by Carl Safina
The rising sun is poised just below the horizon, about to burn its way through a cloud. We haven’t slept, but the Sooty Terns are calling, Wide awake, wide awake.
“Time to go tuna fishing,” announces Dave. He, Mike, and I stream the lures astern. We stop them about fifty to seventy-five feet behind the moving boat and they pop to the surface, skipping and darting like fleeing prey fish. Dave sets the reels’ drag brakes at fifty pounds; not an inch of line will budge from the spool until Whatever is at the other end exerts at least fifty pounds of pulling power. The two outside lines are run from the tips of the fishing rods to poles called outriggers that hold the lines out away from the boat, helping to prevent tangles. A clothes-pin-like clip holds the fishing line to the outriggers, and you run the clip up to the end of the outriggers like running a flag up a pole. The two inside hand lines go straight to their lures. So now we’re trolling, dragging four lures, watching them skipping in our wake. We’re pulling the lures pretty quickly, about ten miles an hour, but we’re after fish that can sprint five times that speed. They’re the fastest fish in the known universe.
One tern starts hovering excitedly nearby, and a tuna crashes twice through the surface. Immediately, more birds wing speedily toward the spot, streaming in from all directions. Right away you can tell: this is an aerobic place to make a living. This is the big league. Four billion years of product testing and refinement have produced animals at the top of their game: the fastest swimmers, the most exquisite fliers. And—we’d like to think—the best fishers.
A pile of Sooty Terns gathers to our right and starts diving. Dave shouts to Captain Wolfe, up on the bridge, and points to the commotion. Wolfe turns the boat toward the birds. I glance back at our churning wake and the skittering lures.
Nancy suddenly points, “Oh my God! Look at all the fish jumping there!”
I look forward and see silhouetted fish exploding from the water and sailing through the air like tossed footballs. There’s nothing floppy about them. These are projectiles, missiles, bombs.
The starboard lure gets bit but the fish comes off immediately after popping the line from the outrigger clip. Half a minute later the port outrigger snaps and the line shoots tight and begins peeling off the reel. But that fish quickly comes off, too.
The leaping fish vanish. The birds disperse.
A few minutes later, a nice fish yanks a hand line taut and stays on. Itano grabs the line and slips it into the hauler winch. Soon the fish appears beneath our turbulent wake, a life of shining silver, gleaming white, glowing yellow. Dave opens a door in the transom, grabs the line, and slides the fish through, onto a pad on deck. It’s a Yellowfin Tuna, Ahi in Hawaiian. Gorgeous and bright; a laminated, decorated speed package.
Nancy flashes me a smile. Like nearly everyone on the planet, she’s never seen a living tuna. Its great beauty impresses her. She’s admiring the dark ocean-blue back, how it blends downward first to electric blue, then into the bronzy burnishing along the side, to the pearly belly; the silver-hard gill plates; the large eyes bearing light blue irises; the lightened vertical flank markings creating stripes and spots; the shape of the fusiform body from nose to the rigid keels along its stiff, crescent-shaped tail; the winglike pectoral fins, and the bright yellow emarginations of the fins; and the rows of little yellow finlets running along the tailward third of both the back and belly, which the fish controls like rudders; the way its larger fins vanish into slots to eliminate friction during streaking bursts of speed.
Dave pops a tag into the fish’s back, a nylon dart with a number on it. It sticks out like a little streamer. Each tag says HAWAII tagging PROJECT and then the serial number. Dave slides the fish out the door. Into a tape recorder hung in a waterproof bag around his neck he dictates, “Tag number 89, Yellowfin, eighty centimeters—”
He is still saying “centimeters” when another fish hits one of the hand lines and is hooked. Dave slides that fish through the door, disengages the hook, and throws the lure back in so that that line is already fishing again before he even has the tag in the tuna’s back.
These fish are small so far, only about fifteen pounds. They’re easily manageable. Each fish is on deck for fifteen seconds or less. Itano can handle more action. So he asks Mike to add another hand line. Now we’re trolling five lines.
