CHRISTMAS ISLAND : It Was Once a Test Site for the Explosion of Hydrogen Bombs; Today, It’s Possibly the Hottest Fly Fishing Spot in the World

There were not the smallest traces of any human being having ever been here before us; and, indeed, should anyone be so unfortunate as to be accidentally driven upon the island, or left there, it is hard to say that he could be able to prolong existance. There is indeed abundance of birds and fish; but no visible means of allaying thirst. --Capt. James Cook, Jan. 2, 1778

Capt. James Cook wrote the above in his journal aboard the 462-ton Resolution, as he sailed away from Christmas Island on Jan. 2, 1778. Nine days earlier, on Christmas eve, he had discovered the 30-mile-long coral atoll, and named it. Eighteen days later, sailing northward, he discovered Hawaii.

Cook wrote a lot about Christmas Island, none of it favorable. It is clear today, however, that the great 18th-Century mariner, gifted with “soaring genius,” according to one biographer, wouldn’t have known a great fly fishing destination if he’d seen one. Because he did, and he didn’t.

On a warm, windy afternoon recently, 208 years after Cook found the island, fly fisherman Lani Waller, about an hour after jumping off a chartered plane from Honolulu, waded for the first time into bonefish-rich waters on a coral flat at the southern end of Christmas Island.

He was transfixed with what he saw. In front of him, in water no deeper than 10 inches, were bonefish, some of them two feet long. In the clear water, they appeared like translucent, slightly green torpedoes, gliding slowly through the shallows. Some could be seen by their tails sticking out of the water, as they plowed up sandy areas looking for small crustaceans.

“My God, look at that,” Waller said, gesturing to the bonefish. “You can read about a sight like this, like I have for several years, but unless you see it you can’t imagine what it’s really like. Just what I see here in front of us tells me why this island is the hottest fly fishing destination in the world today.

“Look at all those fish . . . it’s like no one has ever fished here before.”

Suddenly, Waller tied on a needlefish imitation fly, and flicked over the clear water, toward a bonefish about 25 feet away. The fish inspected the fly briefly . . . and passed.

“Uh-oh, that shouldn’t happen,” Waller said. “If that happens one more time, I’ll try something else.”

It did, and he did. He put on a Crazy Charlie, a slender, delicate pattern developed by bonefish fishermen in the Bahamas.

Waller flicked it at a fish and . . . hookup.

“That’s it, that’s the one,” Waller said, as the 18-inch bonefish raced through the shallows at amazing speed, toward the edge of the coral flat, and the safety of deeper, blue water. The bonefish took about 50 yards of Waller’s line, but he slowly retrieved and in five minutes had the struggling, white-bellied fish at his feet. He carefully plucked the barbless hook from the fish’s lip, released it, and the fish zipped away, to deep water.

Walking steadily ahead, with the wind at his back, Waller caught another . . . and another . . . and another.

“This is the place,” he said, in wonderment. “It’s the ultimate. I mean, how can fly fishing get any better than this? We have already seen more bonefish in 30 minutes than I have seen in entire days in the Bahamas, which is supposed to have great bonefishing.”

Christmas Island: The largest of 33 coral atolls in the Republic of Kiribati, an independent nation since 1979. Location: 2,200 miles due south of Honolulu, 119 miles above the Equator. Size: The Republic of Kiribati is twice the size of Western Europe, but the total land area of all 33 islands is smaller than El Paso. Population: About 60,000, 3,000 on Christmas Island. Language: Kiribati. Principal cities: London, Paris, Poland, Banana. Size of Christmas Island: Roughly 30x15 miles, with a 90-mile coastline. Elevation: Five feet. Currency: Australian dollar. Air service: One charter flight per week from Honolulu. Recent history: Great Britain used Christmas Island as a test site for the explosion of 18 hydrogen bombs between 1956 and 1962. Principal industries: Copra production, small commercial fishing operation and, now, fly fishing.

Britons and Americans stationed at Christmas Island during the 1956-62 nuclear testing period are believed to have been the first to discover that the island’s coral flats, inside the main lagoon, were loaded with bonefish, one of the most revered species in fly fishing. Today, groups of up to 35 fly fishermen leave Honolulu on Wednesday morning’s chartered flight to Christmas Island, where they fish the island’s flats all day long for six days and eat and sleep at the island’s only hotel, the Captain Cook Hotel.

The cost, including air fare from Honolulu: $1,395.

