There Is More Than Sun and Beaches on Hawaii’s Big Island, Making It Easy to Get Hooked on Kona’s Coast : BIG MARLIN IS THE LURE

About 10 years ago, near the halfway point on the west coast of the big island of Hawaii, engineers detonated 50 tons of dynamite to blast a small-boat harbor out of an ancient lava flow.

It’s called Honokohau (Ho-no-ko-how) Harbor, and it doesn’t look like much. Nobody ever landscaped the place, and somebody forgot to put in stairs. In some areas, to reach the boats, you have to leap off a rock wall.

No matter. Welcome to the big-game fishing capital of the United States.

Before Honokohau, pioneering marlin-fishing skippers anchored 10 miles down the road, in the natural harbor at Kailua-Kona, where the boats weren’t fully protected from storms blowing in from the southwest.

One recent morning, Phil Parker, in his second-story office at Honokohau Harbor, looked out the window at the Kona Coast marlin-fishing charter boat fleet. About 60 boats were tied up against the spectacular backdrop of Mauna Kea, the world’s highest mountain, measured from the ocean floor.

“Everything you see out there, including the harbor, can be traced to Henry Chee,” he said. “Henry Chee originated marlin fishing on the Kona Coast. He developed it, he pioneered it, he taught everyone how to catch those big blues.

“There are a lot of young skippers here today using techniques that they don’t even know Henry started. It’s no exaggeration to call Henry Chee our Babe Ruth.”

Phil Parker, 65, who runs a booking office for Kona marlin fishing trips, was talking about the good old days. From 1954 to 1964, he was a charter skipper in Kona, and his brother George has been a Kona marlin skipper since 1945. George, at 74, is the oldest fishing guide in Hawaii.

“In the old days, when I started running a boat here in 1954, there were four boats,” Phil Parker said. “Now look out there. There are something like 54 to 60 now. I can’t keep track of them. Looking back, it seems like there were more fish then. But then, we lost a lot of marlin. Our gear wasn’t as good as it is today.”

Today, marlin fishermen arrive daily, check into any of a number of resort hotels perched on black hunks of jagged lava, and book $450-a-day fishing outings with any of 50 or 60 full-time Kona area skippers.

But once, it was only the Kona Inn, and only Henry Chee.

Butch Chee was showing a reporter a scrapbook of photographs, letters and newspaper clippings about his father’s long career as a marlin skipper, and talked of 1965, the year his father died.

“He had a stroke one day while gaffing a marlin, and died (at 55) three days later,” he said.

“One of the last things he told my mother was: ‘Don’t let Butch fish for a living. Encourage him to go to college, develop a career and fish for fun.’ ”

Butch, it turns out, executed an artful compromise. He did go to college, to BYU Hawaii, and became an elementary school teacher. Today, at 35, he teaches fourth graders during the week and takes people marlin fishing on weekends, on his 23-foot Mako sportfisher.

In Kona, you don’t need a big boat. Most of the trolling activity is within a mile or two of the shoreline. Several years ago, someone on a 19-foot boat caught a blue that weighed more than 1,000 pounds.

Butch relishes telling new acquaintances the story of Henry Chee’s homing pigeons.

“When Dad started out here, in the late 1930s, there was no such thing as radios on boats,” he said. “So he was in partnership on his first boat with a man named Charlie Findlayson, who owned a bunch of pigeons. So if someone fishing with Dad caught a marlin, he’d write a note on a tiny piece of paper, put it in a capsule on the pigeon’s leg, and release it.

“The pigeon would fly back to Kona, through Mrs. Findlayson’s kitchen window. She’d spread the word around town. If it was a big fish Henry would be bringing in, she’d arrange for the newspaper photographer to be there, at the pier.”

Henry Chee was not from a fishing family, but he got hooked by the sound of a screaming reel.

