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Jeffrey J. Zeigler
An enormous map of the world adorns the wall of Charles Perry’s boat building shop in Colington Harbour. Over the years, though, the world has become a much smaller place for Perry. Anywhere there is great fishing, that’s where will you will find the angler who has built a reputation for hauling in the big ones. He has the pushpins in his map, detailing the exotic destinations he has been, to prove it.
For four months out of the year, Perry runs a boat out of the Canary Islands for Jose Luis Beistegui, a man from Madrid with a passion for big fish. Perry also oversaw the building of Beistegui’s boat, a 58-foot Spencer built in Wanchese.
Though he considers the expeditions to the Canary Islands his full-time job, that is just the beginning for Perry. In October and November of 2006, Perry worked on the deck of a boat in Australia.
In December, he helped tag giant bluefin tuna in Morehead City with Dr. Barbara Block, a professor at Stanford University. He has helped with this program the last eight years.
In February, Perry was in Costa Rica, teaching at “Marlin University,” a week-long school sponsored by Marlin Magazine set up to educate aspiring anglers.
Now that he is home for a few months, Perry is concentrating on a new project -- putting together a DVD about fishing for Atlantic blue marlin off the Ivory Coast of Africa. The new DVD is a follow-up to the video he produced about marlin fishing eight years ago.
Fishing runs through Perry’s blood. His father, Charles, was one of the first sport fisherman out of Oregon Inlet. Young Charles took up fishing with his dad when he was six. He caught the fever, dropping lines in local inlets.
"My mother, who is still living now at 95, she was kind of a religious sort of person and went to church every Sunday, and she took me to church,” Perry recalled. “I got one of those pins for perfect attendance, when you don’t miss a Sunday during the year. I had five of them. Then when I turned six, that was the end of my pins!”
At age 14, Perry started fishing offshore. After a few years at East Carolina University and a tour of Vietnam, Perry decided to take some time off and in 1972 he went to Australia to surf. While he was there, he learned about the outstanding black marlin fishing. He went back in 1973 to pursue the prize fish.
“It was like I was addicted to it,” he joked. “The fishing was so good. I thought I caught big fish here. I was catching 1,000-pound fish, three for a season. I did that for quite awhile. I got that experience, which I couldn’t replace with anything else.”
Perry has even tried his hand at boat building. After adding a shop to the property in Colington Harbour, Perry set about building his own boat, with the help of Wayne Deaver. The 28-foot, center console vessel took a year to build.
“At the same time I was overseeing the building of the Spencer boat (for Beistegui), I built a shop out here and got a jig,” he said. “Wayne was along for the knowledge behind it. He is the only reason the boat turned out the way it did.”
Perry actually postponed this interview to run his pride and joy up to the Virginia state line in the hope of catching this year’s elusive rockfish.
“Yesterday was my last trip for the season. There were a bunch of boats fishing there and one fish was caught for about 25 or 30 boats. The rockfish didn’t show up this year,” he said.
In Perry’s shop are large photos of some of the marlin he has caught, along with paintings done by an African painter. The shop sits idle now, except a small project he is working on. Perry would rather be out on the water, and said his Outer Banks home is still the most prolific for migratory fish like yellowfish tuna, summer marlin, dolphin, and wahoo as anywhere he has fished.
“This place is really a phenomenal area in the fishing world and I have traveled enough to see those other areas. It just keeps producing fish,” he said. “It’s really one of the better fishing areas I have gone.”
Perry also gives kudos to the local fishermen of the Outer Banks, who he claims are some of the best in the world.
“You can take the five best fisherman out of Oregon Inlet and you put them anywhere else in the world where fishing is good, and give them two weeks to adapt to the area, and they’ll be competitive with anyone, anywhere,” he said.
Dismissing the idea that “he knows where the fish are,” Perry reflected on how far he has come since his first fishing expeditions with his father.
“I just wonder what my father would have thought if he was living today and knew how much I have traveled and fished around the world,” Perry said. “I would have never thought so. A lot of people now say, ‘you’ve done all this stuff. You’re famous.’ It’s not that I am famous, it’s just that I’ve outlived all of them. That’s all it is.”
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