Everyone knows that the effects of COVID can be seen everywhere. However, some effects aren’t things most folks would normally think about. For example, there is a new boat in Honokohau, but it’s not supposed to be here now. It’s here because it can’t be “out there” campaigning around the Atlantic, fishing hotspots such as Ascension, Madeira or the Azores islands, as originally scheduled.
Why in the Atlantic? It was built on the east coast, so the owner planned to check out those areas before sending the boat home to Kona.
A famous editor once said “there is no life without irony” and judging by the name of this new boat — SNAFU — irony is alive and well in pandemic. The “Rated G” translation of the acronym SNAFU is: Situation Normal, All Flubbed Up.
How apropos during pandemic.
Some cultures believe that one must be very careful with the names bestowed upon kids and boats, even dogs. The thought goes something like this: if you have a baby on a full moon night and call the kid “Mahina,” you may have to him or her home on full moon nights during teen years.
Likewise, if you live in a college town and your home is on a street with half a dozen sorority houses lining the block, you may want to think twice before you name your new son “Randy.” Launching a new boat in the middle of pandemic with a name like SNAFU, however, is to test this on an entirely new level.
Atlantic islands like Madeira and the Azores have struggled with shutting down tourism, establishing quarantines and ramping up testing just as we have. So you can just imagine the look on the faces of the immigration officer and port captain in Madeira, Portugal when an application for entry arrived for a boat called SNAFU.
“What do you think, Sir?”
Are you kidding me? Things are already more flubbed up than they have ever been in history. No way! Send them to the Azores. Maybe they will let them in.” Nope.
So, SNAFU came home to Kona, where the philosophy of that old Willie Nelson song rings true, “What can you do to me now that you haven’t done to me already?”
In actuality though, SNAFU has been a pretty good kid so far. The first week Capt. Bryan Toney got to take owner Jason Long out fishing, they did pretty well. The team went three for four on blue marlin one day, caught a black marlin (rare in Kona) that they called 350 pounds, had a couple more one fish days and saw lots of other fish too. How they are seeing them though, is pretty interesting. According to Capt. B.T. seeing them this way is great fun, whether you catch them or not.
Being a child of 2020, SNAFU is surrounded by technology. On the bridge Captain B.T. has a new gadget to play with, and like many folks with high tech devices, he says he is glued to it. But then again, we are talking about a guy who has enough social media followers to be a Kardashian.
“No more chicken for me! I love this thing. I’m always messing with it.” The “chicken” he lost is his head dropping like a chicken pecking when he used to fall asleep from boredom. This “thing” he’s messing with is a new Furuno full circle scanning sonar, and he’s watching marlin swim around under the sea with it. That would keep anybody interested!
A full circle scanning sonar sends out ultra sonic waves in a 360 degree arc around the boat through a transducer in the bottom of the boat. In James Bond fashion, the transducer is kept inside the hull when the boat is going fast, and then lowered into the ocean — through a water tight fitting in the bottom — when SNAFU is in the fishing zone. What next? Drop away machine gun ports?
According to the Furuno website, “Sonar is a high performance horizontal Fish Finder that can search around the boat in all directions. A conventional Fish Finder can only search vertically below the boat while a Sonar can search in all directions including sideways.”
B.T. says that his new tool is a game changer, and it’s not just because it helps him catch fish. “I see lots of fish that don’t bite and I can follow them around and watch how they move in relation to the ledge and direction of the current. I’ve followed a couple of nice ones for a pretty long time. Some are just barely swimming along and some were booking it at about seven knots. I only stop following if it won’t bite or if we have to head home.”
“Never leave fish to find fish” is the old adage that comes into play here. If a marlin bites but it gets away, you usually stay in that area for a while, hoping there is another. This gadget sheds some light on the reality of just what is going on down in the deep, a place every captain tries to visualize when a fish gets away. It is easy to see how a high tech tool like this can be addicting.
Back in the 80’s, way before technology took over every aspect of life, Capt. Tomo Rogers used to have a plaque mounted on the bridge of his very low tech boat Kona Seafari. The plaque read, “A collision at sea can ruin your entire day.”
Capt. B.T. is young and a pretty switched on guy. If it were an old guy like me driving a boat called SNAFU with an addicting gadget, I’d mount Tomo’s plaque by the wheel and set an egg timer to ring and remind me to quit the screen and look around every five minutes or so. Covid has things flubbed up enough already without a collision at sea.