IT was an offer with a catch

Earlier this month Daniel English, the 41-year-old owner of a Louisville construction company, was leaving the Churchill Downs race course in Louisville, Kentucky with a couple of out-of-town friends.

After hitting the exacta on the last race, English must have looked happy ? and telegenic.

He caught the eye of Matt Eastman, host of the ESPN Outdoors show ?

Eastman was in town to find someone willing to drop everything and head off on a fantasy fishing trip. Right now. The rub: missing the Kentucky Derby which took place the next day. The reward: two days of deep-sea fishing off Bermuda.

"People were flooding out," Eastman recalled. "I was desperately running around just trying to find someone who seemed cool ? and who would go."

One of English's friends told Eastman and the two videographers with him about English's good luck.

"He looked like he was having a good time and a nice guy," Eastman said, "so I went over and started talking to him and, bam, asked him."

English fitted Eastman's stated qualifications: "a good personality and a good attitude and someone who was willing to blow off the Derby ? and someone who had a passport."

With blessings from Dina, his wife of 14 years, English headed for the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, May 6.

On Sunday morning he was on a charter boat 25 miles off the Bermuda coast, his line loaded with a lure he described as "a fake squid-looking thing".

Before 9 a.m. he felt a tug and found himself locked in a wearying struggle with an 80-pound wahoo. "When that thing pulled on the line, I knew it was a big old fish," said English, who stands 6 feet 3 and weighs 225 pounds.

"It was huge. It took me, I guess, a good 20-25 minutes to get the thing in the boat. I really didn't know what I was doing. They just said, 'Reel!' and I kind of muscled it and pulled, and I was sweating. My shirt was drenched. My forearms were about worn out." What happened to the fish? "We ate it that night," he said.

English caught many other fish, including a shark measuring close to five feet and two blackfin tuna. He and the crew tagged those fish and returned them to the water.

"I named the two blackfin tuna after my daughters, Sydney and Nicole," he said, "and the shark . . . I named that one Tyler (for his 12-year-old son). They're swimming around out there, and if someone catches them again, they'll get that information and send me a little line saying they caught my fish."