A visit to Christmas Island is a journey to a unique marine environment, a tiny place--a flyspeck on the Pacific--where the world seems painted in variations of brilliant blue, where fast-moving clouds that seem only a hundred feet or so above the coconut palms, separate blue sky and blue water.

Stand on a coral flat, inside Christmas Island’s main lagoon, on a windy day on an outgoing tide. Looking down, with your back to the wind, the water rushes away quickly, toward a blue-green horizon of water, seemingly to the edge of time.

Recently, a group of 11 fly fishermen from such widespread points as New York, Alaska, Iowa, Vermont, Colorado and California visited the island that one of them, Waller, calls “the hottest fly fishing destination in the world today.”

Here’s how it went:

DAY ONE--Like little torpedoes, the long, slender fish cruised slowly through clear, shallow water. Waller, less than two hours after he’d landed at the airport, had already caught and released a dozen bonefish. With his first-day guide, Diarra, watching, he put a fly with an expert cast about two feet in front of the nose of a bonefish. But almost before it could react, another bonefish from the right side appeared suddenly, moving with a great burst of speed and caught the fly in its mouth with great impact.

“Wow, where did he come from?” Waller yelled, palming his shrieking reel. The fish raced to deep water, stripping 60 or 70 yards of line off the reel.

“All the others so far seemed to hit the fly kind of lightly, but this guy is the first one to really whack it, like bonefish I’ve caught in Florida and the Bahamas.”

Waller released the bonefish that had come from nowhere, and continued to marvel at the conditions.

“The really great thing about this is, in addition to the abundance of the fish, is that they aren’t spooky, either. I mean, look, we’re getting to within 20 to 25 feet with no trouble.”

A couple of hours went by so quickly, that Waller groaned when Dairra said it was time to climb in the little pickup truck and head back to the hotel, for dinner. Reluctantly, Waller dismantled his fly rod and began walking back to the truck, worried that somehow the fishing would never be this good again.

But it would be.

DAY TWO--Tom McCullough of Arlington, Vt., pondered his situation and laughed.

“It just hit me that two days ago I was standing in snow in Vermont, and here I am in the middle of a lagoon on a coral atoll in the Central Pacific,” McCullough said.

McCullough’s guide for the day was a gentleman the University of Hawaii football staff overlooked. Big Eddie Corrie goes 6-foot-4 and 240 pounds and probably knows more about catching bonefish with a fly rod than anyone on the island, including the guests. He’d just tossed out an anchor on the edge of a coral flat in the middle of the main lagoon. The ride from London on a covered skiff (called “punts”) had been windy, splashy and wet.

As the fishermen climbed out of the punt and into the one-foot-deep water, Eddie’s big voice boomed: “OK, gentlemen, this is the place. This flat has bonefish 7 to 12 pounds.”

McCullough looked around. The flat was about one mile in diameter, and the depth was about one foot, everywhere. He picked up a handful of a sandy mud from the bottom and examined it, in his hand. Tiny crabs crawled out of the mud.

“OK, now we know what the bonefish are looking for,” he said, selecting a Crazy Charlie fly. The Crazy Charlie is a simple pattern--a lightly wrapped hook shank, with two pairs of Dacron line at the end, and glued-on eyes made from the beads found on the metal chains that hang from some overhead lights and lamps. It would prove to be the most productive fly of the trip.

McCullough quickly picked up several bonefish, then saw a bloated, spiny pufferfish slowly swim by. He looked for Big Eddie, who was about 50 yards away.

McCullough : “Hey, Eddie--are there any poisonous fish out here?”

Eddie: “Only the pufferfish.”

McCullough: “How poisonous are they, Eddie?”

Eddie: “In three minutes, you die.”

McCullough: “Hey, wait a second Eddie . . . “

Eddie, breaking up, explained that a pufferfish fatality can occur only by consuming a pufferfish liver. Nevertheless, McCullough, for the rest of the trip, gave puffers a wide berth.

Bonefishing on Christmas is strictly catch-and-release fishing. It’s illegal, in fact, for guests to kill one. Word is they’re not much good to eat anyhow, for the reason implied by their name. Locals can kill the fish, however, and at the lunch break in the punt, Eddie was explaining what he was going to do with the four that were laid out on the punt’s deck.

“I cut them up for bait, and use my 80-pound-test outfit to catch giant trevally,” he said. “I can feed my family for a couple of weeks with a 50-pound trevally.”

