Tater as a youth, shown here when
commercial fi shing was a whole
different game.
go sometimes. I’d start back and you know, I
was making a living, making money. I wasn’t
interested in anything else back then.”
It was also a time without phones that
doubled as cameras, but Tater is fortunate
enough to have a visual record of these years.
“There used to be a man and a lady and their
son around the dock and they had these big old
cameras. They made these big black and white
photos of the people on the docks. They’d take
the pictures and run over and develop them
and sell them for like a dollar a copy and they’d
always save one for me. Luckily, one of my
sisters kept them all for me, a bunch of them
and that’s how I ended up with them.”
Tater worked with Joe Knowles until 1967,
then went to work for the United States Fish
and Wildlife Service. “They had a boat that a
guy donated in the Keys, a boat called Ballyhoo,
which was a 42-foot Carolina boat. Jojo Del
Guercio had once owned it, and they were big
fi shermen.”
Tater found himself in Panama City working
with Dr. Norman Vick, also known as the “Guru
of Gulf Coast Fishing.”
Since 1961, Dr. Vick had worked with the
Eastern Gulf Marine Laboratory, part of the U.S.
Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. Vick’s
work with a marlin-fi lled ocean river called the
Loop Current is already a Gulf coast legend.
Two years before he came to Panama City
little was known about the loop, and only one
marlin had been caught on rod and reel in the
northeastern Gulf. Last year 1,510 were brought
into Destin alone.
“The boat that was called Ballyhoo was
renamed the Rachel Carson,” Tater said. “I had
no idea who Rachel Carson was until I got the
book “Silent Spring” and read it. Then it all
clicked.”
Tater tagged billfi sh and, in the wintertime,
helped to tag amberjacks.
“We made trips over to South Pass, La. and
fi shed out there. The marlin fi sh there comes
in very close, so you don’t have to go very far. I
ended up staying over one time for about three
months at South Pass, at the New Orleans Big
Game Fishing Club. There was a Coast Guard
base there.”
Tater discovered Boca Grande in 1969.
“I was with Capt. Buck Lee with Avondale
Mills, and they had been coming to Boca
Grande since right after the war in 1946. They
came to Boca Grande and hired guides, but his
boss had been coming in the 1920s, Mr. Comer,
with his grandfather who was the governor of
Alabama. In 1925 he came and camped on
Cayo Costa with the local people. Mr. Comer