Editor’s Note: Captain Bobby Walker, a third-generation charter-boat captain based out of Orange Beach, Alabama, along with his family, helped pioneer the charter-boat business in Orange Beach. His grandfather, Rufus Walker, was a mailman who started taking parties on weekends to troll for king mackerel and Spanish mackerel. His uncle, Roland Walker, was one of the first charter-boat fishermen to discover red snapper holding on underwater airplane wrecks and shipwrecks. Roland later carried tires and all types of old metal junk to drop in the Gulf of Mexico to create artificial reefs. He also convinced state politicians to deploy 300 wrecked-car bodies in the Gulf of Mexico, which became the first step in Alabama’s intensive artificial-reef-building program that’s today one of the largest artificial-reef programs in the world.
