News

By Willie Howard

    OCEAN RIDGE — Capt. Mike Zubak, a charter boat captain who earned a living on the waters off Boynton Inlet for nearly 40 years, died June 22 while in Hospice care at Bethesda Memorial Hospital. He was 85.
    Mr. Zubak had suffered from multiple health problems in the past year and died of kidney failure, said his son, Jon Zubak.
Mr. Zubak, who lived just south of Boynton Inlet on Island Drive South in Ocean Ridge, had a sailfish image tiled into the bottom of his pool and portholes on his front doors. He dedicated his life to fishing.
    A native of Detroit, Zubak moved to South Florida in the late 1950s after serving as a paratrooper in the Army. He worked the Boynton Inlet docks in the late 1960s, where he met his wife, Dorothy Flaccus.
    Mr. Zubak worked on several Boynton Beach charter boats and ran his own commercial fishing boat, the Go Boy Again, before setting up his charter business on the Elf III — a 44-foot wooden sportfishing boat custom built in North Carolina in the late 1960s. He operated the Elf III from 1968 until he sold it in 2004.
    Even his son is not quite sure how Mr. Zubak came upon his nickname, Zoom Boom, but fellow fishermen said it was probably a reference to his tendency to get excited.
    “He was very lively, always entertaining,” said Flip Traylor of Ocean Ridge, a boat captain who always used Mr. Zubak’s split-tail mullet when he trolled for billfish during tournaments in the Bahamas.
    “He’d get cranked up,” said Butch Moser of Delray Beach, a veteran charter captain who worked as a mate on the Elf III with Mr. Zubak.
    Moser remembers boating one of the first recreationally caught swordfish off Boynton Beach with Mr. Zubak in 1968 along with several Warsaw grouper over 100 pounds. Mr. Zubak’s other prized fish included a 145.5-pound white marlin caught off Lake Worth.
    Mr. Zubak was known as a man who had strong opinions and didn’t back down when he thought he was right. But he had a compassionate side, too.
    In recent years, he stopped by Palm Beach Yacht Center (where he used to dock the Elf III) every night to feed pelicans and stray cats, said Sandy Schulz, who operates the Living on Island Time and Southern Comfort IV fishing boats from the marina with her husband, John.
    Marina managers told Mr. Zubak not to feed the pelicans, but he fed them anyway, along with the cats.
    “He came by every night like clockwork,” Schulz said. “He loved animals.”
    When Cindy Lyman Jamison was home from her first year in college, Mr. Zubak helped her operate the Lucky Penny charterboat for her father, Kenny Lyman.
    “Mike would talk to me on the ship-to-shore radio when other captains wouldn’t,” Jamison said.
    Friend John Jolley said Mr. Zubak taught a lot of people to fish on the Elf III.
    “He was a hard-working guy,” Jolley said. “He was one of the old guard, and now he’s gone.”
    Steve Sprague, co-owner of Tuppen’s Marine & Tackle in Lake Worth, said he still catches fish at key locations he learned from Mr. Zubak.
    “He knew all the hot spots,” Sprague said.
    Jon Zubak is Mr. Zubak’s last remaining relative. His wife, Dorothy, and son, Michael, died in 1997.  No memorial service was planned as of late June. Jon Zubak said he will spread his father’s ashes on the ocean.