Capt. Ray Walters: A Legendary Career in Sportfishing

Introduction

Capt. Ray Walters has carved out a legendary career in sportfishing that spans decades. In this captivating narrative, we delve into his remarkable journey—from the shores of Daytona Beach to the deep blue waters where marlins roam. Join us as we explore the life and adventures of Capt. Ray Walters, a true “Old Salt“.

From Surfer to Sportfisherman

Walters grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. Surfing was his sport straight to adulthood. But at age six, he got his first taste of the thrill of a bite. “My grandfather was the one that got me fishing,” Walters said. “He’d take me to the pier in Daytona, and we’d be there all day long. I fished for sailor’s choice, fin fish like sheepshead and pinfish. Nothing big. My grandfather got a kick out of just sitting there drinking beer and watching me.”

Ray moved to California at age 20 to try to make a living surfing. He soon realized that he and the fiberglass part of grinding the boards didn’t get along. So, he moved back to Daytona. There, a high school friend and surfing buddy took him offshore fishing. As Ray tells, “after that I was hooked for life.”

Ray’s friend hired him to mate on a charter boat called the Angler, run by Capt. Donnie Thoburn. They’d charter fish in the summertime off Daytona and commercial fish in the winter when it was too rough and cold for tourists to visit. Ray fished on the Angler for six years when a desire to go offshore deepwater trolling landed him a job in the Florida Key’s town of Islamorada. It was a job that Ray never started.

“I came back to Daytona to pack up all my stuff,” Walters said. “Some friends of mine from Port Orange Seafood asked me to stick around long enough to fish the first annual Greater Daytona Beach Striking Fish Tournament, over the Memorial Day weekend. That was 1977. They had a 22-foot Boston Whaler and four Penn 6/0s for the tackle. That’s it. We fished with Capt. Bill Wohlhuter and two other guys.

“We wrote a bad check to enter the tournament and by the Grace of God, we won,” Walters continued. “It was the first marlin ever caught out of Ponce Inlet and it weighed 449 pounds. It was my first marlin too. I had no idea what I was chasing until I think it caught me. It was lucky we won because then we could put enough money in the bank to cover the check.”

The tournament win put Port Orange Seafood on the map. They were fishing against all the “big boys” like Capt. Ronnie Hamlin, who came on the Miss Budweiser, and it was pretty cool for the local boys on a little boat to beat everybody. “It’s what started my career,” he said.

Walters stayed in Daytona and worked at Port Orange Seafood for the next 10 years. They charter fished, shrimped, and did a little bit of everything. In fact, they caught so much mullet they built a smokehouse capable of smoking 1,000 pounds of the fish, or 100 turkeys, at a time. Back then, there weren’t many smokehouses for fish. Ray also continued to fish competitively. The team won the fourth and fifth Striking Fish Tournament, on two different boats, with angler Scott Laney for the fourth and Jackson Donohue, one of Port Orange Seafood’s owners, as an angler for the fifth.

A Move To The Virgin Islands For Marlin

While working at Port Orange Seafood, Walters bought a new General Motors vehicle and received tickets to anywhere Eastern Airlines flew as part of the car dealer’s promotion.

“My sister’s husband, Ray Yarbrough, was a bricklayer and he built one of the houses on Great Camanoe in the BVI,” Walters said. “My sister would send me letters about all the marlin that they were catching at Johnny Harms’ dock. So, I used those tickets to fly to St. Thomas and charter the Carib Maid for three days with Capt. Butch Gonsalves.

“While we fished, I told Butch, this is what I want to do for a living, and I’d love to mate for him,” Walters said. “After I left, he kept calling me. He hired me in the summer of 1983. I worked all summer, and we caught more marlin that summer than he’d ever caught in a season on his boat. By the end of the summer, he sold me the boat and the business. That’s how I ended up charter fishing in St Thomas.”

Randy Zimmermann was Ray’s mate on the Carib Maid. The colorful mate orchestrated the vessel’s claim to fame during Ray’s tenure. So, the fish tale goes, a couple of nurses went 0 for 17 on blue marlin in three days of fishing. To cheer them up, Randy promised if they fished one more day and didn’t finally catch a marlin, that he’d pay for the trip. Ray told his mate he was nuts. Randy had the last laugh when the Carib Maid pulled in to the dock with 7 blue marlin flags flying from the rigger.

No other boat had caught this number of marlin in one day for many years. Plus, the Carib Maid was not only the oldest boat in the fleet, but the slowest as well with a maximum speed of nine knots. The mate’s secret came out at the dock party. Randy had the anglers employ every good luck charm he could think from stroking the rods to downing shots of rum and root beer.