“Dad’s father was a Hilo banana farmer,” Butch said. “Neither one had ever been in a boat, until the day in 1935 that Dad went fishing with someone here. He went out with Findlayson one afternoon, and they caught a marlin. Dad told me the sound of that very first screaming reel stayed with him all those years.

“Findlayson was one of the original skippers in Kona, and he and Dad went into partnership on a boat called the Malia in 1936.

“He’d become quite well known as a good fisherman by the time World War II started, when he went to work for the Navy, running tugboats at Pearl Harbor.

“He returned after the war. Dad had to work a lot harder in the old days, when skippers had to dry out the line every night, to prevent rot. Dad would wrap it a few times around his back and roll his shoulders, trying to break it. If it broke, he’d throw it all out and load up with new line.

“He started using the first plastic marlin lures in Hawaii in the 1950s. And he made them himself.

“In 1955, when everyone but Dad was using bait, there were 175 marlin caught. Dad caught 63 of them, all on plastic lures.”

By the 1950s, Henry Chee’s fame had spread to the mainland. Pictures of celebrities standing next to huge blues caught in Hawaii began to appear in newspapers and magazines. He was the guide for Henry Fonda, Errol Flynn, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Arthur Godfrey, Roy Rogers, Gordon McRae, Hal Wallis and Walter Lantz.

Chee apparently wasn’t much for conversation. Recalled his son: “When I was learning how to fish, I’d ask Dad a question and he’d say: ‘Just watch what I do, then you do it.’ ”

Jeff Fay backed his 36-foot sportfisher, Humdinger, out of its dock in Honokohau Harbor. It was 7 a.m., windless and clear. On the west slopes of Mauna Kea, lights from homes above Kailua-Kona twinkled in dawn shadows.

Fay, 38, is in a competitive business. He’s a Kona marlin fishing skipper, and considered by some to be among the area’s best. He has hunted billfish at the one fishing resort probably even better known than Kona for giant marlin, Cairns, Australia.

He steered the boat out of the harbor, joining about 15 others that had been chartered for the day. He turned to the north, over a flat sea. Topside, at the wheel, he talked about a number that bedevils marlin fishermen--a number to which all who have fished the seas for billfish aspire.

The number is 1,000. As in pounds. A grander.

“A lot of first-timers come over here expecting to have a good shot at a grander, but the odds just aren’t there,” Fay said. “I’ve fished here more or less full time for 10 years and I’ve never had a grander caught on this boat. I’ve had three over 900, but never a grander.

“Guys who are hot to get a grander, I tell them to go to Cairns, and fish for those big blacks (black marlin). Much better odds. I fished there the seasons of 1972, ‘73, ’74 and ’79. I had 11 granders during that time. Here, in an average year, you might hear of two or three granders caught off Kona.”

On this day, Fay was taking an old friend, Sally Rice, fishing. Sally works for a real estate developer and has had more than a little success at catching blue marlin. She’s been in and out of the world record book, first for a 583 1/2-pound blue caught on 130-pound test caught in 1969. She broke her own record three years later with a 623-pounder. Her records have since been broken.

Rice, a Kona area resident since 1959, says marlin fishermen are batting a much higher average these days than they did a decade or more ago.

“It used to be that, when marlin fishermen here would get together and tell fish stories, you’d hear mostly about these long, brutal fights with big fish that broke off. Now, you hear more about fish getting caught. In the last 10 years or so, while there are many more boats here to fish off of, there’s also been a big surge in the quality of big-game tackle, and fewer big fish are being lost. In other words, there’s more room now for error.”

Question: When should a fisherman wanting to catch a blue marlin plan a trip to Kona?

Rice: “If I was spending money to come over here from the mainland, I’d plan it for July through August. Blues are caught here the year round, but I think the total catch from July and August would beat any other two-month period in a normal year.”

Fay: “I’d say anytime between May and September, for consistently good fishing. But remember, the big blues are likely to be caught any time of the year.”

Fay said that fisherman numbers are up at Kona.