I hear an outrigger clip go snap! and the reel near my head starts screaming. This is a really hot fish. I mean, the reel is shrieking. Even against the drag brake set at fifty pounds of pressure, this thing is burning line off the spool. Dave reaches for the whizzing line and it cuts his glove open. This fish takes out all the four-hundred-pound-test line—intended to be all the line needed for almost any fish out here—and now we’re into the 130-pound-test backing.
A much smaller fish hits a hand line—a fifteen-pounder—and Dave tags it. Now I’m charged with keeping the line on the rod tight—which the hot fish does by itself. Dave grabs my line in his damaged glove, slips it into the hauler, and in a few minutes we have a yellowfin weighing sixty pounds coming through the door. This one was incredibly strong for its moderate size; we were expecting a much bigger fish. I’d like to see a two-hundred-pounder pull.
We’ve been fishing for fifteen minutes and have tagged four tuna. Not bad!
Our stowaway Bonin Petrel makes a sudden appearance from under the bait-prepping table, then goes back into hiding.
Two more fish rise to the lures, sink their hard teeth into the soft plastic, and feel a steely sting. One small Bigeye Tuna, one small Yellowfin. The Bigeye weighs about twenty-five pounds. It’s got slight barring on the belly in the rear half, a bigger, stouter head, and a deeper body that got it the Latin name obesus. This is a baby; they can grow to be several hundred pounds—if they live long enough.
Captain Wolfe turns the boat toward another group of about a hundred diving birds over breaking fish. Immediately, two more fish rise and strike. This time all the lines tangle. Fish are now spurting and darting through the surface practically alongside us, under a fluttering, diving flock of excited noddies and Sooty Terns, a couple of Wedgies and Fairy terns, and one Laysan Albatross. Except for the albatross, these birds depend almost completely on tuna to drive prey to the surface, where they can get at it. Overfishing threatens even them, because no tuna—or very few—would mean all these birds starve.
About a dozen and a half Sootics swoop in and check themselves over our splashing lures. I’m watching the lures skipping and I see a big splash behind one. A few seconds later, a tuna sucks the lure under, snaps the line from the outrigger clip, and then streaks away. Again all of the heaviest line goes and the fish takes it far into the backing. This fish requires attention. We clear all the other lines out of the water and start backing down on it. I put the reel into low gear. Captain Wolfe yells from the bridge, “C’mon, Carl, crank—reel, reel!” I begin putting line back on the reel as the boat backs down farther. Dave gets the line into the hauler, but still the fish is pulling very, very hard. Even with the hydraulic hauler the fish is coming only slowly.
Dave suddenly calls, “Shark!”
A yellowish Galapagos Shark that I estimate at perhaps two hundred pounds and Dave thinks weighs 250 grabs the tuna, engulfing it so thoroughly that it itself gets hooked. The shark corkscrews downward, and the rod swivels violently to meet the arcing movement as it powers away. We work it to the surface. Another very hefty shark appears. “We have a shark coming to eat a shark,” says Mike. I not sure he’s right about the second shark’s intentions. But I’m not sure he’s wrong. The first shark suddenly pulls so hard that it breaks open the snap connecting the leader, and gets free.
A minute and a half later, we get blasted by another doubleheader of tuna. The first of them gets seriously raked by a shark. Dave decides not to tag it, and calls it a keeper. It’s a hundred-plus pounds, and Dave says it’s about four years old.
Nancy says, “How magical that it would grow so big so fast.” She adds, “Seeing it come from the ocean str
ikes me mostly as tragedy.”
A sizable school of tuna comes up about fifty yards to our right, our port side. Wolfe turns the boat sharply to meet them. The fish that we’re keeping is still on the deck, rapidly drumming its stiff tail. Nancy says, “Look at its rainbow of colors changing as it dies.”
It gasps and throws up a flyingfish and a squid. I’m thinking, I’m glad these fish can’t scream. Dave comes with a sharp pick and delivers a pithing stab to its brain. The fish shudders, then goes silvery still.
Nancy murmurs to me, “Now that it’s dead it looks like a beautiful work of art.”
Wolfe says, “Looks like they’re smiling when they die.”
Nancy turns to him, saying, “Lucky for us.”