After lunch, and after he’d begun wading the flat again, McCullough was bewildered by the abundance of bonefish. He studied a group of about five, about 75 feet in front of him, swirling around on the bottom, perhaps uprooting some small crabs. Then, turning around, he observed that several bonefish were following him, no doubt discovering that his footsteps were kicking up food.

In late afternoon, while Big Eddie waited for the fishermen to return to the punt for the ride back to London, he saw a long, dark shadow cruise by, about 100 feet to one side of the boat. It was an exceptionally big bonefish. He grabbed his fly rod, strode quickly to where they had last seen the fish, and on his first cast beyond that point, connected with the biggest fish seen yet.

The fish made two long, ferocious runs before Eddie reeled it in and released it. The fish was easily eight pounds.

DAY THREE--Joy Hilliard, from Englewood, Colo., laced up her watertight reef boots, picked up her fly rod and walked from the pickup truck over a shell-covered beach to the edge of the biggest coral flat anyone would see on the island.

It looked as if it stretched to the end of the world. It was no more than eight inches deep, yet it extended about three miles into the main lagoon, with only a sliver of blue water marking the flat’s end. She walked ahead for perhaps a quarter of a mile before spotting any bonefish.

“Oh, they’re pretty spooky,” she said, watching two dart away quickly when her fly landed on the water, a few feet away. “We haven’t seen any this spooky.”

Hilliard, whose father taught her to fly fish long ago, in eastern Pennsylvania, has fly fished some of the most well known waters in Scandinavia, Iceland and Alaska. But this was her third trip to Christmas Island.

“There just isn’t a place like this, anywhere,” she said. “There are just so many bonefish here, you can literally catch them all day long. It’s really unique.”

Hilliard was now walking over a portion of the flat covered with soft mud, and she sank to her knees in a couple of spots. Only half-seriously, she wondered aloud if snowshoes might be recommended gear for Christmas Island.

She walked another half-mile. And still the flat stretched almost to the horizon. Suddenly, bonefish were everywhere, in water shallow even by Christmas Island standards--eight inches. When a bonefish changed direction or accelerated, its dorsal fin rippled the water. Here, the fish eagerly assaulted her presentations of her Crazy Charlie. She experienced about an hour of brisk fishing, before the bonefish began riding the outgoing tide to deeper water.

Later that day, at dinner (sweet and sour wahoo), John Norris of La Jolla was describing the bonefish that ate Pittsburgh.

“It was a monster, on a flat near Poland. That thing was just cruising by, very slowly. It was terribly frustrating, because I made 6 or 7 casts at him and he didn’t even seem to be looking at the fly. Too small, probably. He was this big around. I know it was a bonefish, because I was 15 feet away, looking right at him.”

On the subject of large bonefish, conversations with the guides indicate Christmas Island is the place for world record-seeking saltwater fly fishermen. The largest bonefish listed in the IGFA record book for spinning gear is 17 pounds and the fly rod all-tackle record is 15 pounds.

Said Big Eddie: “I saw a bonefish caught accidentally in a net here that we weighed once. It was 23 pounds.”

Then, Eddie fired the imaginations of everyone at dinner with tales of flats at other islands, where bonefish abundance exceeds even that of Christmas Island.

“There is a small island called Carton Island, about a thousand miles from here, with wonderful bonefish and trevally fishing. It’s a smaller island than Christmas, and only 18 or 20 people live there. But there are many more bonefish than here.

“But best of all is Fanning Island, about 185 miles north. Fanning also has many more bonefish than Christmas. It is also more lush than Christmas, with a higher elevation. They have five or six times as much rain as we do. The bonefishing is excellent, and the fish are not spooky because they never see people. We hear reports our government is planning to develop tourism there.”

DAY FOUR--A day off from fishing, for a tour of Christmas Island. Big Eddie talked about rapid changes for the people of the island.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, when everyone on the island ate the juice from the coconut tree, fish, coconuts and a little rice that would come in occasionally from Tarawa (the capital of Kiribati), we lived to be 80 or 90. Now, our diet is different and we’re dying at 50 and 60. We never used to worry about anything. Now we worry. I worry about the future of tourism here, and my job. I worry about things like how will I ever get enough money to send my oldest boy to Tarawa, to school.”

One reason why Eddie worries about tourism’s future is because of a move the Kiribati government recently made to bolster the small country’s treasury. It signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal--equal to one fourth of the annual Kiribati budget--with the Soviet Union. It gives 16 Soviet commercial fishing boats unlimited access to Kiribati waters, most of which are virtually unexplored and untapped sportfishing waters.

