Nose in books, feet in water
Scientist David McKee named to Boatmen's 2007 Hall of Fame
BY PHIL REYNOLDS SOUTH JETTY REPORTER

Old buddies COURTESY PHOTO Port Aransas Boatman, Inc. 2007 Hall of Famer David McKee, right, and Jinx Martin, judges at a mid-1970s Deep Sea Roundup.

David McKee, one of three chosen to be inducted into the 2007 Port Aransas Boatmen, Inc.'s Hall of Fame, almost doesn't remember when he wasn't fishing.

"When I was a kid, I ran around with a fishing rod in one hand and a B-B gun in the other," he recalled.

Back then, other anglers respected "your rock" on the jetty or "your flat" in the area between the barrier islands and the mainland.

"You never saw another track or a footprint. You knew you were the only one who knew about that place," McKee said.

Things have changed. Global positioning now puts anglers in an exact point on the map, and "with GPS and the media telling you what's going on and where to go and what color (of lure) to throw, the pressure on the system is ungodly."

None of that affects McKee's devotion to fishing or his dedication to the Deep Sea Roundup, however, even though as a biologist he's concerned about that pressure on the system. And that's one of the reasons McKee was elected to this year's Port Aransas Boatmen Inc. Hall of Fame.

Now and then David McKee is shown as he is often seen these days, with a rod and reel in hand. At right, he shown in a 1963 photo on a day when hundreds of tarpon were being caught off Horace Caldwell Pier. McKee is one of three selected to be inducted into the Port Aransas Boatmen, Inc.'s Hall of Fame. The others are Doc Gilmore and Jerry Webb. They will be honored during the 72nd Deep Sea Roundup July 5-8. Also being recognized is the Boatman of the Year, Mike Firestone. COURTESY PHOTOS

McKee, a professor of biology at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, has been involved with the Roundup for 30 years, since the time when he was a young biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

As a biologist working out of Rockport, McKee had gotten to know Port Aransas Boatmen Jinx Martin and Dewey Dreyer well, he recalled.

"I showed up one July and Martin put me to work at what was called a Deep Sea Roundup," he said. "We weighed and stumbled and got slimy and got the thing done, and wouldn't you know? I came back the next year."

That was 30 years ago, and Dr. McKee has been a Deep Sea Roundup judge ever since.

Far from being a "textbook biologist," however, McKee said he came by his love for angling naturally.

"All of my youth was spent on the north jetty or the south jetty or Horace Caldwell Pier, fishing for tarpon and shark," he said.

"You know, beer wasn't there, girls weren't there - it was all about going down to the Island Café and buying a 25-cent loaf of bread and four cans of Spam and living on that for weeks on end ... and fishing."

Besides Martin and Dreyer, McKee remembered his uncle, Sam Hunt, and Chris Page as being early influences on him.

"I guess, as a kid sitting on that tarpon bench, one of the things I always tried to figure out was how am I going to make a living doing this - fishing?" he said.

"(My family) said, 'If you want to make fishing a part of your life, you ought to go to college and get a degree in marine biology, or something like that" - which I did."

After getting a bachelor's degree from what was then Texas A&I University-Kingsville, McKee went to work teaching at Flour Bluff High School. He was there five years - "I was a Flour Bluff Hornet long enough to earn my stinger" - before his only venture outside the sciences. He had a motorcycle racing shop in Corpus Christi, also for five years.

"I went fast, but I fell down a lot," he reported.

After moving to the Parks and Wildlife Department, McKee got a master's degree and then his PhD from Texas A&M University. He's taught at A&M-Corpus Christi for 21 years.

"I really encourage the kids, 'Don't just study it and learn it in a classroom. Get out and fish and walk the beach and windsurf and dive and make it your life.' If you only learn it from a classroom and have that kind of limited experience, you'll never be very successful."

McKee finds himself teaching less these days, however. His future is in book writing, he said.

He's finishing a book on fishes of the Upper Laguna Madre and will next do a book on fishes of the Gulf of Mexico. After that, he'll put a lifetime of lure collecting to work (he estimates he has 8-10,000 lures) on a coffee table book on the history of lure manufacturing in Corpus Christi."

None of that will keep him from fishing, though it's not likely any future trip will match his favorite, an expedition to Horace Caldwell Pier back in 1963.

"There were more than 100 tarpon caught off the pier that day. I hooked 13, landed three. It was un-believable," McKee reported. "It's probably the best trip I've ever had. All were released - catch and release was very much a practice of tarpon fishermen in those days. You didn't dare kill a tarpon. You pulled a scale (as a memento) and let it go."

How about his worst trip?

"There's never been a bad fishing trip. Fishing's great; catching varies somewhat."

And if you're not fishing? Well, shucks. You might as well drop by the Deep Sea Roundup and become a judge for the next 30 years or so.