Captains hooked: how Ernal Foster's ideas about blue-water sportfishing caught on and created an industry on the Outer Banks.

• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

In Hatteras Blues, published this fall, Tom Carlson chronicles a family business--and the birth of charter fishing on the Outer Banks. The author taught creative nonfiction and American literature for 32 years at the University of Memphis.

Most old-timers agree that the first attempt at fishing for blue marlin out of Hatteras Village took place in 1933. A village fisherman, Lloyd Styron, was there, and in an interview shortly before he died he recalled the occasion. The fisherman was Colonel Hugh Wise from Princeton, N.J. He had traveled around the world catching sharks and had in fact written a book about them. But he wanted to try for a marlin. At the time, he was about 65 or 70, Styron recalled--"and he had a bad hip and didn't get around very well. He talked local captain Nelson Stowe into taking him offshore."

Stowe, like all captains in Hatteras Village in those days, had a commercial fishing boat and none of the equipment necessary for a marlin venture. So Captain Stowe borrowed an office chair from his friend Andrew Austin, and for an outrigger "a bamboo pole about 10 or 12 feet long that I had found along the beach," and off they went. They didn't catch anything, recalls Stowe, and, worse, poor old Colonel Wise got thrown around so badly both in and out of his office chair that he decided he didn't want to try it again.

Wise's unhappy honeymoon with marlin took place just months after an out-of-work Ernal Foster had returned to Hatteras Village. And according to his son's recollections of his father's account, it was also right around this time a large sailboat, Alma, dropped anchor in Hatteras Village harbor. Its captain took a liking to Ernal, and before he sailed off, he gave him the gift of a book: Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. "My father had a grade-school education," says Ernie, "but he read that book all the way through, and for some reason that image of that giant albatross, that good-luck bird, stuck with him."

Another abortive attempt to catch a marlin off Hatteras Island was made in 1936 by two brothers, Jack and Paul Townsend, of Ocean City, Md. They were aboard their own boat, a 40-foot Elco, and they had better equipment, but their luck was the same as that of the bruised Colonel wise. Then, in the summer of 1939, a veteran fisherman named Hugo Rutherford came to Hatteras Village. Fishing from his own private boat, he landed the first two marlin ever taken off the shores of the island. One of the fish weighed 590 pounds.

Mr. Rutherford also took a fancy to Ernal, this quiet but personable and enterprising young man who had just had a boat built for himself, and he donated two red-and-white-banded cane outriggers to the Albatross. Outriggers were fast becoming standard gear for serious gamefishing in places more advanced than Hatteras Village: Montauk, Ocean City, the Bahamas, Miami (in fact, much of the cane for outriggers came into the port of Miami in bundles on the decks of huge freighters). But Ernal's were the first real outriggers among the boats in the village.

So was Ernal's idea a first in Hatteras Village, or anywhere the length of the Outer Banks: Instead of fishing commercially as much as you could and maybe taking out an occasional game-fishing party, why not reverse the polarities? Why not take out gamefishermen exclusively when the weather held--the early spring, the summer months and into the fall--and then do commercial fishing when the sportfishing season was over? In a television documentary made in the early 1990s, Ernal sat on the wood steps of the Albatross office and said, "They laughed at me. Said I was crazy to mess with it, that I ought to get back to commercial fishing. Real work, they said."

But Ernal knew something the commercial fishermen didn't: There was money to be made from tourists and fishing. It was a truth brought home to him as a young boy occasionally helping his father. This was back in the early 1920s. Ernal had been born in Hatteras Village, but his father, Charles, had moved the family to Beaufort, farther south on the Banks, to be near the menhaden fleet running out of there. Every once in a while, when his father wasn't menhaden fishing, he would gather up his son with him on their own boat and take parties fishing near the numerous Core Banks inlets.

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By 1924, the Fosters were back in Hatteras Village, where they would remain, but Ernal remembered those waters of the Core Sound where he'd grown up. Starting when he was 15, Ernal and an older friend would take a borrowed 33-foot boat down sound and spend the summer ferrying bathers from the mainland out to Atlantic Beach. In the afternoons, they'd fetch them back home. The price was 50 cents a head. During the week, Ernal and his friend concentrated on rounding up groups to fish the waters off Cape Lookout. It wasn't hard to find takers.

So by the time Captain Hugo Rutherford had donated that pair of outriggers to the Albatross, Ernal had been running it as a charter fishing boat for two summers. Things had been slow at the outset. "That first summer, me and Bill ran four charters at $25 a trip." He chuckled to himself. But the next summer proved much better. Ernal and Bill, who was 17 now, had developed a reputation. Fishermen who traveled long distances to Hatteras Village could rely on these two young men to keep their word and take them out--and not renege as some of the older captains had for the sake of a good commercial haul. With Ernal and Bill, if the weather held, they'd take you offshore. And there was little doubt that the Foster boys knew where the fish were. When the trolling action slowed, Bill and Ernal seemed to have an uncanny knack at dead reckoning, of using a barely visible shoreline and who knew what minuscule landmarks to find a handful of old wrecks up on Diamond Shoals or elsewhere. The wrecks teemed with sea bass, amberjack and big blues.

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The only thing occasionally holding back the Fosters, it seemed, was their primitive equipment. Most fishing parties before the war brought their own rods and reels, but Ernal and Bill had their own gear, just in case. It was home-made fare: bamboo rods with twine-wrapped grips and automobile hose clamps for reel seats. The line was braided linen. Twenty-four thread added up to 72-pound test, a workable strength for offshore fishing, but Lord help you if you didn't dry it properly; it would rot quicker than a fall tomato. What reels they had were clunkers with primitive star drags, if they had any drags at all other than your thumb. Tom Eaton, who had brought electricity to Hatteras Island and built the first icehouse, had gone out fishing with the Fosters, and to their operation he donated two beautiful Pflueger Altapac reels. Each cost more than $100, a great deal of money back then (six reels would have paid for the Albatross).

All the pieces of a successful business venture were migrating into place, but even here on the Outer Banks in 1941, you could catch it on any wind--the acrid scent of world war. Hitler had overrun most of Europe, the Battle of Britain had come and gone, and now the Germans were re-creating Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow. U-boats were devastating...