Five years later, Walters got in trouble for catching square grouper. It’s something he admits as part of his story, saying that many people on the fishing circuit have a bit of a pirate past. He was sent to the federal prison at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and housed with 900 other white-collar criminals, nearly half of whom were car dealers caught for turning odometers back. He was at Eglin when the Carib Maid sunk. Since he wasn’t sure when he’d be back to St. Thomas, Ray asked his now-wife Angie to sell the boat.

Walters went back to St. Thomas after his release. Stewart Loveland offered him a job at Neptune Fishing Supplies. Then he mated a winter season for Capt. Bill McCauley on the charter boat, Prowler. Next was a stint with Capt. Vernon “OB” O’Bryan on the Knightlines.

“OB was one of the most intense guys I’ve ever seen. When he was on the bridge, he was looking back at the baits,” Walters said. “He’d make you move the lure two inches. If you moved it one inch, he tell you it wasn’t enough. If you moved it three inches, he’d tell you it was too much. I’d look over at Charles Perry and ask, ‘You see the difference?’ He’d look at me and say, ‘Yeah, don’t you?’ Well, I didn’t see it, but I had a blast with those guys.”

Hitting The Hot Spots

Ray never did get back to charter fishing on his own. “There were so many other boats out there,” he says. “I figured owning a boat was no way to make money. Making money is all about running someone else’s boat.”

He worked on several boats, and started traveling too. He fished in Venezuela on one boat, and then to Costa Rica and Panama where he mated for Captain Ross “Flash” Clark and Capt. Dean “Rasta Dean” Dunham on other boats. In Costa Rica, one of his best stories had nothing to do with fish.

“I still had that surfing bug,” he said. “There were no docks at Jaco, just south of Los Sueños, and I was there with Kent and Kathy Hamil on the Marlin Monroe.” The Hamils were members of the Miami Beach Rod & Reel Club and they fished for club records on everything from 2-pound to unlimited poundage line. “When the Hamils slept in, I’d get up early, take my surfboard and go surfing,” Walters said. “One day, I come back to the boat and Flash says, ‘how was it?’ I tell him the surfing was pretty good, except there were a bunch of kids running up and down the beach yelling something I couldn’t understand – ‘cocodrilo’. He tells me that means crocodile and there are some huge ones out there. Let’s just say I was glad I didn’t speak any Spanish then.”

Ray says that while there’s no better place to fish for blue marlin than St. Thomas, for the variety of fish and the beauty of the place, it’s Piñas Bay, Panama. “You could only get to it by air or boat back then,” he said. “You’re in the jungle. You wake up in the morning, anchored in the bay and you hear the howler monkeys. You’re in the bush for sure, but it was beautiful.”

The Bahamas was always part of Ray’s seasonal sportfishing migration and the Bahamas Billfish Championship was at the top of the list. The first year he fished the BBC, it was on the Bailout with Jim and Myrtice Peacock. That year, Myrtice caught an 885-pound blue—the largest caught in the Bahamas by a woman angler and the third largest ever caught—and won the 1993 Series. Ray was in the cockpit on that catch. “It was amazing,” he says.

The Therapy Days

It was at the BBC that he met George Lorton, who owned the 68-foot Hatteras, Therapy. The serendipitous meeting led to Ray running the Hatteras from 2002 to 2016. They fished year-round: The Bahamas, the Gulf of Mexico, and since Lorton owned a house there, St. Thomas. One of Ray’s best stories of fishing on Therapy is when the team almost won the USVI Open/Atlantic Blue Marlin or ”Boy Scout” tournament.

“It was 2010. We led right up to the last day,” he said. “We were two fish ahead of everyone else. On that last day, George was so sure that we were gonna win the tournament that he went into the salon and took a nap. I came down there and said ‘what are you doing? Get out there and get on your rod.’ And he’d answer, ‘I’m relaxing. We got it made.’ We never got a bite and ended up losing to Sandman by one fish. George was great. A great man. A great guy to work for. It was the best job I ever had.”

After Therapy, Ray returned to the neighboring British Virgin Islands where he ran the 46’ Jarrett Bay, Grander, for Curt Richardson. The BVI closed to visitors for over a year during the pandemic, and the charter fishing ground to a halt. Ray headed north to Franklin, North Carolina, where he lives today, retired from a career in sportfishing.

“My bucket list? I’d like my wife to retire so we can travel,” Walters said. “We hope to travel to see friends in Portugal in the fall. I’d also like to see Alaska. Other than that, I’ve taken up hunting and golf. I need a golf club to hunt and a gun to play golf.”

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