The cockpit is a mess of blood, lines, and lures. We need to get organized. The shark’s abrasive skin did a lot of damage to the line it hit. So Dave cuts off the last few yards and reties the leader. This gives me a moment to ice the damaged tuna, hose the deck, and look around and reorient to the birds’ activities. The water is deep clear indigo. The light breezes manage to put whitecaps on the ocean, but there’s no swell to speak of.
There is some big stuff swimming around here. I peel down to a T-shirt before we’re ready to troll again. I started to really sweat on the last one; when that sun gets up, it is strong. Nancy looks around and says, “Man, it’s hot for seven o’clock.”
A large Wahoo latches on. A cousin of tunas, the Wahoo may be the fastest fish in the ocean, and this one rips out line in a way that leaves that reputation vividly reinforced. Alongside—five feet long and about sixty pounds—it shows a silvery belly and dark back, and its flanks are tiger-marked with broad, wavy, dark-green bars alternating against aquamarine. Very striking. This fish is a painted javelin. Its entire body seems an instrument of speed and impact. It appears more barracuda-like than a barracuda—a hypercuda. It’s got lots of teeth, very little patience, and is scary enough that Nancy leaps dancerlike across the cockpit to distance herself even before it comes aboard. Poetry in motion, her verbal reaction is the word holy followed by a noun.
Wolfe calls from the bridge, “Nice Ono,” using its Hawaiian name.
Nancy, registering her new fear of Wahoo with an anglicized name, begins referring to them as Oh No! Nancy’s never seen fish like this before, and she’s awed. “They frighten me,” she says with a nervous laugh. She says these creatures all seem like implements of war: the Wahoo like spears, the tunas like torpedoes, the sharks like heat-seeking missiles. This version of the battle of Midway has been happening every day for a long, long time, and all these creatures live inside the sea’s most sophisticated weaponry.
Dave grunts, “Hefty one” as he leads the Wahoo through the stern door and onto the deck. Meanwhile, a Galapagos Shark that Wolfe says might be the biggest he’s ever seen comes and eats a tuna that Mike had just brought alongside. I estimate its weight at over three hundred pounds. Wolfe estimates four hundred. He’s a professional fisherman—so he’s probably exaggerating. Anyway, it’s big. And now it’s hooked.
It takes us about fifteen minutes to subdue this shark and work it to the boat. This animal is bulky. Dave reaches over with a knife and makes a slight slice in its lip to free the hook. Nancy says seeing Dave trying to get the hook out of this huge tawny shark reminds her of David against Goliath. Upon release the shark turns a parting shot and whacks! the boat with its tail. Dave looks at us with wide eves, saying, “Whew.”
When the next tuna feeds another shark, I start feeling bad about it. Not that I have anything against sharks, obviously, but you want them to catch their own fish for their own moral, psychological, and spiritual well-being. And ours. We decide to go looking elsewhere on the seamount. Of the hundreds of tuna I’ve caught or witnessed in three oceans, before today I can remember only two getting bitten by a shark while on the line. While big sharks have gotten rare in most places, here they remain so abundant we have to get away from them. I like that part.
Itano says we’re not really getting the numbers here anyway. From his perspective, unbelievably, the catching is too slow.
From mine, well, put it this way: there are so many tuna here—so fierce must be the competition among them—that they’ll bite on things they wouldn’t think of touching elsewhere. While in many places people use increasingly light lines so as not to scare increasingly shy and scarce tuna, here the line is highly visible four-hundred-pound-test nylon, tied to two feet of shiny thick wire. The fish don’t seem to have time to think twice about it. If they hesitate to eat something, someone else will beat them to it.
As we’re changing locales, Dave hands us chopsticks and breaks out a big plastic bag full of raw fish in lime juice. We pass it around, poking into it and nodding our approval with mouths full.
We go to the north end of the seamount and stream the lines out again.
Interesting move; the fish here are much bigger. The first two Yellowfins—around a hundred pounds each—crash the lures simultaneously like Olympian synchronized swimmers. One of them, on a hand line, comes off the hook right alongside the boat. The other takes a very extended run, then suddenly stops. Although there’s weight on the line, we all suspect the fish is no longer alive, and we’re right about that. We haul the carcass back. The middle of its body is deeply incised, with huge bites that have left the layered muscles looking like red tree rings of flesh.