“The thing that really boosted fishing here was when they started having direct flights from the mainland to Kona, about two years ago,” he said. “That really helped. Now, you can leave the mainland and be on a boat here and fishing in six hours.”

At 8:30 a.m., Fay had already spent more than an hour trolling a zig-zag pattern about 1 1/2 miles out. But he was trolling baitfish lines, not marlin rigs.

“I’d like to pick up a few bonito here, for bait,” he said.

He gestured toward 14 other marlin boats trolling in the same general area, and said: “Those guys are all looking for bonito, too. Yesterday, it was on the radio that this spot was crawling with bonito. Now, of course, nobody can find them.

“The best lure in the world doesn’t compare to trolling a real fish.”

Omens were unfavorble. Not only did Fay fail to pick up a bonito, but none of the other boats in the area did, either. One by one, they left, and departed for trolling areas, their deckhands hauling out colorful assortments of fiberglass lures. Fay was among the last to leave.

For several hours, the Humdinger unsuccessfully trolled America’s greatest blue marlin waters, one to three miles off the Kona Coast, roughly the 15 miles between the airport to the north to the Kona Surf hotel to the south.

Fay, as he steered his boat slowly south, was about a mile off the coast when he pointed to his depth finder and said: “You don’t need to go far here to reach deep water. We’re over 600 fathoms right now.”

If Henry Chee was the Babe Ruth of marlin fishing in Hawaii, then George Parker must be its Satchel Paige.

At age 74, Parker fishes about 250 days a year and has a tan that won’t quit. Your next question is, of course, how long will this go on?

“No, no . . . you don’t understand,” Parker said, grinning, “I retired to do this, about 40 years ago.”

Parker was sitting inside the cabin of his 48-foot Playboy, at its dock in Honokohau Harbor, explaining why there was a couch and a couple of chairs but no table in the cabin.

“Put a table in here and people sit in here,” he said. “I don’t want my fishermen in the cabin. I want them outside, looking for fish. This is a serious fishing boat, not a moonlight cocktail boat.”

Parker grew up in San Diego, moved to Honolulu in 1934, then to Kona in 1945. When Parker started fishing the Kona Coast, you needed to be a diver, too.

“Henry Chee and I and a few other guys anchored our boats in the Kona harbor in those days,” he said. “It was only slightly protected from storms. So when a storm came in out of the southwest, it scared you to death. We’d have to dive to the bottom and check the mooring connections all the time. I kept a 50-foot boat over there 32 years and never lost it in a storm, but other guys lost some boats.

“When I came here in ‘45, Henry Chee was still working at Pearl Harbor. So I was the only skipper here for a couple of years. We struggled, in the old days. We depended a great deal on very wealthy people who’d come here for a month and fish every day.

“The big turning point for us was about the time of statehood. Statehood (1959) and jets came in about the same time, and that’s when really big numbers of people started coming here.”

Parker’s fishing career started in the days of linen line.

“A lot of these young skippers today don’t know how easy they have it,” he said. “In the old days, Chee and I had to take all the linen line off the reels and pile it up on the deck, to dry. You have to dry linen because if it stays on a reel wet, it’ll rot.

“Next came braided nylon line, which was very durable and seldom broke, but it chafed easily. With a fish on, if the line even touched anything, it would part. Dacron was around a while, then came monofilament, the best of all.

“Monofilament is forgiving. It stretches just enough and is abrasion resistant, and you don’t have to dry it out every night. And so we hold on to more strikes today than we used to. In my first years here, I think I retained between 25% and 50% of all strikes.

“I can remember many conversations with Henry Chee, after a tough day, when we’d both lost two or three big fish. Now, we bring in maybe 75% of all strikes. We’ve become technicians. We work at detail far more than we used to.”

George charges $400 a day for a party of six, $300 for a half-day. In 1945, it was $60 and $40. He figures that fishermen have caught 3,000 marlin on his boats, since 1945. Two of them were granders, 1,002 and 1,096 pounds. He estimates the average weight of the blues he catches today at 300 pounds.

