Captain Mike’s Fishing

Captain Mike’s Fishing has been sending boats out of Dauphin Island since the early 1970s, when Captain Mike Thierry first started running charters from the island’s marina. The business has stayed in the same circle of hands ever since. Mike’s son Skipper joined the operation in the late 1990s, and longtime first mate King Marchand, who had worked the boats for years, purchased the Lady Ann outright in 2021, keeping the charter under local ownership rather than selling it off.

The fleet centers on two boats built for different kinds of trips. The Lady Ann is a custom sport fisherman that accommodates up to sixteen passengers, suited to parties that want a mix of bottom fishing and trolling without needing a massive vessel. The Escape is a 65-foot Bonner with room for up to twenty-eight people comfortably, built for larger groups and extended trips where more deck space and more bunks matter. Both boats work out of the same dock on LeMoyne Avenue on Dauphin Island, giving the operation a single home base even as it runs two very different classes of charter.

Trip lengths range widely, from six-hour and eight-hour outings up through twenty-hour, twenty-four-hour, and multi-day two and three-day trips. That spread lets the business serve very different kinds of customers on the same schedule board: a family looking for a half-day of inshore fishing, a weekend group chasing red snapper on a day trip, and serious bluewater anglers booking a multi-day run offshore for tuna. Longer trips push well out into the Gulf, where deep-drop and trolling techniques come into play for species that never show up on a short inshore run.

Red snapper fishing is a mainstay of the charter’s offshore business, tied to Alabama’s seasonal snapper regulations, and bluewater and tuna trips fill out the calendar for anglers chasing bigger game further from shore. Inshore trips closer to Dauphin Island round out the offering for guests who want a shorter day on calmer water, targeting species that hold in the bay and nearshore Gulf without the longer run time of an offshore charter.

The business markets itself as family owned and operated, and that framing carries through in how it describes its crew: a founder’s son at the helm of one boat, a former mate turned owner on the other, and decades of continuity between them. For an island with a small year-round population, that kind of multi-generational, hands-on ownership is common among the handful of charter operations still running out of the local marina, and it stands in contrast to larger, corporately run charter fleets found in bigger Gulf Coast ports.

Booking is handled online through the company’s website, with the business noting it is open seven days a week, though it does not publish fixed daily hours since departure times shift with trip length, tide, and season. Prospective anglers are encouraged to book ahead, particularly for the longer offshore and multi-day trips, which fill up faster during peak red snapper season in the late spring and summer.

Between the two boats, the charter covers nearly the full range of what a visitor to Dauphin Island might want from a day, or several days, on the water: quick inshore trips for families, standard offshore snapper runs, and true bluewater expeditions for anglers chasing tuna far from land. That range, built up over five decades of local ownership, has made Captain Mike’s Fishing one of the more established names among the island’s independent charter fleet.

The transfer of the Lady Ann from a longtime mate to an actual owner in 2021 is a small but telling detail about how the business has stayed in local hands rather than being sold to an outside operator as older charter businesses on the Gulf Coast sometimes are. King Marchand’s path from first mate to owner mirrors a pattern seen elsewhere in Dauphin Island’s small charter fleet, where crew members who spend years learning the water eventually take over the boats themselves rather than the business changing hands to someone unfamiliar with local conditions.

For visitors comparing charter options on Dauphin Island, the choice between the Lady Ann and the Escape often comes down to group size and trip length rather than target species, since both boats fish similar waters and pursue many of the same fish depending on the season. A smaller family group might lean toward the Lady Ann for a half-day inshore trip, while a larger party planning a multi-day offshore run would likely book the Escape for the additional deck space and passenger capacity it offers.