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A Slow Day That Sparked a Revolution

What does a workaholic do when there’s a slow day at the office? For Pete Lindgren, president and chief executive officer of Lindgren-Pitman (LP), it meant creating a product that would forever change the sportfishing industry, particularly in deep-dropping for swordfish, snapper, and grouper. It was 2005. The commercial side of the Pompano Beach, Florida-based deep-sea fishing equipment manufacturer wasn’t occupying as much of Lindgren’s ground-breaking genius. Plus, his cousins, Jack and Darin Lindgren, had the production and other aspects of the company well in hand. Thus, Lindgren found himself with time to ponder “what’s next?”

“I thought of all of the shortcomings of the electric reels we had made through the years and came up with a list of features I’d like to incorporate if I started with a clean sheet of paper,” Lindgren said. “First, a cantilevered spool. When I was deep dropping, it wasn’t easy to get a feel for the line and control its descent with a reel that had all the frame supports around the spinning spool. Second, changeable spools. Having the ability to swap out spools when switching from bottom, to dredge to sword-fishing, or change line out quickly when you’re a long way from the tackle shop was huge.

“Third, a level-wind, for both comfort and safety,” Lindgren continued. “It also allowed for creating an accurate line counter and having a stop-at-top feature. No more looking over the side for a rig only to have it smash into the tip and break off. Remember that most of this brainstorming took place before dredges became commonplace and before people began catching daytime swordfish. The S-1200, a high-performance 12-volt electric reel platform, hit the market at the beginning of the daytime swordfishing craze. We were in the geographical epicenter for all of that and had the best-of-the-best in and out of the shop daily, helping us improve the initial design.”

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From the Midwest to the East Coast

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Lindgren grew up in New Milford. The small town sat on the Rock River, a tributary of the Mississippi River, where a two-pound smallmouth bass, walleye, or northern pike was considered a whopper catch. “It was much more about being outdoors during my early years than having a specific interest in fishing, or the sportfishing industry, which, as a kid from Illinois, I had little exposure to,” says Lindgren. “My father was an accountant, and although the opportunity was certainly there for me to follow in his footsteps, I couldn’t see myself sitting in his chair. You can’t do a lot of innovating in the accounting business, at least if you want to stay in that line of work and out of jail.”

Lindgren struggled through high school due to a lack of interest and challenges. He enrolled at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he studied mechanical engineering. That’s where he met and was roommates with future business partner, John Pitman, who was studying electrical engineering. After graduation, and with two points on his draft number to spare when the Vietnam War ended, Lindgren started work at a couple of large midwestern companies. He found much of the work unfulfilling and arduous. So, he set sights on returning to school to start work on an MBA, choosing Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. His aunt lived nearby, plus Pitman, feeling similarly about his career, decided to join Lindgren in the Sunshine State.

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The Fishing World Opens Its Doors

Shortly after moving to Florida, Lindgren and Pitman began working for a friend of Lindgren’s, Ace Edwards, who owned Ace Marine Electronics. The duo helped install and repair SSB radios, paper-chart depth recorders, and radars when they weren’t in class. Edwards had a relationship with several wealthy clients from Texas who were buying 43 Merritts to chase bluefin tuna in Cat Cay, Bahamas. Those installations led to working on Rybovich, Hatteras, and Bertram boats, as well as working for other individuals who preferred to have their radios programmed to secret frequencies and always paid in cash. “Something told me that they weren’t trying to disguise their fishing exploits from other fishermen!” Lindgren said.

Some of Lindgren’s and Pitman’s early electronics customers were also experimenting with deep water bottom fishing using electric reels. Two were legendary captains: Joe Mott, out of Hillsboro Inlet, who was instrumental in the development of swordfishing in South Florida, and Danny Beare, from Lighthouse Point, a well-respected captain who enjoyed fishing for big bluefin tuna along the Bimini edge.

“Back then, they used to take ranges off buildings, trees, etc., to get lined up with their spots,” Lindgren said. “The reels they used were Penn 10/0 and 12/0 reels loaded with wire line and driven by WWII surplus aircraft gearmotors. They would bring them in for John and me to work on, and having been exposed to the saltwater environment, they were always in poor condition, and parts were scarce. We designed a custom marinized gearmotor, coupling, a cut-down 5/8-inch craftsman socket, and a purpose-built machined aluminum frame to hold the assembly onto the Penn 12/0. With that, the company John and I had mused about starting since our college days, had its first product.”

LP officially opened for business in 1975. The two men moved into a 600 square-foot warehouse in Pompano Beach, which they shared with another company, equipped with well-used and temperamental machinery. “Our first customer was a guy named Russ Roatt,” Lindgren said. “He bought serial number 1, and we took it to Walkers Cay to test deep dropping. We caught a lot of fish and hooked some that we couldn’t stop, as the drag star on the Penn Senators would get too hot to touch. I really enjoyed the exploratory nature of those trips. Watching the bottom machine, setting up with the set and drift, calculating the distance and the time of the falling rig with the drift to hit the spot precisely, and constantly thinking of ways to improve the equipment.”

