Bryan, Randy and I had a good fishing trip last week out of Pirate’s Cove in Manteo, NC. Fished with Capt Jeff Ross on the Obsession, who we’ve fished with many times in the past. He works hard for us and we always have a good trip.
We ended up with 13 yellowfin tuna, 3 gaffer dolphin and Bryan released a white marlin. His fish was released immediately after a quick picture and swam off fine. Randy did a great job in the fighting chair on several big tuna and I caught 4 of them in the 30 to 50lb and a nice dolphin on my light TLD25 rod that I personally built. That was fun!
Haven’t been there since I fished the Pirate’s Cove Billfish Tournament a couple years ago…and I noticed a lot of changes. They are still dealing with problems on HWY12 to Hatteras due to Irene last year. Must have been 15 feet of sand standing nearly vertical on the very edge of the roads in some places. They are using trac hoes to pull the sand away from the road and front end loaders to move the sand over to the sound side. Wild. I believe there were 5 breeches cut into the highway, and they fixed all but one (which I saw), according to the mate on the Obsession. It’s now known as the “New Inlet”, which is not too far south of the Oregon Inlet bridge, which has problems of its own. It’s a bridge that looks like it was put together with spare metal laying around and that’s putting it mildly.
Unfortunately, I understand that a lot of the beach is now closed to trucks thanks to the Audubon Society and their desire to help a bird (a lot of people historically drive to and fish off the beach at Oregon Inlet). Some of the locals got creative and made bumper stickers asking the Audubon Society if they could identify “this” bird. 
Meanwhile, it might be safe to say the beach closing is doing its part to hurt tourism because it seemed slow to me for June.
There was no dredging in Oregon Inlet taking place due to cutbacks either. Given the return on investment on the fishing industry in the outer banks, it seems to me