To some, the big game tournament scene in Kona appears to have become rather large. On a national scale though, tournament fishing on the mainland has gone ballistic.
The richest tournaments in the world are held in Cabo San Lucas Mexico. Over the past few weeks, teams competed for more than $6.4 million.
Nope, that’s not a typo. That’s more than six-point-four million dollars.
But here’s a fun fact: Kona fishermen contributed to teams that won more than $3.6 million of that $6.4 million. That’s just under 57%, and it was taken in by a mere four teams fishing against a total field of 293 teams.
Kona skipper Shane O’Brien led his team on “Wild Hooker” to a record purse of more than $1.75 million on Day 1 of the Bisbee’s Black and Blue tournament. Prior to their fish, Kona’s Chris Choy was in the lead with his team on board “Sneak Attack.” When O’Brien’s team weighed their 466-pound blue, they knocked Choy’s team and their 332-pounder all the way down to a paltry $72,000.
O’Brien kicked off the three tournament stretch by winning the first tourney, run by Marlin Magazine. That payday was worth $483,750, so their total haul was $2,235,212.
Captains Kai Hoover and Kevin Nakamaru teamed up on the deck of “True Grit” to earn $1.296 million on Day 2 of The Bisbee.
To top it all off, fellow Kona boy Captain Randy Parker hauled in some $60,000 in the Marlin Mag tournament, for fish that he did not haul on board. Parker’s purse was earned from tag and release.
Kona’s professional crews are a sought after commodity at those high stakes tourneys, for a number of reasons. Kona crews fish year round, whereas most others fish seasonally, and many only a few weekends a year. The experience Kona crews aggregate is valuable when big stakes are on the line.
People bring their boats from all three US coasts to fish these tourneys. For folks from the Left Coast, the trip is pretty easy. The Gulf and East coast guys have to book it all the way through the Panama Canal and then back up. That is not an undertaking for the novice, or the penny pincher.
Where they come from matters relative to their experience as well. Gulf and East Coast fisheries have more restrictive rules on harvesting marlin than here in Kona, where there are no restrictions. Due in part to these restrictions, the Gulf and East coast fishers have evolved a mantra that taking any marlin is almost sacrilegious. So most crews never have. That’s great for conservation, but in these tournaments, the big money is won by the big fish, and you gotta put em in the boat, take em for a ride and put em on the scale.
Although Kona tournaments are usually about 96% tag and release, throughout the year marlin are harvested for food, as has been done for centuries. The end result is Kona fishermen know how to put marlin in the boat better than most other fishermen around the world.
This is a skill that is highly valued in tourneys because most of the guys across the pond just don’t do it often enough to be really good at it.
So, Kona’s pros get flown all over the world to add advantage to teams fishing for big purses, and nowhere does this hold more true than at the various tournaments of Cabo San Lucas.
Although each is a licensed Captain, only Shane and Randy Parker competed from the bridge as skipper. Hoover, Nakamaru and Choy all went back to work on the deck, the place from whence all great skippers come.
You can count on the fingers of one left foot the number of great skippers who are self taught, or are a captain only because they have enough money to buy a boat and didn’t flunk out of captains school.
As the great Australian wireman Brian Reeves said about one know it all captain, “The only time he spent on the deck was walking across it to get to the bridge ladder.”
Kai Hoover was deckhand for Kevin Nakamaru back when he was 16, 17 and 18 years old. The Mexican skipper of the boat Chris Choy fished from worked under Capt. Randy Parker for a few years, and was trained “Kona style”.
Capt. Shane Obrien is a local Kona boy, son of famous big game fisherman, Capt. Fran O’Brien. Father Fran has wired more marlin over 1,000 pounds than any other fisherman in Hawaii. Aside from Father Fran, Shane learned more than a little from Capt. Kerwin Masunaga, a true master. If you ask Fran to talk about his career, he will likely talk about Shane’s.
See a pattern yet? But wait, there’s more.
Kona crews on deck are valuable because they know how to handle large fish, but how can a Kona captain travel to far flung areas of the world and compete on unfamiliar waters against the “local knowledge” of the skippers there?
It’s that “Kona Style” approach, and it has been handed down by the ancient Hawaiians who had to catch fish, or possibly not eat. The fundamentals are an uncanny ability to read current and understand subtle nuances in speed and direction VS bottom structure. There are a few other variables and when you add them all up, their sum total can produce a fish in one spot, while the guy 300 yards away catches nothing all day. Likewise, the ability to read even the smallest changes in speed and direction can tell an akamai skipper he needs to shift one way or the other by maybe only 300 yards to stay in the fish – while the guys who watched him catch his last one flock to the spot he just evacuated.
Shane fishes here in Kona on board the 43-foot Merritt “Strong Persuader” with owner Allen Stuart, crew Charlie Bowman and Mark Schubert. They are steadily in the money here too, and “Strong Persuader” angler Guy Arrington earned the title of second place angler of The Hawaii Marlin Tournament Series in 2019. “Strong Persuader” took third place boat and crew and third on the list of top money winners in the HMT Series.
So yeah — there is a pattern here, but in fashion similar to a pro golfer, wins are wins and wins are awesome, but if you want to make a living on the tournament circuit, consistency is king.
When asked if the fundamentals of fishing Kona Style helped him catch the fish that won more than two million dollars, Shane replied emphatically, “Absolutely. It works everywhere. It’s vital to figure out how a place “works” and it took us a few years, but we think we understand Cabo pretty well now.”
Ya think? The proof is in the pudding and as was handed down, the humility is in the words.