“If you want a grander, you should fish in Australia,” he said. “The Hawaiian Islands rose straight up off the ocean floor. Australia is an old continent, with lots of shallow water. All those Australian granders you read about are caught in shallow water.

“We just don’t have sustainable amounts of food fish to cause those granders to hang around here. When we catch one, it’s a fish that’s just passing through.”

Parker, always known as an innovator in the Kona marlin fleet, carried things to an extreme a few years ago, in the view of the International Game Fish Assn. Parker showed his guest a strange gadget that looked more like a mop than a fishing lure.

“I’d noticed a long time ago that marlin have tiny little teeth on their bill, slanted back, toward the head,” Parker said. “It occurred to me it might be possible to catch them without a hook. So I took a half-inch strand of nylon rope one day, unbraided it, put a flesh colored rubber sleeve over one end and tied it to a fishing line. Underwater, it looked like a big squid.

“You know what? It works. You know what else? I’ve never lost a fish with this thing. I got pretty excited about it, even got a patent. But the IGFA put me out of business by saying it ran afoul of their ‘no entangling devices’ section in the rules.

“So that was the end of that. But it is true bloodless fishing. For someone uninterested in setting records and who doesn’t like to kill the fish, this is the answer. This is conservation, and angling skill.

“Backing a boat down on a marlin so some fisherman tied into a chair with 130-pound test line can get close enough to it so it can be gaffed . . . that’s sportsmanlike? I was very disappointed in the IGFA’s attitude over this whole matter.”

Speaking of killing in Hawaii’s fabled marlin waters, there’s plenty of that. In Hawaii, anyone who owns a $25 commercial fishing license can sell a sport-caught fish, including sport fishing skippers. Result: Catch-and-release fishing is practically unknown on the Kona coast. Marlin skippers routinely sell marlin to commercial fish buyers.

Said Sally Rice: “Probably 99% of the marlin caught around here are killed.”

Said Jack Woolen of Cardiff, Calif., who fishes regularly in Kona marlin tournaments: “I released a marlin in a tournament once, and people looked at me like I was crazy. It’s always bothered me so many of the marlin over there are killed by sportfishermen.”

Said George Parker: “If we couldn’t sell the fish we catch, it would cost $600 a day to go fishing instead of $400. Don’t fault us for that. My gosh, the Japanese, Korean and Taiwan boats in the central Pacific kill thousands of marlin in a single day. What we account for is a drop in the bucket.”

Parker has two sons who are now skippers in Honokohau Harbor. One is named Randy. The other, appropriately, is named Marlin.

How does one get a lead on a good marlin skipper at Kona? Even though the Kona phonebook has five yellow pages of display ads for marlin skippers, they don’t tell you who’s hot and who’s not.

Here’s a number to file away: (808) 326-2553. That’s Captain Alii’s Charter Locker at Honokohau Harbor, where close tabs are kept on most of Kona’s charter skippers. You can listen to radio chatter from skippers at sea or chatter from fishermen and skippers in the store, where saltwater tackle is sold. But for the first-time Kona visitor, best of all is the chalkboard scoreboard, where about 40 skippers are ranked in order of recent triumphs.

One recent day, for example, the hot skipper was Norm Isaacs of the Sundowner. Isaacs had caught marlin five days in a row. And, predictably, he was booked for the next five days straight. The second-ranked skipper was Jack Prettyman, who had caught fish three days in a row.

Prettyman was way ahead of Isaacs in tonnage, however. On Jan. 1, after a one-hour fight, one of his fishermen, Dick Hartom of Sacramento, caught a 1,229-pound black marlin, about 1 1/2 miles out of the harbor.

Skill at employing state-of-the-art gear and consistently catching fish in Hawaiian waters doesn’t begin with today’s high-tech skippers at Honokohau Harbor. Nor did it begin with Henry Chee. It goes back much farther, to the original Hawaiians, who reached the islands centuries ago in outrigger canoes from Central and South Pacific islands thousands of miles distant.

