Hurricane Ian was nearly a category 5 storm with 150-mile-per-hour winds and a towering storm surge when it made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast last September. Officially recognized as the fifth-strongest hurricane in U.S. history by measure of sustained winds at landfall, Hurricane Ian collected a devastating toll from Florida’s people, properties, and natural resources. One of those people was Steve Maillakakis, and one of those properties was his Plaka Restaurant, a beloved 43-year-old Greek-dining institution sitting near the foot of the Fort Myers Beach Pier.
Raised in the Bahamas in a strong angling family by a career restauranteur, Maillakakis, his parents and brother moved to Fort Myers as a 9-year-old in 1987. “We fished a lot growing up, both in the Bahamas and after we moved to Florida,” Steve says. “My family bought and operated two restaurants – one in St. Petersburg and The Plaka at Fort Myers Beach. Like pretty much everything else in the area, the restaurant was totally wiped out by Ian last year.”
Maillakakis, a resident of nearby Cape Coral with his wife and two sons since 2006, says he made the difficult decision not to rebuild The Plaka. “I started building custom fishing rods about ten years ago and made the decision after Ian to turn my hobby into a full-time career,” he says.
“All my buddies and I fish tournaments together,” Maillakakis says. “I started out simply repairing our broken rods at first, then a friend got me into building rods that would support our competitive fishing. I built a lathe before I could afford to buy one. I made it out of old drill parts and bought a mandrel from Grainger. That’s how I started shaping grips. I won a pretty high-profile custom rod-building contest in just my second year of building, met a lot of other really good builders, and my business took off from there.”
Maillakakis’ business is called Spartan Stix, and its exponential growth has largely come from Florida tournament charter captains. “I’m Greek by decent,” Maillekakis says. “My dad was born there. My brother and I were baptized there, and growing up we’d always go back every summer. Our family was originally from Crete, and I was always intrigued by the ancient Spartan civilization.” Steve’s wife suggested the name. “Yeah, my wife came up with Spartan Stix and my tattoo artist did the logo,” he says. “It’s pretty far out!”
Maillakakis feels fortunate that his business has grown organically, largely by word-of-mouth. Today, he’s one of the most popular and well-known rodsmiths in Florida. “It really helps when other captains see me winning or placing well in so many tournaments,” he says. “They notice and ask about my rods, and that opens up a dialogue about how I go about by builds. I’ll always be an angler first and a custom rod-builder second, and all my customers see that.”
So how has the move from part-time to full-time custom rod-building gone so far? “I’ve built 67 rods in the last three months and I’m on track to build somewhere close to 200 rods this year,” Maillakakis says. “I’m pretty efficient. I’ll do nothing but grips for 3 days, then do guides, then wraps. I have seven dryers, so there aren’t really any bottlenecks.”
Maillakakis builds all kinds of rods but maintains a primary focus on those most in demand – primarily inshore rods for snook, redfish and trout, as well as tournament tarpon rods. “You can catch everything here around Pine Island Sound, Sanibel and Captiva Islands,” he says. “We’ve got big schools of 30+ inch reds, big snook, and, of course, Boca Grande is ground zero for the tarpon migration. The cobia fishing is excellent, too, and just three or four miles offshore you can catch pelagics and reef fish. Fishing is always amazing here; there’s really no down time, just days when the wind blows and you can always work around that.”
