A Day in the Life: OLN’s Gavin Harvey

OK, so the bluefish aren't biting--you should have been here last time!

By Mavis Scanlon

While discussing the final arrangements of a predawn fishing trip I was to take with OLN CEO and president Gavin Harvey and John West, the network's SVP, advertising sales, network spokeswoman Amy Phillips passed along a warning from West. "We must dress warm," he told her. "Thermal underwear, waterproof pants on top of sweatpants and jeans, waterproof jacket, wool hat and gloves."

"These guys are die-hards," Phillips wrote in an e-mail. I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

Along with Captain Paul Koopmann, an expert guide, conservationist and the owner of nearby Salty Flies Charters, we set out from the dock at Calf Pasture Beach near Norwalk, Conn., at 6 a.m. on a chilly Friday morning. Destination: Cold Spring Harbor, off Lloyd's Neck, on the Long Island side of the Long Island Sound. The ride across the Sound was just six miles, but several windy days had prevented the tide from moving out fully, a phenomenon called double-stacking, as Koopmann explained. This made for a bumpy ride over 4-to-5-foot swells--and for some slight nausea, at least on this writer's part.

If it weren't for fishing fanatics West, John Carter, OLN's VP, production/executive producer, and Harvey's 7-year-old daughter, Irish, a budding fisherwoman with a passion for fashion, Harvey might never have experienced the thrill of casting for bluefish, which are, pound for pound, the strongest fighting fish out there (so says Captain Koopmann). This year, West and Carter have been out at least a half dozen times--OLN's Stamford office is a short drive from the marina--but our late October trip was only about the third time Harvey had been out on West's boat, a 25-foot Grady-White Advance 257 that he has unofficially named "Commercial Break."

Harvey's usual early morning routine is more apt to include a 15-to-20-mile bike ride than a cruise around Long Island Sound, but he is eager to learn more about the all the sports OLN covers.

"The minute I heard that [West] had this boat I wanted to start doing this kind of stuff," he says. Since being named CEO of OLN in February--in his former life on the West Coast, he was EVP, marketing and brand director, for E! Networks, and supervised the rebranding of E! and Style Network--Harvey's mandate has been to broaden OLN's viewership without losing its core of outdoor enthusiasts.

To that end, OLN just premiered its new biography show, Fearless, broadcast the Gravity Games in September and this month presents the debut of The Best and Worst of Tred Barta, which follows the worldwide hunting and fishing exploits of sportsman Barta.

But on this particular day, there were more important things to yak about than our mundane 9-to-5 worlds (even though there were plenty of OLN budget meetings awaiting Harvey back on land). We had fish to catch. Problem was, they weren't biting. We casted in more than half a dozen locations--each one chosen either because West and Koopmann's eagle eyes had spotted some birds "organizing" around bait fish that had been pushed to the top of the shallows by the predator fish, or because other fisherman had gotten lucky there on a recent day.

"All the fish that are in the Sound move in and move out, and come and go in waves," Koopmann noted. "So each week you never know what's going to happen."

Harvey wasn't satisfied.

"We're not going in till we catch a fish," he said at one point, right about the time when the cold was really starting to sink in.

"That's what I love about this guy," West chimed in. "You turn him on to a sport and he goes hard-core immediately."

It looked as if we weren't going to catch even one stinking fish. So naturally the talk turned to fish tales.

It had been a veritable fish fest the last time Harvey had gone out, over the summer. "We'd be sitting here just like this and all of a sudden the water would start to just boil and over a half an acre it would be loaded with fish on the surface in a frenzy." At one point that day, Harvey said, he caught two fish on the same hook. "I thought, oh my God, this is fishing."

"I told you that would spoil you," West responded, "because normally, you know, it's not quite that easy."

He was right. Phillips, who caught a jellyfish, was the only one who reeled in anything besides grass. As any disappointed fisherman would say, we got skunked. Maybe we should have gone cycling.