When you first meet Captain Rapchick, his confident, easy smile and sense of humor make you feel instantly comfortable. But there is a lot more to Chris than meets the eye. Chris hails originally from Charleston, SC, and is a graduate of the world-renowned military college, The Citadel. He also graduated from James Island Charter High School in Charleston, where in 2006 he was crowned “Mr. Sexy Legs.” Chris admits, “They have only gotten better with the passage of time.”
Deciding that he enjoyed fishing even more than the military, he began working towards making a career that would put him in, on or near the water for the rest of his life. Chris credits one man with starting him on that path. “I’m here today because Johnny Ohlandt taught me to fish and to love fishing.” He has captained boats from the warm Florida Keys to the chilly waters of the Bay of Alaska and traveled as far from home as Patagonia, on the extreme southern tip of South America. Chris has been captain of several thousand charter trips and that experience shows. He says the happiest day of his life was when he obtained his captain’s license, with a close second being the day he joined Ocean Surfari.
“It’s not just a place to work,” says Chris. “We promote a lifestyle here at OS. We live it, we breath it and we help our clients experience it.” Decked out in his work-a-day attire of AFTCO fishing shorts and an Ocean Surfari T-shirt, Captain Chris is living the life … the USVI life. As if by way of proving that to the core, when asked what he would like his gravestone to read, he simply smiled and said, “There won’t be any gravestone. I’ll be cremated, cast in concrete in an old five-gallon oil bucket, and sunk on a reef to make a better place for the fish.”
Chris Rapchick is captain of the fishing vessel Hitman and Ocean Surfari’s newest vessel, the Reef Surfari snorkeling boat.
