Ala Mo Ono

I’ve still never seen a single ulua around Oahu’s wrecks. I’ve sure heard plenty stories though. I’ve heard about swarms of uluas, big uluas that make their homes in the interiors of these artificial reefs. I’ve heard enough stories to provoke me into searching for these fabled fish. That’s how I ended up on the Sea Tiger one morning. The search for prey is probably the reason the onos were there too.
Scuttled to make an artificial reef, the Sea Tiger sits upright on the sea floor 120’ below the surface. It’s a fairly new “wreck,” and reef life is still working on initiating it into the brotherhood of underwater habitats. It’s a big wreck too. Sometimes on Waikiki’s YO-257 you can see end to end, but the Sea Tiger is a bigger ship in dirtier water. This wreck’s big enough to have two moorings, a feature anyone who has shared a mooring with a SCUBA boat can appreciate. It’s also only a short paddle from a big beach with safe parking and showers in the middle of town. I didn’t know it yet that fall morning, but by that afternoon I added the possibility of an ono-sighting to my list of incentives for diving the Sea Tiger.
Kurt and I launched early from Ala Moana Beach Park in order to beat the SCUBA charters out to the Sea Tiger. Over the flats, past the surfers, and out to the precise spot in the open, blue expanse indicated by Kurt’s GPS. We hoped to arrive before the SCUBA divers in order to search for big game before a wall of bubbles scared it off. I can’t remember now if we succeeded in this goal or not. If so, it wasn’t for long. Boats showed up and left, replaced by new boats, for much of the morning (recreational SCUBA divers are restricted to less than 20 minutes on the wreck due to its depth).
Fish were scarce, but I knew there were opelu kala around. That’s not exactly the fish I had come for, but it is at least the tastiest of all the surgeonfish (which, frankly, is like being the smartest student on the short bus or the sanest patient in the whole asylum). Of course, once I decided to target them, I couldn’t even find opelu kala anymore. I was dropping to about 70 feet and leveling off, leaving me 20-30 feet off the deck, where I patrolled for dinner. After a few of these dives I spotted a legal-sized opelu kala. I descended towards him, of course causing him to flee deeper upon noticing my pursuit. I followed him a short distance, closing in, fully extending the gun, ultimately depressing the trigger. The shaft entered behind one gill, exited just behind the other, and came to a stop stuck in the ship. It wasn’t coming out easily; I would have to head up and come back for it in a few minutes. My next dive I began fiddling with the shaft, trying to close the barb and finesse it out. At 105 feet that quickly got frustrating, so I braced my fins against the deck and YANKED! The shaft pulled free, along with a golf-ball sized chunk of the Sea Tiger. I shrugged it off. Oops, what are you gonna do?
I had had my fill by this point- battling at 105 feet for a fish I would normally pass up at 30 feet. My shooting line was twisted into a natty dread of monofilament, still threaded through an opelu kala at some point, but I just threw it all in a heap into the kayak. I took off my weights and fins and added them to the heap too. I had barely had time to gut the opelu kala when Kurt yelled, “ONOOOOOS!” Without putting back on my fins or weights, I grabbed the handle of my camera housing and slipped back into the water, kicking like a frog, futilely chasing after one of the ocean’s swiftest predators. Kurt grabbed the camera and I returned to the kayak to pull on fins and ready my gun, a stock (one band) Marc Valentin 110 with a reel, at this point accessorized with the opelu kala hopelessly tangled in the shooting line.
Untangling the line was proving to be quite a puzzler. Reviewing the footage, you can at one point see my legs hanging into the water as an ono swims almost under the kayak, prompting yells, wails of impatient agony, from Kurt to hurry me along. Eventually I do get in, and see Kurt is close to the prowling onos, within 10 feet, and they’re big.
I closed in on the fish too, or at least the distance between us closed. I guess it was only by luck that the fish hung around so long in the first place; I can’t seem to recall making a stealthy, tactical approach. The onos seemed to just mill around us. Each fish in the pack exceeded 40 pounds, but there were a couple that really drew your attention. Getting to business, I moved at an angle to intercept their path. As they passed in a caravan from my right and at an angle slightly away from me, I picked out one larger individual. Briefly, he turned broadside to me, a mere 12 feet of the ocean’s vast expanse separating us. I extended the gun as he twitched back to a path angling away from me. Instinctively I fluttered off a few quick kicks and did my best Stretch Armstrong impersonation, trying to close the gap. Then I relaxed and let the gun lower.
