Pic from North Carolina Fishing School

[Twanger]

NC State puts on a fishing school out of Hattaras every June.
I attended in 2005. It's a flimsy excuse for the University faculty to do some offshore fishing at the expense of the students, but they do run a pretty low-key and very nice show.

see: continuingeducation.ncsu.edu/fishing.html

All the talk about big-game fishing made me think to pull out these pictures.

Day's catch from the Big Tahuna. I'm the fire plug looking dude on the left... Hey, those are my winter hunting shorts! Never noticed that before.


Here's a 'little fish' we picked up.
It's about 9 feet long, and it's the smaller of the two we caught that week. Estimated weight about 450lb. We didn't kill it... catch and release on Blue Marlin.

[ARO]

looks like a good day of fishin, thats a nice size dolphin on the wharf too!!

[eshoremd]

my buddy and i talked about doing this. what did you think walt?

[hunt4fun1]

Good lookin blue.

[Twanger]

eshoremd -

I have mixed feelings about this program.

First I should say that it was great, they delivered everything they said they would, and we had two great days of offshore fishing. The surf fishing day was a bust, but fortunately we brought our own boat skipped class and got tuna that day annyhoo. Hah! ;D Our fishing school boats got REALLY lucky. We caught two out of the three marlin caught the whole week. Even without the marlin it would have been great. The classroom work was laid-back and pretty slow. It's a good place to socialize and network. They served a good meal and put on a decent show at the 'awards' banquet.

That said... if your objective is to get several days of offshore fishing in, and you can get 6 guys together, you can probably get 4-5 days offshore in a week for the same amount of money (vs. two). If you don't know and trust 5 other guys to pull this off, the fishing school is a good way to go.