Tampa Tribune, The (FL) - March 14, 1999Dave Mirise was a fisherman and a friend to many, say those who knew the 92-year-old Land O' Lakes man. No one is exactly sure when Dave Mirise was first called the "Speck Fishing King." It might have been in 1992 when he turned 85. That was when his friends started counting how many speckled perch he must have caught over the years. And the way they figured it, there had to have been at least 25,000 catches in 44 years. On a good day, Mirise used as many as six cane poles at a time. On bad days, not that there ever really was one, he used two or three poles. There were times, Mirise told his friends, when he caught as many as 100 speckled perch in an afternoon at Lake George in north Florida. "Oh, I have no doubt. He caught at least that many," said one of his longtime friends, Bruce Aldrich, 62. Mirise met Aldrich the same way he met most of his friends: fishing. "You met him once, and that was pretty much it," said Mike Willingham, 42, a Tampa detective who met Mirise in the 1970s. "He was a really terrific guy." Mirise didn't really have any relatives after his wife, Edith, died in 1971.But he wasn't alone. "He had a family of friends that was golden," Willingham said. Many of those friends fished with him at Lake Ellis, the one behind his Land O' Lakes home, and at other freshwater lakes across the state. Their love of fishing made them fast friends. "It's spiritual," Willingham said. "You can hear the clouds go by, the fish swimming. You're very close to nature." And the eating is good.Mirise and his friends caught all kinds of freshwater fish. But speckled perch were his favorite.They had many a fish fry behind his house. For years, Mirise's neighbors regularly brought Missouri minnows to him. In return, he would give them his catch. Paul Courty, 73, met Mirise in 1957 when he managed a Phillips 66 service station on Nebraska Avenue in Tampa. They became friends, fishing together at least once a week over the next 40 years. Courty has a fish story or two to tell.There's the one about the biggest speckled perch Courty has ever seen. Really. It was big. And Mirise caught it. That fish must have weighed at least 3 pounds, Courty said. Most perch weigh 1 or 2 pounds.Courty was excited. He told Mirise he was going to have that fish mounted. So he put it in the live-well at Mirise's dock, promising to come back for it. There wasn't a sign of the fish when he returned. He asked Mirise what happened. "He patted himself on the stomach and said, "I mounted it.' " Courty told that story two weeks ago when Mirise's friends gathered at a Land O' Lakes funeral home to say goodbye. They tried to make it a happy time. "He was 92. He had lived a long, full life," Aldrich said.They talked of his successful life. The Ohio native had owned and managed gas stations and restaurants over the years, even though he had only a seventh-grade education. He was an Army veteran of World War II. He was a Baptist. And best of all, he was one heck of a fisherman and friend.They'll remember fondly their friend, the "Speck Fishing King."