Big Eddie said he wasn’t aware of any health ramifications from the British-U.S. nuclear tests from 1956-62. The test weapons were detonated in the atmosphere, about 30 miles south of the island. Everyone on the island was put on boats and taken to sea, about 30 miles north of the island.

The Captain Cook Hotel manager, Tekiera Mwemwenikeaki, driving two visitors around the island, stopped at a London processing plant for copra. Tens of thousands of coconut husks, cut in half, lay on raised decks, drying in the sun.

“We sell the raw material for copra to Tonga and the Tongans convert it into many products, like margarine and copra oil,” Tekiera said.

On a beach near London, on the western shore of the main lagoon, he showed the visitors several outrigger canoes, made the old-fashioned way, with joints tied together with line made of local materials. Nearby, also on the beach, was a piggery, where pork was raised for the hotel and local consumption.

In a clearing by a coconut palm forest, he showed several acres of abandoned, rusted vehicles left over from the nuclear testing period. Everything from U.S. Jeeps to British trucks and cranes were parked, in advanced stages of rust.

In London, one-story thatch and metal-roofed buildings lay beneath wind-blown coconut palms. Tekiera stopped by the tiny, wooden post office so his guests could buy stamps. For off hours, the sign over a slot outside the front door read: “Overseas.” He pointed to the island’s jail, another wooden building with a high, barbed wire fence in the back.

Tekiera was asked about Christmas Island’s crime rate. Islanders have a delightful way of making a point in the shortest sentences possible. He replied:

“Sometimes someone gets drunk and starts a fight. That’s about it.”

Earlier, Big Eddie had been asked what had become of the Republic of Kiribati national airline, Air Tungaru. His face grew thoughtful, as if he was groping for the right words. Then he said: “It went bust and they sold all the airplanes.”

Later, a trip via punt to Bird Island, one of the island’s major marine bird rookeries. Christmas Island is a bird watcher’s dream. Cook and other early visitors often wrote of the island’s “millions” of birds. Cook, in fact, began seeing the island’s birds 200 miles before he found the island.

Visiting Bird Island is like walking on glass. Eggs are everywhere, lying unprotected on the ground. Seemingly, every bush, every clump of grass, every depression in the soft sand contains an egg. Some are even found in the crotch of heliotrope tree limbs. White terns, boobies, great and lesser frigates don’t seem the least big protective or territorial, and fly directly into your face, curiously staring. For fly fishermen, they appear out of thin air when a hook fish breaks the surface of the water the first time.

The birds of Christmas are recovering from a second disaster in the last 30 years. The first were the four years of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, which didn’t kill them outright, but blinded them with the intense light flashes. Unable to find food, they starved.

Slowly, populations returned to previous levels. Then, several years ago, a natural disaster: El Nino. With a sudden change in ocean temperatures, the food chain was altered and birds left the island to find food, often leaving unhatched eggs. A slow recovery is under way.

Dr. Ralph Schreiber, curator of birds for the L.A. County Museum of Natural History, has made 19 trips to Christmas Island for bird study projects.

“The 18 species of marine birds who nest on the island are all making a slow recovery from the effects of El Nino,” he said. “But none of them are anywhere near their normal abundance. Three species are back up to about 70% of normal and the other 15 are as low as 15% of pre-El Nino numbers.”

DAY FIVE--A memorable day at Chris Flat.

Lani Waller and Dan Ostermann of Spirit Lake, Iowa., arrive at the departure point to reach Chris Flat. However, to reach it, Waller and Ostermann had to cross a tidal channel leading to a peninsula. On the other side of the peninsula was Chris Flat, one of the largest flats on the island.

Carefully, they walked across the tidal channel, with water rushing out on the outgoing tide. The water was at mid-thigh depth.

When they crossed the peninsula, Chris Flat spread out before them endlessly. Ostermann went to the left, Waller to the right. Intermittently on the flat, deep-water holes, some of them a quarter-mile in circumference, were present. Waller, walking near the edges of holes, caught numerous bonefish.

Here Waller and Ostermann experienced a marine environment so rich with life, it was at times difficult to concentrate on bonefish. Schools of various species of trevally swim by, their long dorsal fins plainly visible, cutting the surface of the water. Two three-foot-long eels swim by, poking their heads in crab holes, on the bottom. Chris Flat also turned out to be a nursery for black-tip reef sharks. Dozens of them, about 18 inches long, swam by. Puffers, jellyfish and crabs were seen. One brightly colored tropical fish had brilliant red-white circles on its back, as if Mother Nature had provided predators from above with a target.

