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hatteras harbor marina.
oh man, that last time we went out was ROUGH...the classic hatteras style body design of boat is pretty amazing in that it can pitch from side to side (ugh, my stomach is starting to turn already) quite violently and still stay upright...however, it doesn't do much for the occupants LOL...while we were out trolling that day, the captain was up in that high seat and there were times I SWEAR that the boat was leaning over so far that he could have actually reached out and touched the water...it was pretty unsettling, to put it mildly...and, to top it off, it was a pretty crappy day of fishing.
About two hours after we started trolling it layed down to about 8-10 foot seas thank god (which is still challenging to deal with, but not scary, and not as much slamming down in between swells. Anyone with any history of motion sickness would have been chumming the waters). It stayed there for a few hours, then dropped to about six about an hour before we had to pull the lines up.
I'm surprised you guys went out in that. Quite often if there are south winds over 20 knots, a trip will get canceled - your captain must have been hard up for money to run out in weather like that, which long run wouldn't have helped his case. In the scuba industry our choices are made based on creating repeat customers and we know a miserable diver is not going to be a repeat diver. Anything over 4 foot seas gets the boat called.
We only went out because they had to fish friday or saturday to get their four days in and saturday was forecasted to be slightly worse with one hour less of fishing time (I think it ended up being not nearly as bad, but that's NC weather for you, it switches without warning). Most boats had anticipated the weekend weather and were fished out on thursday....only about 30 went out friday and another 30 on saturday (of 150ish boats). Weird thing is that NC winds are typically worse on the weekend with tuesday through thursday consistently being more flat. It makes no sense that it would work out that way, but it's an identifiable pattern that maybe someone from noaa can explain to me one day.
zwhit, that's the right word
If you ever get a chance to billfish, you should! I can't emphasize how exciting it is to see this gigantic fish fighting and dancing practically on top of the water that's more than twice your size. One of the fish we hooked was only a hand length too short to kill and this thing was HUGE...close to 400 lbs, but they've been caught and weighed in at over 1000lbs. Definitely a man vs beast kind of appeal that most guys would get a real thrill out of (and I'm basically a dude with girl parts when it comes to this kind of thing lol).
Heck, even when we hooked dolphinfish (happened several times a day on the smaller lures we had out for white marlin and sailfish), it was fun. Those things are unbelievably beautiful in the water with the florescent yellow blue and green coloring glinting through aquarium clear water.
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