Airmar East Coast Division

Captain of the Year Home

Capt. Jimmie Horning // Hog Wild // 500 pts.

• Hatteras Village Offshore Open, 1st Place, 500 pts.

Capt. Lee Smith // Carterican // 2nd Place, 300 pts.

• Hatteras Village Offshore Open, 2nd Place, 300 pts.

Capt. Harry Smith // Double B // 100 pts.

• Hatteras Village Offshore Open, 3rd Place, 100 pts.

2021 AIRMAR East Coast Division Captain of the Year

Capt. Miles Herring

Glazed // 1,000 pts.

Carolina Billfish Classic, 1st Place – 500 pts.

Edisto Billfish Tournament, Heaviest Marlin – 505 lbs. – 500 pts.

Captain Miles Herring grew up around boats. His father had boats most of his life and Herring has been on boats for 50 years, the same amount of time he’s been alive.

And despite winning the coveted Captain of the Year, AIRMAR East Coast Division for the 2021 season, Herring doesn’t consider himself a professional captain.

“Believe it or not I’ve never had a paying captain’s job, it’s just been recreational. I ran family boats, friends’ boats and just been fishing for fun,” he says. “I’ve got my captain’s license and I’ve been running boats my entire life, but that’s about the closest thing I’ve got to being a professional captain.”

While Herring’s father fished the occasional tournament, Herring deviated from this, consistently dipping his toes into the tournament scene over the last 30-plus years.

Herring received his captain’s license when he was just out of college in 1994. Since then, the Murrells Inlet, North Carolina native has made a comfortable spot on the tournament scene, fishing the East Coast corridor with family and friends on his 58-foot Dean Johnson, Glazed, of which he is the owner/operator. Herring looked long and hard for that boat. His father had Hatteras boats when his son was growing up but Herring decided to start out with a 36-foot Yellowfin that he had for six years before he outgrew it when his family began to grow.

“I started looking for a simple Carolina boat with low-cost operations and maintenance and I found this one by luck in December of 2017 and put it directly in the boatyard at Bayliss Boatworks and did a pretty extensive exterior upfit.”

At the time Herring had nine Krispy Kreme donut businesses and his children decided the new boat should be named Glazed, after the glazed donut of course.

And as involved as his four children—a 13, 15, 18, and 19-year-old—were in naming the boat, they have become just as involved with the fishing and work on it.

“It’s common for me to have all four of my kids plus a few other kids and adults on board,” Herring says. “We’re usually more kids than adults, it’s kind of funny really, we’ll have 10 to 12 people and most of them are under the age of 19. It’s kind of a low-stress operation, we have fun. We’re not the normal captain and two mates with a tower rod and a signal operator; we’re a few guys that grew up together and a bunch of our kids.”

It’s this team that helped Herring take on the Captain of the Year title. Herring discusses their accomplishments with a sense of pride and is quick to talk about the accomplishments of his team of family and friends rather than himself. His 13-year-old son Woods, for example, has been named a junior angler at the Carolina Billfish Classic two years in a row.

It was during the 2021 tournament that Herring and the Glazed team also won first place giving Herring 500 COTY points. For this tournament the crew approached it with what Herring calls “the basics”—four circle hooks and two lures.

“We’re doing what everybody else does, just hard work and paying attention,” Herring says. “We’re very competitive, but we have fun.”

For the Edisto Billfish Tournament, the Glazed team’s Wilson Springs reeled in a 505-pound marlin earning them another 500 COTY points (and cementing Herring’s East Coast COTY title). The fish was hooked at 2:19 p.m. and they didn’t boat it until 8:30 p.m. They didn’t get back to the dock until midnight. During that tournament Herring’s two sons, Woods and Miles, were on board as well as the sons of Herring’s friends.

“There were three people over 50, one around 30, and two 19 year olds, a 16 year old, a 14 and 13 year old,” Herring laughs. “It’s all short people, we were a full boat.”

That night was a memorable one for the group. As they backed into the dock Herring remembers a full crowd watching them. His wife and daughters had also driven three hours into the night to see the team weigh their winning marlin. But this is just how the Glazed team operates—it’s a group effort through and through with enough support to go around, something their captain is obviously proud of.

“I’ve got some really great anglers, we all have daytime jobs and this is what we do on the side and that makes it even more special,” Herring says before adding “For me to watch my son hand the rod to my other son, there’s some pride in that.”

Past Winners