Recently I was lucky enough to join some friends and family on a offshore fishing trip out of Nags Head North Carolina.
October can be a good or bad month for fishing offshore of NC. With the trip coming up, we watch two hurricanes skirt the east coast causing rough water and stirring up the ocean shortly before the trip. This could have meant fishing would either be good, or really bad. Then as the week of the trip came up yet another hurricane was making land fall on the gulf coast and threatening to come up the east coast but this time inland (Thanks Nate).
Well, we headed down to North Carolina as hurricane Nate caused destruction down along the golf coast.
With the weather forecast in our favor, a 20 percent chance of rain and 10 - 15 knot winds, this was better than we expected and hoped for and we were excited to head out in the ocean.
The morning of the trip we walked outside our hotel around 4:30 a.m. to find out it was about 95% humidity, about 74 degrees and breezy to say the least. We arrived at the boat and the captain said similarly to what we had heard, 10 - 15 knot winds and 30% percent chance of showers.
We headed out into the dark into the ocean to find out the weather man, well, is a liar. We got out into the ocean maybe a mile or so, and it got rough, really rough. There were 6 - 8 foot roller waves with a windy chop on top of that. As we headed further out into the ocean it got worse, I would say there were times that the waves got up to 10 foot rollers with a windy chop on top of that, and the captain said he recorded 30 knot winds as we were headed out.
Needless to say we were in for a rough ride even in a 60' boat. We got bounced, beat, and rolled all around going out and even once we were fishing. I have to admit shortly after getting out in the rough water I got sea sick for the very first time in my life. I have been out on the ocean before, I have been out in the Chesapeake Bay in rough waters, I have never been sea sick but this time it hit me full force. I have never felt so bad in my life, and I wasn't the only one. Out of the 6 people that went on the trip 4 of us threw up at least once and two of us spent the day being sick. Even the two that didn't get sick said at points they felt sick.
Now on to the fishing, Fishing started out slow but shortly after the sunrise it picked up. We started picking up little football black tail tuna sporadically. As the day went on we had points of excitement, one person was lucky enough to reel in a nice Wahoo fairly early in the morning. There were a couple of points where we had 2 - 4 fish on at a time.
We also had some excitement when a shark came up in the spread as we were reeling in several tuna at one time, he actually got a good part of one of the tuna, but then we hooked him. We sadly didn't get any pictures of the shark but it was about 4 - 5 foot dusky shark.
All and all, it was pretty good day fishing even with the rough water. I was able to reel in 2 black fin tuna and a albacore. We also finished the day with the Wahoo and a couple yellow fin tuna. We ended up with 16 tuna and the one Wahoo as you can see pictured below.
I sadly wasn't able to get many pictures since I was busy being sick and when I wasn't sick I was trying to reel in a couple fish. So, I wasn't able to get any pictures of just how rough it was out there.
I had a fun trip and brought home some yummy tuna and wahoo, so it was a good day!
