A Story by Tail Fly Fishing Subscriber, Denis Rouse
Photos by Jeremy Inman at Oahu Fly Fishing
Honolulu–Hawaiian bonefish, called O’io here, have shoulders. They’re bigger, beefier and warier than their Caribe cousins. Not to worry If one of these silver wraiths of the coral flats breaks your line and your heart, there are other pursuits just onshore. Where else can you blue ribbon fly fish a few hundred yards from one of the most fascinating, densely populated cities on this planet? My brother Rick and I are here for family reunion and related business issues, and to celebrate a birthday, mine. I’m turning 80, and frankly in no mood to cheer my ongoing decrepitude. Rick’s four years younger but we’ll both need a break from this sort of thing. We still live to cast flies so we signed up with guide Jeremy Inman at Oahu Fly Fishing for a go at these magnificent missiles, these “boners” we ended up nicknaming them. Nothing salacious intended. If you think so at least your mind is in the right place.
Who knew Hawaii had bone fishing grounds?
The old Hawaiians knew, they still do, but because they’re, well, boney, they’ve never been highly prized as luau fare. Add to that fortunate species protection it’s only in recent years a few local haole (that’s white guy in Hawaiian) catch and release fly fishermen discovered the mystery, beauty and woeful challenge of the O’io, the big silver ghosts that risk the shallows of the reef flats to feed, and occasionally inhale a favored fly here called spam and eggs, and rip at otherworldly speed fly line and backing, and then the angler hears the doleful tink of the spool going empty; over, gone, and then experience the afterglow of catch and release au natural. It’s why we love fly fishing. It’s the ones that get away that live in memory, and it’s why we get narcoleptic listening to how many you caught and how big they were.
Ok, right to the bad news. Jeremy caught a positive Covid test and had to cancel. We tried to book another guide but to no avail. What to do? Forget this story lead, or give you the lowdown of what went down during our no fishing week in Honolulu? The latter course seems a little nutso but as all wannabe writers know, the need to write is like an abscess under your second lower molar, it’s absolutely undeniable. We’ll get after those magnificent fish in the future, but in the meantime dear reader, suffer the foregoing.
Immediate hassle at the Honolulu airport, Daniel Inouye International Airport.
If the late Senator Inouye, a highly decorated, as in Medal of Honor, WW II American Japanese veteran of the European theatre of that conflict, knew how bad things are now, he’d probably want his name scrubbed off the place. Despite being triple vaxxed, despite jumping in advance through all the hoops required by the state tourism bureaucracy, I’m held up because I don’t have my docs and code uploaded on an iPhone because I don’t own an iPhone, I don’t want to be an iPhone zombie, and my old trusty clam shell cell phone isn’t cutting the mustard. When I indicate some impatience and frustration with the nice young native Hawaiian woman interrogating me, who was actually doing her level best to get me released, she asked “You wanna get quarantined?.” So I shut my pie hole and an hour later I was a, har de har, free man.
My eldest son John picks me up curbside and ferries me to the hotel where brother Rick and I and the whole fan damnly are booked, the Kamaina Hotel, located at the far east end of the island of Oahu, in the shadow of Diamond Head, just across the street from the spacious green belt of Kapiolani Park. John is ravenously hungry. He teaches surfing for a living, an enterprise that requires daily physical energy akin to a triathlon, so we promptly load the whole fan damnly in his van and head for revered since 1978 Yanagi Sushi on Kapiolani where the sea fare and the service rivals that I’ve had anywhere in Japan. Their maguro (bluefin tuna sashimi) is a Mishima novel in one bite, Japanese perfection. And since we live to eat, that brings up what we love most about Honolulu; you don’t need a plane ticket to enjoy the best of Japan, China, Thailand, the Philippines, Korea, Viet Nam, and throw in Portugal and Cambodia and Taiwan and, if you know where to go, and John does, local style Hawaiian specialties most tourists only know dimly from awful commercial group luaus sponsored by a predatory cabal of travel agents. And thus it is way too many nice people from Toonerville and Mayberry who remain clueless what they’re missing at little joints like Jack’s in Aina Haina (since 1964) where Set A Fish and Eggs on the menu is a “juice battered” Hawaiian style filet of Mahi that’s so over-the-top terrific fresh you know it was swimming only hours ago.
My birthday bash is held in Korea at the Seoul Garden also on Kapiolani. Everyone’s there. My brother, my sister, my daughter, my three sons and their wives and a horde of wonderful grandchildren, and a best friend, John, from wild teenage years together, who’s hot for my sister, and great local friends Sheldon and Gwen Zane. Sheldon is helping me navigate “related family business issues” mentioned above, actually a problematic real estate investment that’s become pin the tail on me the donkey. The Seoul Garden shares the same building, although appropriately cordoned off from the restaurant, with its other business, the Femme Nu Strip Bar. Perhaps another birthday. Anyway, Korean barbecue, marinated pork belly strips, cuts of kalbi beef, sizzling aromatically right in front of you, you’re going to eat way too much, and enjoy every bite, and maybe also order the killer ice cold noodles in piquant broth, naengmyeon it is in the language of the peninsula, a favorite on hot, muggy evenings. And save room for the whole yellow corvina grilled so well you’ll munch on the head, and in true Korean fashion if you prefer, served with some of the fish’s selected stomach contents remaining to be enjoyed.
At the urging of my second son Joseph, we do some road tripping around Oahu. He’s here from Denver for my birthday, and for some distance from a nascent marital crisis at home, which I won’t get into except to remember a Nicholson line in a movie in which he’s playing the role of a successful writer of female dialog. When asked how he accomplishes that, he says, “Easy, I just omit reason and accountability, and think like a man.” Joseph is a New Age entrepreneurial success story, he alone runs High Desert Marketing, a one-man organization that locates products lost in outdated business models that made us human, like going to the store, and distributes and sells them via the huge virtual octopus of Amazon.com.
Our road trips include the crest of the Pali where in 1795 King Kamehameha unified his power by defeating a rival army. It’s known in Hawaiian as “The Battle of the Leaping Mullet”, a reference to the number of warriors driven off the cliff, a victory attributed in large part to artillery gifted to the king by British Captain George Vancouver during his Big Island visit in 1793, he of course with additional British territorial claims in mind. We paid for a tour of Iolani Palace where in 1895 Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokulani was imprisoned in her upstairs bedroom for eight months, and the monarchy was expunged in favor of European and U.S. pro business interests that controlled the legislature, a move that led to U.S. annexation in 1898, and finally to Statehood in 1959. One sparkling afternoon we drove up Oahu’s west shore to the end of the road, to escape the crowds of Waikiki and luxuriate on the sand at Yokohama Beach, one of the most beautiful and least visited on Oahu. It was great respite, but honesty demands divulgence we were not unmoved by lines of homeless encampments we saw along the way, and we weren’t cheered up by the presence of one of the new U.S. Space Force bases there, the latest military force established by executive order from former President Trump to apparently ready the nation to launch belligerence up to the heavens. Guess he never saw the classic 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which fictionally poses an oddly credible result of such a move.
All in all, it was a great week, disappointing of course that our fly lines stayed dry, but are you ready for the capper?
I got an iPhone for my birthday.
* Long time Hawaii surfer son John advises O’io is indeed a favorite at true local Hawaiian luaus in the form of Lomi O’io, an ancient Hawaiian version of ceviche, that constitutes the spoon scraped raw meat of the fish combined with rock salt, green onion, Limu Koho, or local red seaweed, Imanoma, or roasted Kukui nut, and Hawaiian chili peppers and served ice cold.