Another hundred-pound Yellowfin darts in to snatch a lure and takes a long run. How fast the hunter becomes prey; its struggles summon the sharks.
Wolfe cuts whatever meat he can from the carcasses of both shark-attacked fish. And actually there’s plenty of it left; it won’t go to waste. But I find myself disturbed by the disruption we are causing to the lives of these creatures. The fisherman in me must be going soft. I wonder if that’s a good thing.
Dave says, “We’d better start tagging some numbers here.” These big fish are exciting, but for Dave’s project a whole bunch of thirty-pounders is better. And, obviously, fish that survive are necessary.
Dave complains again about the fishing being slow, because we have to wait fully five minutes before the next fish. To me it seems red-hot, but I use the few minutes to look at birds again. I don’t understand why the albatrosses expend any energy flying here; they don’t look like they’re feeding. Then again, flying costs them about the same as sitting. Perhaps they’re trying to stay on top of the smell of the food until darkness. I’d love to spend the time here it would take to figure that out.
At nine o’clock, not only are the fish still biting every five minutes or so, but they’re all big. The next fish is a Wahoo—Ono; Oh No!—and as Wolfe grabs the snap holding the leader, the fish tears it open with such force that it gashes his hand. The fish escapes, trailing the lure.
By ten o’clock we’ve successfully tagged and released about twenty fish, quite a few in the hundred-pound class. Where I come from, that’s exceptional fishing of a kind we remember but never seem to experience anymore. Dave is unhappy. He says the fish are winning. Quite a few came off the hooks, broke free, or were taken by sharks. Altogether, about half the fish we hooked did not make it as far as the tags and the measuring pad. That’s the bad part.
A ten-foot hammerhead shark appears near the boat, then vanishes.
Our next flurry reinforces the difficulties: Another big Ono caught, followed by two Yellowfin Tuna that pull free. A shark takes the next tuna. Dave Itano is shaking his head. His operations usually go much more smoothly, much more productively for both him and the fish.
We find a new group of birds, start circling the edges of them. It’s the same few species as earlier, including both albatrosses, which, mysteriously, are always active but never seem to get anything to eat. We hook a tuna that gets the leader wrapped around its tail. It’s a plump eighty-pounder, but the wrapped line has cut it in a bad place and it’s bleeding profusely. We’re bummed.
Dave says we’ll keep him. He slices the throat to cut the gills so
the blood will drain from the meat. Now the fish begins to panic and thrash, splattering blood everywhere. Dave calls for the spike and he piths the fish. It spasms and stiffens, and stops.
When an identical fish strikes and makes it to the boat intact and is tagged and released—just the way it’s supposed to go, the way it usually goes for Dave—it seems unusual.
We’ve been at it five hours. Now we’re trolling an area with several dozen spread-out Sooty and Fairy Terns, some shearwaters, four or five Laysan Albatrosses, and a couple of Red-footed Boobies. Suddenly a few dozen birds seem to converge excitedly. Tensed with expectation, we approach.
Nothing happens.
The fish seem to settle down. Lacking sleep, I doze off.
At noon one of the albatrosses happens to fly into our line with its mouth open. This brings it to the water. The line is running through its bill, and we can’t believe it can’t get rid of the line, even though it’s shaking its head vigorously. There’s not enough time for us to react, and if it doesn’t get away from that line, the hook will probably dig in. Then, sure enough, the end of the line comes through its bill, the lure hits the bird, but the hook misses. The bird is unhurt and untangled.
Over the next while we tag two small Yellowfins and keep two small fish too damaged by the hooks to tag. A much larger fish, unseen, gets bitten off by a shark.
The talk is of heading home. Dave feels the trip hasn’t gone well. But he wants to tag one more tuna, to end on an up note. We get a double hookup. We tag one. But during a quick backup maneuver to avoid a shark attack, the second heavy line wraps in a propeller. The shark gets the tuna anyway.
