sure something fits your setup? Ask before you order. Getting it right the first time is part of the process, too.