After walking roughly west for six hours, Waller pointed to Ostermann, a distant dot on the horizon.

“Dan gets the award for the No. 1 fanatic of the trip,” he said. “He’s been over there all day, back and forth on the edge of a hole. He must be catching a lot of fish. He didn’t even go back to the truck for his lunch.”

Waller wasn’t doing badly, either. The location was different each day, but the results were the same--almost a monotony of fishing excellence. Waller said he’d averaged between 10 and 15 bonefish an hour, all day.

On the ride back to the hotel, in late afternoon, Waller talked about recommended gear for a week of fly fishing at Christmas Island.

“I’m OK gear-wise, but the one thing I don’t have I really need is lens-cleaning paper for my glasses and camera,” he said. “The salt air is murder on glass.

“Basically, a fly fisherman should be certain he can cast in windy conditions--it’s just something you have to put up with here. I started with eight-pound-test tippets here, but went up to 15 after I broke a couple off on coral. A lot of the fish you hook will try to run over the edge, go deep, and your line will hit the coral.

“I’d recommend bringing three dozen leaders--you really lose a lot. The best fly seems to be the Crazy Charlie, but you know what? I think anything would work. Some of us have caught fish this trip with a Dr. Barebones, too. Whatever you use, bring four or five dozen. There should be just enough weight on the fly to cause it to sink fast, because most of what bonefish eat is on the bottom.

“You need 150 to 200 yards of backing on the reel. The bonefish don’t run that far, but a big trevally will, and you’ll catch them, too.

“The only other critical gear item I can think of is good waterproof footgear. I used Japanese tabis here, but they do leak a little. You need something to keep little chunks of coral out of your boots. High top wading shoes with gaiters would probably work.”

DAY SIX--A deep sea fishing day.

For fishermen who want to break up their fly fishing week with a day of deep sea fishing, welcome aboard the 38-foot Noumake, a sportfisher made in Fremantle, Australia. The skipper: Capt. Peter Edwards, a native of Tarawa. Armed with big game trolling gear, he was taking John Norris on a hunt for wahoo.

Edwards steered the Noumake from its London mooring, threading it carefully over the ominous, jagged chunks of coral clearly visible rising from the lagoon’s bottom. He took it into a natural pathway through the coral forest near the lagoon entrance, first found 208 years ago by a 22-year-old lieutenant serving under Cook, William Bligh.

“We’ll go to ‘Ono Alley,’ ” Edwards said. Ono is a Hawaiian word for wahoo. He took the Noumake (means garfish in Kiribati) to blue water less than a mile off the white beaches (which house several wrecked sailboats) on Christmas Island’s southwest shore. There, the trolling lures went out.

“We’ve gotten a half-dozen wahoo in an afternoon here,” he said. “There are wahoo, yellowfin tuna and some black marlin all the way around the island, but the water on the east side is almost always too rough. Here, we’re protected.”

Norris jumped into action when one of the reels went off. It was a yellowfin tuna, about 20 pounds. An hour later, the center lure was suddenly buried in a big splash, a split second before the reel screamed. This time, it was a giant trevally, about 50 pounds. Norris kept the strong fish on a tight drag, to keep it from its coral hiding places. Finally, after three hours, a wahoo--about a 50-pounder.

Christmas Island is relatively unexplored territory for deep sea fishermen, and Edwards--who makes his own fiberglass-skirted lures--is eager to show Hawaii-oriented marlin fishermen a new place to find billfish, most likely September-through-November. The Noumake charter fee is $300 per day.

Later, at dinner, Dr. Scott Boley, chief of pediatric surgery at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and Tom McCullough are needling John Norris for a day of fly fishing that was almost disgustingly productive.

McCullough: “We were on an incredible flat. All of us were catching fish, but John’s reel must have gone off 30 times in the first hour. I wanted to walk over to him, grab his rod and throw it into the deep water.”

The following morning was departure day. The charter flight from Honolulu was late. It’s always late, regulars say. At the airport, a group of about 20 more fly fishermen walked off the plane. Seeing the departing group, one yelled: “Hey, how was it?”

Responded one of the departing fishermen: “Remember the best day you ever had in fly fishing, multiply it by about three, and that’s how good this place is.”

“That good, really?” the newcomer said.

“That good, really,” the departing fishermen said.