In Kailua-Kona, on the village’s waterfront, in the old Hulihee Palace Museum, there is a display of ancient Hawaiian fishing gear. In a glass case, hook points hundreds of years old are still sharp, lines strong, knots secure and the lures marvels of craftsmanship. Everything on display is crafted from native materials, except for some lures carved from dog bones in the years after Capt. James Cook discovered Hawaii in 1778.

The Hawaiians fished with line made from the bark of the olona shrub, a fiber they also used to make nets.

Tiny fish hooks were made of filed, sharpened coral, or from sea urchin shells. Hooks and lures were made first from animal bones, then, after Cook, from dog bones.

The hooks are marvels of creativity and craftsmanship, and range in sizes comparable to today’s fly fishing gear to larger lures, constructed of long, straight shafts of dog bone and carved to resemble an anchovy-size fish. A barbless bone or shell hook, roughly 1 1/2 inches long, is threaded through an eyelet and tied to a notch in the lure. Trailing fibrous strands simulate a small fish’s tail.

The first western visitors to Hawaii observed surprisingly sophisticated trolling techniques by the Hawaiians. After finding a school of surface-swimming yellowfin tuna or dorado--Hawaiians still call dorado “mahi mahi”--the ancient fishermen, besides trolling their hand-crafted bone and shell lures, would flick the top of the water with their finger tips, simulating the sound of small baitfish leaping free of the water, trying to escape the predators.

On another shelf is an ancient rig for catching squid and octopus--twin bone hooks mounted beneath a lure shaped from a coconut husk.

The old Hawaiians fished both at the bottom and on the surface. Cook and later visitors observed that the Hawaiians carefully studied stomach contents of fish, to determine what color or shape of bone or shell lure to use.

Large shells aren’t found in Hawaii, so the islanders frequently returned from outrigger voyages to Midway with larger shells, from which craftsmen carved lures.

Anthropologists believe that Hawaiians caught fish as deep as 1,200 feet. And there is evidence they also caught marlin, at least accidentally, when marlin became entangled in fishing lines.

You leave the museum, and you look across the blue, wind-mottled little harbor, to where a $75,000 sportfishing boat is tied up at the village pier. Two fishermen are having their pictures taken with a big marlin hanging upside down, at the scales.

You ponder the men who once fished these same waters without steel hooks, monofilament, power boats, depth finders, high-tech reels or fiberglass rods.

You wonder who carried the fishing art the furthest, the two guys on the pier or men with stone tools who could make a bone look like an anchovy.

PACIFIC BLUE MARLIN RECORDS

Five of the 13 listed world records for Pacific blue marlin were caught off Hawaii’s Kona Coast. The International Game Fish Association records:

Class Weight Place Year Fisherman M-2 Vacant W-2 Vacant M-4 Vacant W-4 Vacant M-8 Vacant W-8 Vacant M-12 396-11 Punta, Mexico 1981 Bernard Guentner W-12 Vacant M-16 450-0 Kona, Hawaii 1985 Martin Abel W-16 632-12 Pinas Bay, Panama 1984 Linda Miller M-20 768-10 Buena Vista, Mexico 1982 Eugene Nazarek W-20 406-0 Mazatlan, Mexico 1972 Marguerite Barry M-30 626-0 Pinas Bay, Panama 1983 Rinaldo Wenk W-30 530-8 Kona, Hawaii 1985 Nancy Jo Fann W-50 716-7 Cape Karikari, New Zealand 1985 Irene Jamieson M-80 1,014-0 Manta, Ecuador 1985 Jorge F. Jurado W-80 674-0 Waikiki, Hawaii 1978 Charlotte Ferreira M-130 1,376-0 Kona, Hawaii 1982 Jay deBeaubien W-130 737-8 Kona, Hawaii 1981 Sandra Lee King Note: In the classification category, the M stands for men and the W for women. The number after refers to the number of pounds of test line.