Fall Shootout 2006

Fall Shootout 2006
I lost the first spearfishing tournament I entered. I don’t mean that I just didn’t win, but I got dead last place. I either finished by weighing in zero fish, or was disqualified for bringing in one that was undersized; I’m not real sure how that was officially scored.
The Fall Shootout begins at a little restaurant in Kailua called Pinky’s. At 8:00 AM one hundred divers (fifty teams of two) are unleashed to shore dive where they please along some fifteen miles of Oahu’s windward coast, as long as they are back by 1:00 PM. Some divers are already dressed in wetsuits by the time the floodgates are opened at 8. Others have parked their cars strategically around Pinky’s in order to avoid the traffic jam and get to their spot first. Miraculously, everyone exhibited patience exiting the parking lot, or at least the two cars I cut off and the one I swerved around didn’t seem to get too bent out of shape.
Kurt Chambers and I began mapping our road to victory a couple months prior to the tournament, pouring over aerial photos and nautical charts like we were planning a war. After a few fruitless scouting forays we hit the proverbial rock bottom, which in our case was a slimy sand substrate about a mile off Ka’a’awa at a drop-off I discovered on an aerial photo. I must have been victimized by camera tricks, because what we ultimately found was a slope from a 60 foot rubble flat to a sand bottom at around 75 feet. We decided to quit wasting time scouting and just dive our familiar grounds at Rabbit Island.
We knew we could outswim the other teams and get the first crack at the fish we hoped would be out there. Even at the time we knew that wasn’t a guaranteed recipe for success, but we didn’t know of any ulua holes so we threw our chips down on hoping fish would be back there and rolled the dice. We had seen plenty of fish behind the island before, and Kurt had even broken up a party at an omilu house that spring and came away with a fifteen-pounder. So even though scouting didn’t pan out, we weren’t totally screwed.
Quite the contrary. In fact, half our plan did, indeed, come to fruition. When we arrived at Makai Pier, the beach facing Rabbit Island, there were at least two other teams already there. But we suited up quickly, attached everything to the buoy, leaving our hands free to speedily stroke the mile out to the island. I believe it took around 40 minutes to get out there, but the important thing is it took the other teams over an hour. We would be able to hit the ridge on the island’s northwest side first, maybe picking up an uhu (there was a prize for smallest uhu over 18 inches). We would be the first to ambush the mu pile by the big boulders half way around the island. We would get to check the omilu house around the back before anyone else and spear any other game lurking back there. But it turned out we were just first to see nothing was home.
I did end up shooting a nice kala pretty quickly, so at least I was on the board. But each team could only weigh two fish. So a four-pound kala was pretty useless without something meaty: an ulua patrolling the deep reef, a lurking uku, maybe even the rare, but not unprecedented, appearance of an awa in the surge. So I strung up the kala and looked for a real prize. I swam to the omilu house, but no one was home. There’s a spot Kurt and I know where more often than not you will get at least one chance at a decent fish- an uku probably, maybe a kahala, but it’s been a kagami before, even an ono. I didn’t know where the fish were this day though. At this point I didn’t really even know where Kurt was.
For a while I thought I was keeping him off to my left and a little behind me. But I eventually realized another team that finally made it to the island owned the buoy I had been tracking. I rode the surge of a swell up the cliff face of the island and grabbed onto a little ledge to look for Kurt. Already occupying the ledge was a sea urchin, who didn’t want to share his perch, but gladly gave the tips of his spines to my fingers. I let go and decided to ride the swell round-trip a couple times, kicking madly and swiveling my head at maximum elevation, but never saw Kurt. I don’t really know what he was doing all this time, although I would later find out what he wasn’t doing: catching fish.
Instead of spending more time looking for Kurt, I worked the nearby pile of mu, a fish that can get a bit hefty and is one of the more respectable species a diver could turn in. I ended up picking up a small one, the young fish’s curiosity, like that of an innocent puppy, resulting in his demise when he rounded the boulder to investigate the disturbance (it was me, with a speargun… surprise!). Like I said, a small one, three pounds, useless for the tournament, but it would be good to steam. Later, I knocked down a fair-sized red, hoping to take honors with the smallest uhu. When we finally crossed paths, I saw Kurt had gotten one just a little larger than mine. He had also picked up a papio.
We expended every last second we were allotted, but alas, we came up empty. We raced back to Pinky’s, the last pair to check-in I think, and turned in our uhus somewhere around 12:59:48. Lance Ohara was measuring fish. He slapped mine down by the ruler. “Too short.” Quickly he slid my 17 inch uhu off into a cooler, replacing it with Kurt’s. “Too short,” and only seconds after handing in our uhus, the last of our hopes vanished as the cooler closed on our fish, too short to be considered for the award of smallest.
To win a tournament like this it is almost imperative to bring back an ulua. Uluas win these tournaments for the same reason Billy Madison won at dodgeball: they are in a size-class above the rest. As I recall, in this particular year, 2006, only two uluas were turned in, both by one team- the winning team of Vernon Takata and Shawn Fujimoto. I saw some other impressive fish: a fantail with scales the size of Santita’s corn chips and a grill-top sized kala that I remember got an extra look from Kurt (times have changed) among others.
Kurt and I both admitted we got it handed to us that day. Still, it was interesting to me that 100 guys could go out, many of them to grounds they’ve grown up diving, and fail to bring back many real monsters. This was an even more prominent theme in the next tournament I would attend, the 2007 Gene Higa Memorial, in which no uluas or ukus were caught. In the Fall Shootout, Dave Sakoda, at that time the best diver I had ever dove with (quite possibly still the most lethal diver I have dove with), caught little more than Kurt or me. Spearfishing is just so hard to begin with, but when you have to count on catching two of your best fish of the year in a few hours some specified morning… Well, I’m literally the last person who knows anything about that.