A lasting legacy: Letters from the Kona community on the impact of Jim Rizzuto
This is a collection of letters from the Kona community that West Hawaii Today received follow the passing of long-time fishing columnist Jim Rizzuto:
Column made my Monday brighter
It is with great sadness that I read of Mr. Rizzuto’s passing.
I have been a homeowner here in Ocean View for many years. I spend about four months a year here. One of the highlights of each week was reading Kona Fishing Chronicles in WHT each Monday.
While I don’t fish, reading Mr. Rizzuto’s articles brought the experience alive for me. His writing style coupled with his humor was something I looked forward to each Monday. I even bought a copy of his articles in book form which I still read. Thank you for making my day a bit brighter for all these years.
May your legacy live on.
Jim Burlington
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Morning calls will be missed
When I was 19, I moved to Kona from Oregon with my parents. They bought a small boat and we enjoyed fishing as a family. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I found myself working the decks of some of the larger charter boats when not working in the family fencing company. In 2009, my parents decided it was time to move on from fencing and I started working the deck full time aboard the Bite Me One with Capt. Kevin Hiney.
When he left that boat, I took over as captain and man, what a ride it has been. My dad works my deck more often than not, and Jim always enjoyed the fact that a father and son were fishing together. Jim always seemed to know when I had a story to share and was always the first one to give me a call the next day. In 2011, I caught my first fish over 900 pounds (as a captain). It was an all day fight and there was a small crowd gathered back at the scales (which had closed at 5 p.m. and it was now after 7 p.m.) to see the big fish. The very first call I got the next day was from Jim when he got the news, wanting to know every last detail about the fight, the lure, the anglers, you name it, and he asked it and I gladly shared.
There was a nice write up in the paper around Jan. 8, 2011, with a picture of the fish. My biggest marlin to date was 921 pounds which I caught with my dad on board as my deckhand.
I recently fished in the Firecracker Open and was lucky enough to catch a nice ahi but the big marlin eluded me that day. When I heard of Jim’s passing on Sunday, my first thoughts were that I was going to miss his morning call the next day to find out every last detail about the fight, the lure and the anglers.
Aloha, Jim!
Chad Contessa
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Remembering our fish dinner
My heart is saddened by the passing of Jim Rizzuto.
It can’t be true, I said to myself. My then husband, Bernd “Burns” Bree and I met Jim and Shirley in the year 1966, in Waimea. Talks of fishing brought Burns and Jim close to each other. Immediately, they invited us to their home for delightful fish dinner, and more talks of fishing.
Burns and Jim are now in “Fisherman’s Heaven,” still laughing about the big one that got away.
You’ll be missed by many, Jim.
Diana Bree
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Rizzuto inspired me
I was totally shocked when I heard of Jim Rizzuto dying. What a loss to the world of fishing and our community, and to the West Hawaii paper.
We’ll never have another Jim Rizutto telling us how they “reeled ‘em in.” We’ll miss him greatly.
I’d see him at the garage sales trolling for new lures, looking for classic rods and reels. So into his kuleana. He lived his dream of fishing and writing about it.
That’s what inspired me.
He complimented my writing once and it vaulted me forward, gave me more confidence. A very gracious person.
Aloha nui loa, Jim
Dennis Gregory
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It all adds up
Jim Rizzuto was one of my most important mentors.
I believed 40 years ago that he was the best math teacher on the planet. I still do.
All he asked of his classroom students: pay attention, and do not disrespect the process. It was a fair bargain. Decades after graduation, and friends now, we were fishing one day on the Rizzuto Maru, trolling deep.
As Jim slipped one of his custom, handcast lures into the water and began counting silently, I asked if he was measuring how much line he was unspooling. No, he said. And then he explained how an angler could determine, very accurately, the depth of a trolled lure and its distance from the stern, just by calculating the sine and cosine ratios of the angle of the fishing line from the rod tip to both the boiling wake straight down, and to the distant water entrance where the monofilament disappeared.
Ditto the lesson on added drag that piles up on a line when the boat turns to keep pace with an ono or ahi on the run, and the line rips through the water, following in an arc, and the arc increases the drag by X amount, threatening to break the thin mono connecting fish to boat.
And all this while the reel is singing as line snaps out over the stern. And Jim Rizzuto figures out all these factors in nano seconds. Later, when a powerful strike bent one of the heavy trolling rods, and the reel sang again — the Ferrari sound of big game fishing off the Kona coast — Jim Rizzuto was in his element, giving chase, chronicling this marvelous world for the rest of us.
