Sea Change: Captain McBride Builds a Legacy Business with the Freshest Catch
Captain Fred McBride is living his dream. “Other than my family, fishing is the first thing I think about when I wake up every morning,” he says.
Houston native McBride, 44, is a commercial fisherman on Galveston Bay, targeting species that other local fishing businesses don’t — flounder, sheepsheads, stone crabs — and selling his catch directly to fine-dining restaurants in Houston, usually on the day it’s caught.
McBride’s business, Captain Fred’s Seafood, maintains three boats, each serving different purposes. The smallest is a flat-bottom boat he uses in shallow water to catch flounder, sheepsheads, blue crabs and black drum. A medium-sized boat is for harvesting stone crabs as well as sheepsheads and black drum out in the bay. The third is a 42-foot, deep-sea boat named Just Ain’t Right after McBride’s late father, Frederick Douglas McBride III, a world-traveling merchant seaman who always said that’s what he’d name a big boat. It’s for offshore fishing of tuna, amberjack and other large, edible finfish. The deep-sea component should become operational in 2023. His long-term goal is to have crews working all three boats.
McBride’s saltwater passion developed early. He remembers his grandfather, Jesse Lundy, taking him fishing at 4 years old. He purchased his first boat for $200 at the age of 16, using the money he raised mowing lawns. For many years, he successfully competed in Gulf Coast fishing tournaments. In 2018, he began fishing commercially part-time, going full-time in 2021.
While fishing has always occupied a significant piece of his soul, McBride began his career as a musician. Classically trained on the viola, he studied at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and at Texas Southern University. For 18 years, he was an orchestra teacher and director at Houston’s MacGregor Elementary School. He comes from a family of musicians and educators. His fisherman grandfather was a school principal; his mother, Jessica McBride, was a band director for 32 years; his aunt, Dr. Anne Lundy, is a conductor, founder of the Scott Joplin Chamber Orchestra and music educator at Community Music Center of Houston. His brother, Jesse McBride, is a pianist and professor of jazz studies at Tulane University.
“I loved teaching music to the kids,” McBride says. “But I asked myself, what legacy can I grow and cultivate for my son? And the pandemic made me think about what I really wanted to be doing with my life.”
So, he took the plunge: retired from teaching, committed to commercial fishing and began building the legacy business he dreamed about. “I’ve always been a laser-focused person. When I do something, I’m in 100 percent.” He maintains that there are more similarities betweenmusic and fishing than you might think. “To be successful in either, you have to be disciplined and methodical, but improvisational, ready to react on the fly.”
McBride has intensively researched the behaviors, seasons and habitats of each species he targets, and he has benefited from “old salt”wisdom gained from other commercial fishermen. Committed to sustainable harvesting practices, he takes the stewardship and maintenance of healthy saltwater fisheries and environments seriously.
He also carefully considered his niche in the local fishing industry, asking himself what he could provide that other people weren’t. “I could easily sell my catch to wholesalers,” he says, “but I want to work with creative people. Chefs are like jazz musicians in that they know how to improvise. And I can provide them with local fish that they can’t get from other local sources.”
Since 2018, McBride has developed relationships with Houston chefs who seek local, sustainably caught, hyper-fresh seafood. These include Chris Williams (Lucille's), Mark Holley (Davis Street at Hermann Park), Aaron Bludorn (Bludorn), Drake Leonards (Eunice), John Quinn (State of Grace), Kaitlin Steets (Theodore Rex) and Brittney Aplin (Captain Brad’s Coastal Kitchen).
One enthusiastic customer is Matt Staph, performance sous chef for the Houston Texans professional football team. He prepares daily buffets for 100–200 athletes and staff. “Fred’s fish is the freshest in Houston,” he says. “It just doesn’t get any better.” Staph, an avid fisherman himself, recalls meeting McBride in 2019 when he was chef de cuisine at Chris Shepherd’s One Fifth restaurant. “We had a Gulf Coast theme, and Fred approached us about supplying Galveston Bay flounder. The rest is history … One-Fifth’s flounder amandine roasted on a wood fire became the mostpopular item on the menu.”