If the situation required urgency I would have already blown it long ago. I knew I needed a really good shot if 1.) the single band and 6.3 mm shaft of my 110 were going to have the penetration power needed, and 2.) I was going to incapacitate it enough to prevent it from speeding off, spooling my reel, and taking my gun with it. The ono was well within range of the canons many divers use to spear them, but my gun is on the sissier side of the spectrum. Taking down a big ono with a Marc Valentin 110 is something like bringing down a deer with a .22. In the back of my mind there were still some questions about what sort of fury might be unleashed once I pulled the trigger on one of these guys, but I was pretty sure, kind of sure maybe, that I could land one if it veered off and came right at me.
Just then, one veered off and came right at me. This wasn’t the biggest of all, but it was definitely among the bigger ones. Definitely big, was the bottom line. It swaggered directly at me, then paraded broadside in close range- 6 feet or so. Close enough to activate the launch sequence. I gripped the gun’s handle with both hands, as though it was a Luger, took aim, and let the shaft do its thing. Immediately I saw I smacked it right in the gill plate, a great shot, but my nerves weren’t at ease just yet. The fish was obviously hurting, blood streaming out of it like smoke trailing a plummeting B-17. But did the shaft fully penetrate, allowing the barb to toggle open and grip the fish? I couldn’t tell, because the ono was dragging me in a counter clockwise circle; I couldn’t get a good look at its other side. Unsure of this critical detail, I played the bleeding fish gently. Fortuitously, I had changed the shooting line just the previous day. A little detail like that can be so important, a lesson I usually learn the hard way (for instance, had we had a second gun that day we could have picked up another ono, which kept swooping in on the fracas). Even with the ginger treatment I was giving the mortally wounded ono, it had pulled only a few feet of line from my reel.
Kurt went down with a knife and the idea of finishing the ono off once and for all. Up to this point the ono showed few hints of its speed and power, but Kurt must have roused up some sort of bad memories from the ono’s childhood, because it sprung back to life and thrashed away, taking a little more line from the reel and thwarting Kurt’s approach. Although unable to introduce his knife blade to the ono’s skull, Kurt did at least get a good look at the shot. It had indeed pierced through both gill plates. Now all I had to do was horse it up.
On the classic spearfishing video “Epic,” Travis Kashiwa narrates the footage of his struggle with a speared ono by saying, “I was just trying to make pretend I knew what I was doing. But as you can see, I had no clue.” I don’t know Travis Kashiwa, but by all accounts he’s an excellent diver, one whose prowess I could only hope to emulate. At this point I think I was doing a pretty fair impersonation. Just like Travis on “Epic,” I was getting thrashed about by an ono, without any real good idea of what I was doing. Things had pretty well turned into a rodeo; back and forth I rode the fish, trying to grind its brain to a halt with the cold steel of my knife. At last, a final shudder, the beast was subdued. Kurt and I lifted our heads from the water, the panorama of Honolulu’s skyline over our shoulder, exchanged a high five and let out cries of victory.
All this time a SCUBA charter was moored to the opposite end of the wreck, its divers oblivious to the thrilling encounter with the onos and the ensuing battle. On the beach, though, people took notice, some reconsidering swimming in the same waters as such a sea monster. We took it to Kurt’s bike shop and hung it on the scale. 55 pounds! I never weighed the opelu kala.
Next stop was my butcher block, the normal spot where I fillet fish, Kurt’s sidewalk. In all other respects Kurt maintains a real neighborly existence, but our propensity for catching fish must at times stretch his neighbors’ patience thin. Coolers of chum have ripened for days in the sun in his yard, and like I said, more than once I’ve turned his sidewalk into a sacrificial altar. I like to think we soothed things a little by handing out some ono steaks. There was plenty to go around after all.
Ono is one of the best, if not the best, food fish in Hawaii. It is suited for most any method of preparation. Forget sauces, spices, or stuffings, just heat it up and it’s delicious. Heck, don’t even bother with that. It doesn’t get much better than ono sashimi. Needless to say, I wasn’t disappointed to be eating ono instead of oats and canned peas for dinner night after night.
That ono is one of my greatest catches of all time. When I reach the Pearly Gates and St. Peter asks what I accomplished on Earth, I think I’ll start with, “Well, I never saw an ulua on a wreck, but let me tell you what I did see…” Even the footage Kurt grabbed of the ono rodeo makes me smile a little whenever I watch “Oahu Still Get Fish.” But big onos aren’t an anomaly on the Sea Tiger. There was an even larger one that I didn’t get. And since that day I’ve seen Harold Gibson boat one over 40 pounds that yanked two floats and a long tagline half way to Jalalabad in the time it took for his bluewater gun to stabilize from its recoil. Then on another occasion I saw a nice ono on the wreck but was unarmed. So, I’ve still never seen an ulua on one of our wrecks, darn it, but just maybe that’s because I divert too much attention toward the surface, toward the domain of the ono.