Just as his classroom was an adventure in abstract learning, so, too, on the water, fishing with this harmonica-playing force of nature was a real-life adventure. I see now how he bridged deep-sea fishing and abstract math. They have a shared calculus — in both, it is the thrill of the chase that transcends mere numbers. There was so much to learn from him. On the water, on land, to those of us who were his students, Mr. Rizzuto was Master and Commander.
He is deeply missed and I can only wish, “May you find a fair wind and a following sea on your last voyage. “
Andrew Perala
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Memories aplenty
When Jim came to HPA in September 1969, I was a faculty member at HPA and arrived three days before Jim did.
At the time, it was a small place and all the faculty members knew each other and would do things together — whether it was golf, tennis or fishing.
I was not very good or knew anything about ocean fishing. I had been raised in France and all I knew was how to catch a trout in a stream. Jim is really the one who introduced me to ocean fishing by inviting me on his little 14-foot boat with one engine.
We would go and troll alongside the Kawaihae coastline to Kohala. He would put out the lines and pretty much show me what to do. We trolled for mahimahi, ono — you know, something to eat. It was such a small boat we were just sitting next to each other for hours.
I remember one time we got into some really violent wind and he told me we were going to turn around. He made the turn and tried to catch the white wave back to Kawaihae. At that point his engine dies. I am, of course, oblivious to what is going on and not until later did I realized we might have been pushed to Tahiti or some other place.
Of course, here is Jim, not particularly nervous and he pulls out the string you tie around the engine. He pulls three or four times and nothing. He is getting a little bit more nervous because we are drifting away, all the while, I’m just sitting there thinking about what a wonderfully beautiful day it was. Finally, Jim put in all of his strength and energy he could muscle and them VROOOM. He started the engine. It was a big sigh of relief.
He was a man of many talents, with a great, strong personality and filled with integrity. However, it was best not to provoke him because then there would be an explosion. He would stand his ground against anybody.
Jim will be remembered as one of our best men. His passing is a big loss for everyone.
From a conversation with Bernard Nogues
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Jim was a rare catch
I first showed up to HPA as a nervous seventh grader from Kona, to discover that my friendly new principal was not only a mathematics genius, but also the man my boating buddies and I had long idolized for his captivating fishing columns in the West Hawaii Today.
His breadth and sincerity allowed Jim Rizzuto to communicate with virtually anybody — which I’m sure solves the mystery about why so many fishing experts were willing to share their hard-earned secrets with him.
Jim was a rare catch!
Kimo Higgins
HPA Upper School English teacher, class of ‘86
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Remembering Kona’s great chronicler
Our great chronicler is gone.
On July 2, during the peak of the tournament season he covered so well, for so long, Jim Rizzuto’s extraordinary wealth of knowledge, and talent as a historian, archivist, diarist, recorder, reporter and narrator, was stilled.
Our loss is immense. Jim Rizzuto had written about fishing in Hawaii since 1964, and for 53 years he chronicled our great game fishery to a worldwide audience. To anglers around the world, Jim’s name became synonymous with fishing in Hawaii.
Our chronicler was also a world-class teacher, and even while he pursued a career, teaching mathematics at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, he was teaching his readers around the world how to catch great fish. Jim was a best-selling math book author before he was a well-published fishing writer and he therefore excelled at everything from explaining the minutiae of lure rigging, to the complexity of battling a big fish on light tackle. He was at his very best when he matched his skill as a math teacher with this expertise as an angler, to explain obscure formulae for determining fish weight, or diminishing reel-spool capacity and consequent drag increase.
Kona would not be as well-known in the world of big game fishing if Jim had not abandoned his East Coast roots and settled in to sleepy Waimea to raise a family and teach mathematics. He was already fascinated with fishing when he moved here, but there was a manifold increase in his addiction, when he met the game fish of Hawaii, and those who pursued them.
And Kona became the beneficiary of his love of the fishery he fell into here, as Jim began to convey stories of the great fish, and great fishermen who plied these waters, and to share their secrets for catching great fish, in the popular magazines of the sport.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jim for what he gave back to the community that embraced him when he moved here over a half century ago. The sport fishing fleet, the industry that supports it, the tourism industry that benefited from Jim’s half a century of largely uncompensated public relations efforts on behalf of game fishing in Kona.
A great voice has been silenced, but we will not soon forget the immense gifts that Jim Rizzuto gave us, for he was truly one of a kind, once in a generation, a scribe with a sense of humor and irony, who never wrote down to his audience, who was fascinated by and truly loved his subject matter, and who gave so much to those of us who fish.