McBride catches flounder in shallow water, at night when the weather is calm. With a light to search the bottom where camouflaged flounder lie flat in the silt, he catches them with a gig — a multi-pronged spear on a long pole — in the same manner used by coastal Native Americans for millennia. It’s a method that requires patience, keen eyesight, steady aim and a good knowledge of the habits and habitats of flounder.
One of McBride’s signature offerings is stone crab claws. Most people associate stone crabs with Florida, while blue crabs are the prized delicacy on the Texas Gulf Coast. They don’t realize that stone crabs are also plentiful in Texas waters, though they’re rarely commercially harvested here. McBride knows of only one other commercial fisherman who harvests stone crabs, but only as bycatch, not as a targeted species. A stone crab has two outsized front claws, the only part of the crab harvested. In accordance with sustainable practices and Texas regulations, you can take only the right claw, and only if it is at least 2.5 inches long. Crabbers cleanly break off the right claw and return the crab to the water. The claw regenerates within three years. Even with only one big claw, the crab continues to feed as the right claw grows back.
McBride catches stone crabs in mesh traps, each tied to a small white float, which is how he locates his traps in vast expanses of bay waters. Regulations allow up to 200 traps per fisherman. He maintains a mental map of where the traps are. He moves them as the crabs move, depending on water salinity, temperature, abundance of food, etc. He checks the traps every two or three days.
Harvesting traps is a physical choreography that McBride calls his “little workout.” He spots a trap, idles the boat, deftly hooks the float rope with a long-handled gaff, hauls the trap aboard, empties the crabs into a bucket, re-baits the trap and throws it back. The process takes 1–2 minutes. “When I’m working with a helper, it takes less time than that.” Once the bucket is full, he stops, harvests the claws and tosses the crabs back. One morning in September, he checked 60 of his traps, producing 25 pounds of claws bound for restaurant tables that evening.
“I go out fishing at sunrise and try to be home by noon or one to maybe take a nap before picking up my son at school. It’s a 6-hour process to fish, prep and deliver my catch to customers .” Floundering adds night shifts to his schedule. McBride and his wife have a new baby, who’s often awake long before the sun is up. “If you love what you do, you don’t need much sleep,” he says.
McBride may no longer teach in a school, but he remains an educator at heart. He’s something of an evangelist, eager to introduce others to the satisfactions and joys of fishing. Even though there’s a venerable history of Black fishing traditions — from Africa’s West Coast to Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay and the Gullah Geechee culture in the Carolina sea islands — that legacy, for the most part, hasn’t had much of a presence in the Houston area. As far as McBride knows, he is the only Black commercial fisherman on the Texas Gulf Coast. He’d like to change that. He’s willing to advise and help people starting out, and he spreads the word about how harvesting fish can and should be a sustainable, renewable food source.
“When I was growing up in the Third Ward in Houston, fishing wasn’t on the radar for most kids, certainly not commercial fishing,” he says. “I was lucky that my grandfather introduced me. Part of the problem is lack of exposure but it’s also an economic issue. Owning and maintaining a boat is expensive, and commercial fishing here traditionally has been a white enterprise.”
He’s especially interested in teaching kids about fishing. “I really want them to learn where fish and crabs come from, and what we need to do to make sure they’ll still be around for their grandchildren.” His eldest son, age 12, is a regular fishing companion and loves being out on the water with his dad.
In the same spirit, McBride will take out any chef or kitchen staff who wants to go fishing. Staph remembers that when he expressed interest in learning more about floundering, McBride asked, “Want to go with me tonight?” McBride wants them to understand how the fish they prepare are caught and processed, as well as to expose them to the pleasure of fishing. He says, “I want everybody to appreciate what we have going here on the Texas Gulf Coast.”
