Who they are

Erich and Abigail Jaeger are not corporate villains, rogue operators, or a threat to anyone. They are a husband and wife who loved the water, believed in a brand, and built a business with their bare hands on Tampa Bay — proudly announced at a Sea Tow annual meeting as “the new owners of Tampa Bay.” They ran boats in the dark, in the rain, answering panicked calls at 3 a.m. They rent their home. They have two young boys. Everything they had was bound up in the franchise: equipment, reputation, customer relationships. That was the retirement plan. That was the kids’ future.

How it started

In 2019, Sea Tow took the franchise back. Then — with the family already stripped of its income — Sea Tow sued them in federal court in June 2020, demanding $1.5 million. Not in Tampa, where the boats and witnesses were, but in the Eastern District of New York, 1,100 miles away, where the Frohnhoefers live and Mitchell Stein practices. By all accounts there was no reasonable expectation that a family renting their home could ever pay that sum — which invites the question at the heart of this entire site: was the lawsuit filed to be won, or filed to be survived? As one dispatch put it: Sea Tow may have thought it won simply by filing. Their post-termination venture, Maverick Marine Services, was not a plan to topple an empire. It was how a family fed itself.

The part nobody expected

The Jaegers did what no Sea Tow operator had done in four decades: they fought back. They found counsel — Rosen Karol, reported to be working on contingency, without which, frankly, they would not have survived the process — and filed counterclaims under the New York Franchise Sales Act plus third-party claims naming Mitchell Stein and Joseph Frohnhoefer III personally. Six years later, the scoreboard is remarkable: Sea Tow’s case has been narrowed to two surviving claims — a dispute over May–June 2020 management fees and the timing of de-branding a boat. Sixty days of billing disputes and a paint job. The Jaegers’ counterclaims, meanwhile, largely remain, and their renewed bid for summary judgment on liability sits with Judge Kuntz Doc. 318.

Sea Tow appeared to be seeking the amendment “simply to slow down the litigation and drain the Jaeger Defendants of their comparatively limited resources.”Judge Nina Morrison, denying Sea Tow leave to amend · DE 238 at 7–8 (March 2023)

The ones who fought back

The Jaegers did what no Sea Tow operator had done before: they fought back. They filed counterclaims alleging Sea Tow violated the New York Franchise Sales Act, and third-party claims against Mitchell Stein and Joseph J. Frohnhoefer III personally — and the court found their franchise-fee arguments had merit, with Judge Seybert ruling the alleged fees fit “comfortably within” the statutory definition of a franchise fee ECF No. 216. The price of fighting has been steep: 23 deposition demands against a court-imposed limit of 10, and 17 non-party subpoenas so sweeping they drew an emergency stay Doc. 311 · Feb. 19, 2026 — a freeze the court dissolved six days later, letting the subpoenas proceed only under court-imposed confidentiality DE 314 · Feb. 25, 2026. They found counsel with, as one dispatch put it, a really big heart — Rosen Karol Salis, PLLC, reported to be serving on contingency, which broke the outspend-them equation that this litigation strategy depends on.

And here is why their fight matters to every other captain in the Fleet: the Jaegers are the test case. If they win, the whole system cracks open. If they lose, no operator will ever dare fight back again. The stakes aren’t just legal — they’re existential.