We are not yet into the election year, but everywhere one looks are polls.
There are the polls about politics, of course, but no one takes them seriously. Did you know that there are serious polls, most appearing on Facebook feeds, asking such questions as, “When does everyone wake up on Christmas morning?” and “What awesome job did you have in your past life?”
A poll on fishing popped up, asking for the top 10 reasons to go fishing, proving that it could be the dumbest poll of all.
Who needs a reason?
Here is their list of answers: contribute to conservation, stress relief, social bonding, support fisheries management, health benefits, recreation, self fulfillment, boost to the economy, fish for food, and the thrill.
This list was released by the State of Virginia, so they can be excused for missing basic fundamentals of fishing in the Pacific Islands.
For example, back in the late 1980s, while on a gig for the FAO-UN in the remote Solomon Islands, I wandered down to the lagoon to watch the kids catch fish for breakfast, with hand lines.
My job was to write a report assessing the potential to integrate sport fishing into the local, tribal, subsistence fishing culture. It sounds simple, but many locals still employed techniques thousands of years old and fished from canoes only seen in the pages of National Geographic. As a Texan via Kona, I had as much a clue on how to do this job as the man in the moon.
An added challenge was that the Solomon Islands are home to between 60 and 70 languages in an archipelago only 800 miles long. That’s a new language every 13.5 miles!
Watching the kids fish, it became clear that I didn’t need to speak any of those languages to understand that they were competing. They were also talking more than a little bit of smack in the process.
When the kid with the biggest fish held it up and pointed at the kid with second biggest fish and laughed, it was an “Ah HAH!” moment. We could have been at any fishing hole around the world.
The “discovery” of competitive fishing by Solomon village kids struck me as strongly as discovering water might have struck the real men on the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin.
Why? For one, the evolution of so many languages in such a small region is often thought to be evidence of extreme distrust between the neighbors. I wasn’t even a neighbor. I was an outsider. I needed an “in”.
Two: Kona has a history of producing some of the most competitive fishermen in the world. Competition could be my “in” with local fishermen.
One of the most famous competitions between great captains went on in Kona during the 70s and 80s. Captain Black Bart Miller and Captain Bobby Brown had a civil friendship around the harbor, but when the lines were tied loose — in their minds — they were the only two boats out fishing.
Their game ends with Bart catching the largest fish, a 1,656-pound blue marlin. However, it was disallowed as a world record due to rule infractions. Bobby landed a 1,376-pound blue, caught within the regulations, and holds the World Record to this day.
Miller was the first to catch more than 100 blue marlin in one calendar year. Brown upstaged him with 118 blues the next year. Since then, these have been the two “magic marks” in big game fishing — 100 or more blue marlin in a year and, catching a fish that will beat the 1,376-pound record — legally.
As with Miller’s fish, a few fish have been weighed larger than Brown’s record, but none to the strict regulations required to qualify as the world record.
Captain Marlin Parker of “Marlin Magic” has one of those fish, a 1,400-pound blue, but it’s not the record either. Parker and crew also won a cumulative total of more than $500,000 in the 2019 Hawaii Marlin Tournament Series, adding to that a scaled a “grander” that weighed 1,035.5 pounds. His third such fish over 1,000 pounds.
Going into the final days of 2019, “Marlin Magic” posts 105 blue marlin on their fish logs. Obviously, he’s competitive, but after going out almost every day for 50 years, there is more to the story. He just loves to go fishing.
Chuck Wigzell has a catch log that tells him he is close to 200 blue marlin on the year, but he doesn’t trust his notes, so you won’t hear it from him. He has two charter boats offered at different price points. When one is idle, the other is usually busy. This keeps him out on the water almost every day. This is the way to catch more fish, but it mainly keeps him out where he wants to be: fishing. With a few days left in 2019, he could be the first in Kona to ever crack 200 blue marlin in a year, setting a new “magic mark”, but you’ll have to ask him to find out.
Captain Brett Fay on “Humdinger” takes a similar approach. If there was a prize for the most charters a year, he and Chuck would be competitors, but that’s just no “it.” Brett figures he’s well over the 100 blue marlin mark on the year, but is also reticent to cite a specific number. “I write ‘em down and report ‘em to the State each month, and then get up and go fishing again. I don’t have time to look back and add the totals up.”
When you get up at 4 a.m. every morning, spend all day in the hot sun and get home in the dark, adding tasks to a list that never gets shorter gets sidelined.
Bobby Brown mentioned that in the “old days” he was not fishing to compete against everyone on the water. It was just something that he did with Bart. He’s still fishing too, mostly very light tackle, so it’s not the competition that keeps him going either.
Everyone seems to agree that “Just Going” fishing should be No. 1 on that list from Virginia.
In the end, I was not exactly wrong about competition being my “in” with the Solomon islanders. It showed they fished for fun and food.
“Just Going” is what worked better out there. “Just Going” worked for the Apollo guys too. No, they didn’t find water on the moon. They found a lot more.
So in 2020, Just Go….what you find is often better than what you looked for anyway.