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Industry-Changing Innovations

As LP shifted its focus toward manufacturing in the late 1970s, Pitman pursued his interest in marine electronics and launched Commercial Marine Electronics. Lindgren took over the manufacturing side of the business. Lindgren says he looks back to the beginning of the longline fleet in South Florida in the late 1970s, how it evolved, and his role in that evolution, specifically with LP, to trace the company’s major innovations.

The South Florida longline fishery originated from the inspiration of Cuban fishermen, who would set hooks deep at night using lighted kerosene pots. One of LP’s early customers, Captain Harold Turbyfill, had a commercial boat called the Happy Night Tonight, a 45-foot Y&G. It had tarred-rope longline gear aboard, which was common in the New England fishery at the time. Turbyfill’s crew were sportfishing guys who fished on their charter boat, a 46-foot Hatteras, the Happy Day Today. The crew was more interested in using monofilament instead of the traditional rope mainline.

The problem was that monofilament is like a giant rubber band and can exert a massive amount of pressure on the spool it is wound on, especially when there are miles of line wound onto a spool. The old spools, designed for the rope gear, couldn’t handle this and began failing catastrophically. LP made spools that were direct drive and engineered to withstand this pressure, becoming the first company to engineer a longline spool specifically for monofilament fishing. It revolutionized the industry, and they began shipping longline reels and equipment worldwide.

Manufacturing monofilament came as a complement to LP’s longline reels. Often, the company selling the monofilament, which was then imported from Europe, was making as much money as LP was manufacturing and selling the spool to put it on. So, Lindgren traveled around the world to learn the intricacies of the large-diameter monofilament manufacturing process. When he returned, he began building his own manufacturing equipment, designed by him. It took LP a year to bring their new line to market.

“Nowadays, LP Primeline monofilament is still among the best large-diameter monofilaments made in the world,” he said. “Why else would a customer going after grander black marlin on the Great Barrier Reef pay $150 to ship a $40 coil of our leader mono to Australia during a hot bite? Our mono has been in space, used in the oil and gas industry, and for animal fencing in addition to the fishing applications.”

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Shining a Light on New Technology

Light products are another invention where LP steered the industry. The company once represented American Cyanamid chemical light sticks, which were distributed to the longliners. When the company cancelled LP’s marketing agreement, LP designed its own process and equipment. They were soon making their own, 40,000 a day, untouched by human hands. When there was concern about seabirds ingesting chemical light sticks, LP changed gears and developed a reusable LED light, the electralume. This was around the same time the nighttime rod and reel fishery took off, and the electralumes became the go-to light. This market was yet another step for LP into the recreational market.

The genesis of all this innovation was right in LP’s backyard, as Pompano was the hub of the longline universe for many years. “I know that’s a bit divergent from the sportfishing end of the company today, but if you look at the design of one of our S-1200 electric reel spools, you’ll notice a remarkably similar design to one of our 50NM longline reel spools,” Lindgren said. “There was a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and an awful lot of engineering that went into both of those designs. We leveraged years of knowledge from the commercial environment to make our sportfish products as robust as possible.”

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A Culture of Relentless Testing

Lindgren adds that LP conducts much of its product testing in the shop before it ever sees the light of day. “In the early days of the S-1200, I had a 1977 53-foot Hatteras, Dollie” he said. “We did testing with bottom fishing in the Bahamas and swordfishing here in Pompano. Over the years, we’ve also had many long-term customers who are eager to test out something they think will give them an edge and are respectful of the R&D process to achieve it. A lot of testing is also done with those guys. Fishing evolves daily, and you must stay in tune with the industry to keep up with a changing landscape. Having a great working relationship with your customer base, and more importantly, having their trust is paramount.”

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Celebrating 50 Years of Innovation

LP celebrates its golden anniversary this year.(2025) The business has grown from a 600-square-foot space to a 30,000-square-foot facility, with four full-time engineers and a staff of employees who’ve worked for the company for 20-plus years, including a grandmother-daughter-grandson team that builds electric reels. Over the years, LP has eliminated much of the hand cutting and fabrication from production, relying almost entirely on CNC now. Lindgren enjoys sharing the production process with customers and offers tours of the facility.

“We’ve come full circle, starting with the conversion reels, which took a back seat to the longline equipment, and then coming back to the electric reel game,” says Lindgren, about going from targeting products for the longline industry to recreational sportfishing. “I like to think that a fisherman is a fisherman. There was a significant overlap between the two industries when we had a much more vibrant domestic longline fleet. Many captains and crews did both at one point or another. I think the commercial ruggedness of our products is well respected in the recreational industry. Most would rather buy a toy made by John Deere than a tractor made by Fisher-Price.”

Most recently, LP released its DTX dredge reel system, which runs remotely through the Garmin OneHelm interface. It allows all reel functions to be controlled from anywhere with a networked Garmin screen on the boat. It also allows the reels to be mounted remotely, either inside the hard top or on top of it, freeing up the cockpit and allowing the crew and anglers to concentrate on fishing without worrying about the dredges.

“It’s kind of bucking tradition, but that seems to be what we are always doing,” says Lindgren, who at age 76, is working in the shop seven days a week. “The innovation part of the business keeps me showing up. The next great idea might be spawned tomorrow, and I want to get my fingerprints on it.”

To see more of what LP has to offer visit their website https://www.lindgren-pitman.com/

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