Fishing gets odd when man nets live raccoon from ocean off popular North Carolina pier

Tall tales of the great fishing off North Carolina’s coast took a turn for the strange, when a man threw a net in the ocean and caught a live raccoon.

The odd moment happened March 25 off Emerald Isle’s Bogue Inlet Pier, which stretches 1,000 feet into Onslow Bay.

“It was about 7 o’clock in the morning and I looked over the side and saw it clinging to a piling for dear life,” pier staffer David Dodson told McClatchy News. “He just looked so cute, I had to try something.”

How the raccoon got in the predicament is anyone’s guess, but Dodson thinks it fell while poaching eggs from seabird nests on the underside of the pier. Fishing it out of the ocean took more than an hour, he says, because the raccoon was more afraid of the net than of drowning.

“He kept swimming from one pole to the next, trying to get away from the net. He did that until he had only one pole left,” Dodson says.

“I was thinking: ‘Buddy, this is your last chance to be saved.’ He looked at me and then crawled into the net. I guess he finally figured it out. I had chased him to six poles by then.”

The raccoon was clearly exhausted, but scrambled away as soon as the net reached the railing, Dodson said. “I don’t think he could have made it to shore on his own. That’s a long swim.”

The Gulf Stream flows north off North Carolina’s coast, giving the state a reputation for hosting an unexpectedly wide variety of sea life, including Caribbean fish. Hurricanes have also been known to drag odd things into the ocean, including livestock, wild horses and bears.

Dodson says he has worked at the pier three and a half years, and this counts as the strangest thing he’s seen in the ocean.

Bogue Inlet Pier dates to the late 1950s, but has had multiple sections rebuilt due to hurricane damage, according to its website.