Rick Gaffney
HIBT will miss Rizzuto
All of us with Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament are deeply saddened with the passing of our longtime friend and noted author Jim Rizzuto. In a writing career that spanned six decades, Rizzuto taught generations of fishing enthusiasts through his books and thousands of articles about the ins and outs of fishing in Hawaii.
Much loved for his in-depth knowledge of fishing, he followed the HIBT since its inception in 1959 and been actively involved since the early 1970s when he joined the HIBT press corps. At various times, Jim has served as HIBT press chief, commissioner, governor and pier emcee as well as President of the Pacific Ocean Research Foundation.
Since his first magazine article in a 1964 issue of Salt Water Sportsman, Jim’s work has appeared worldwide in Field and Stream, Marlin, Bluewater, Sportfishing, New Zealand Fishing News and many other international publications. Jim’s Kona fishing column appeared weekly in West Hawaii Today since 1971 and his Fishing Hawaii Style column monthly in Hawaii Fishing News since 1976. His work will be greatly missed.
A hui hou, friend. Until we meet again
Peter Fithian
HIBT founder
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No replacement for Rizzuto
Jim Rizzuto and I were special friends who found each other late in life. We shared a deep passion for fishing of every kind, but Hawaii offshore sport fishing was for both of us the ultimate experience.
Jim was an extremely complicated man with a great gift for teaching, and he was an incredible teacher as thousands will attest. His love for fishing was still his greatest passion.
We approached fishing from different angles and would argue most often about what was more important, science or romance. I always argued for romance, the beauty of the fishing experience, and he argued for the records, the proofs and the logic. We both loved those arguments, because they were both valuable and a part of every one of us. I never convinced him of the error of his ways. I could not imagine a fishing world without lucky hats and lucky lures, and to Jim all that was just silly.
He often told me he was deeply grateful for the extraordinary kindnesses he found within the Kona fishing community and what a gift that had been to him. When his wife Shirley suffered from the debilitation of Alzheimer’s disease, he was deeply touched by all of his fishing friends who came to his side, reached out to her and shared in the magnificent struggle that brought out Jim’s best nature and highest qualities.
He was a classic sports writer, weaving the themes and lining up the players, hauling in snippets of his endless archive, chronicling the weeks, months and seasons as we headed to the ocean time and time again and returned flush with success or bone raw with defeat and self-recrimination. His stories were kind, and his praise was genuine.
Can Jim Rizzuto be replaced? I do not think he can. We are likely to look back on these golden years of hometown reportage and how-to instruction as one of the most wonderful gifts we never truly appreciated.
Jim Rizzuto has returned home and left so many adrift on our sunlit sea, without him to turn to Monday morning, to learn from each month in Hawaii Fishing News or to freshen our knowledge with one of his great magazine pieces for the international audience.
Please scatter Waimea flowers on our sapphire blue sea, where dreams are chased and stories made sweet for our ears. Say prayers, and let them be prayers of thanks for having this good man in our lives.
Bill Jardine
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Rizzuto put Kona fishing on the map
Getting started in the charter fishing industry was not easy in 1984, but having fished commercially for six years, I felt qualified to tackle most anything.
One slow winter afternoon we hooked a decent marlin on live bait and during the fight another boat circled closer to observe. The closer they got the quicker I wanted this over (and to look good). Every time I grabbed the leader, the fish would greyhound away from the boat, the jumps sending water everywhere and as the other boat came even closer, I could see that they were filming our situation.
We eventually caught the fish and I thought that would be the end of it. No way this was passing easily. The next morning Capt. Freddie Rice made a point of stopping by the boat to share that not only the entire struggle on the boat was recorded on video, but Jim Rizzuto was also on board to witness the event. The most difficult call of my young career had to be made. After several attempts only to hang-up before it rang, I let the call go through.
The person on the other end answered, “Hi this is Jim Rizzuto – how can I help you?”
After trying to explain who I was, out of the phone came, “congratulations on your fish. That was the large fish for the week at the pier.”
Hmm, something positive and I calmed down a bit as he shared something that was true for the next 32 years of our friendship.
“I’m here to promote every boat/captain in the harbor by sharing positive stories about our fishery.”
There’s an old bumper sticker that reads, “Kona is a drinking town with a fishing problem.” Make no mistake — Honokohau Harbor and our big-game fishery is the reason that Kona was put on the map. Not our weather, expensive hotels, snorkeling and golf courses.
Jim was always in our corner, promoting with written stories and TV programs. Just look around today – most of the positive things about the marine environment have his fingerprints on them.
Chuck Haupert
