This was our second trip to Hawaii. I liked it well enough last time, but I wouldn’t have gone back, except, of course, it’s required. In 2019 I didn’t catch a fish, and I had to catch a fish. Maybe if I surfed I’d be more excited about Hawaii, but I’m not a beach guy, and the thought of me surfing is only amusing to everybody else, not me.

Hawaii is a trek from Houston; of the states only Alaska is further. It’s 14 hours of flights if you include the mandatory LA layover, and planes and airports and Covid travel entirely too well together. The combination brings out my inner compliance officer. When the government tells me to wear a mask at the airport, I’m all in, and the non-compliant lady next to me at the baggage claim makes me irrationally angry. She has an ugly nose, and I don’t want to see it. I really want to tell her that she has an ugly nose, but I worry that her husband with the even uglier nose might punch me, and notwithstanding my righteous wrath he might be justified.

To top it off, except as a Christmas Island stopover, Hawaii isn’t usually considered a fly fishing destination.  I covet catching Christmas Island bonefish as much as I covet catching any saltwater fish, short maybe of Seychelles giant trevally, but the Seychelles (which are off the East Coast of Africa) are even harder to get to than Hawaii, or even Christmas Island. When my shoulder hurt last year, Mark Marmon told me about an orthopedic surgeon who fly fished—which seemed to me a reasonable basis on which to choose a doctor.  It turned out it was my neck, not my shoulder, but in addition to prescribing some stretches and a prescription for an anti-inflammatory, the doctor told me about fishing for giant trevally in the Seychelles. He said that he could only go every three years or so, because by the time he got there and spent a week fishing, the trip cost about $30,000.  I hope that included his flies.

In the same vein, at my annual check-up my cardiologist showed me pictures of the 28” rainbow he caught on his annual trip to Alaska, and the permit he caught last year in Belize. I didn’t share with either of them the photos of the bluegills I caught last year in Kansas. 

Relative to the Seychelles, Christmas Island is a bargain. There’s one weekly flight to Christmas Island from Hawaii on Fiji Airlines, not that I’ve looked, not very often anyway. Once you get there you’re stuck for the week, and the only thing to do is drink beer and fish. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? I guess if it’s good enough for Santa, it’s good enough for me.  

Of course we didn’t go to Christmas Island, but to Molokai and Kauai in Hawaii, with an overnight in Honolulu on Oahu. I cashed in all of our accumulated credit card points so that we could fly first class to Hawaii on Delta. Except for the price, first class isn’t what it used to be—our snack on the flight from Houston to LA consisted of three kinds of pasteurized processed cheese food—designated as cheddar, smoked Gouda, and something called alpine-style, all three of which tasted exactly like Velveeta.  I like Velveeta, though I prefer it melted with a can of Rotel. Delta is missing a bet. If they had served queso and chips I’d be all in for Delta first class, even if the WiFi costs extra and the price of a first class ticket doesn’t get you into the Delta passenger lounge.

The problem with Hawaii as a bonefish destination isn’t the 14-plus hours of travel, it’s that it has the reputation of not having a lot of bonefish, and the fish it has are supposed to be  particularly skittish. Saltwater sport fish are different than freshwater fish. They’re stronger, and bonefish are built to outrun what ails ‘em—particularly sharks. They breed in deep water, but they come into the shallows to eat crabs and shrimp, and that’s where they’re targeted. Even in clear shallow water they’re hard to see, but with a sunny day, a good guide can spot the fish and tell you where to cast. I can see them sometimes, and Kris is better at it than me, but the guys who make a living spotting fish are amazing. All the angler has to do is cast where the guide says without spooking the fish, convince the fish on the retrieve that the fly is something it needs, and on the take remember to set the line—strip-set—not lift the rod. Of course lifting the rod fast and strong is the natural reaction to any take by a fish, and it’s what my momma and daddy taught me when first I caught crappie, so I’ve been doing it for a long time, but fly fishing for bonefish, if you raise the rod tip, you’ll never set the fly. The fish is gone and not coming back. You have to jerk the line straight back to set the hook.

I only raised the rod tip once, I promise. That was one of the nine or so takes where I lost the fish. Ok, maybe twice, but not much more than twice. Certainly not more than three or four times.

If you or your guide sees a fish, and you do everything else right, then you hang on.  Bonefish are extraordinarily strong, and when hooked they run for the border. They’ll rip out a hundred yards of line before you’ve rightly figured out what’s happened. Think of it this way: if you hook the fish at 40 feet distance, then less than a 30 seconds later the fish will stop running 260 feet away. It’s just amazing. All of you focuses into hanging on and wondering if the fish will ever slow.

Targeted Hawaiian bonefish, Albula glossodonta, aren’t the same species as targeted Caribbean bonefish, Albula vulpes, which is interesting, and they’re generally bigger, which is good, but Hawaiians eat every bonefish they can drag from the sea, which is complicated. Consumers can buy gill-netted shrink-wrapped bonefish in the markets. To prepare the fish (this is the recipe part) they scrape the meat from the bones, and fry up the mashed meat as bonefish patties. I don’t know if there’s ketchup involved, but I’m pretty certain there’s no cornmeal. This may seem like no big shakes to a non-believer, but for most fly fishers, it’s an article of faith that bonefish are inedible, and killing and eating a bonefish is only slightly more appealing to most of us than eating a puppy. It’s just not done, and I’m so programmed that just the thought makes me kinda queasy.

Flyfishers tend strongly toward not keeping and eating fish anyway. They like to torture the fish and then put it back in the water so that another flyfisher can torture it again later.

In most places where bonefish are fished, the Bahamas and Belize for instance, catch and release is the norm, but Hawaiians, particularly Native Hawaiians, eat bonefish. Couple the island’s taste for bonefish croquettes with its lack of bonefish regulations—Hawaii doesn’t recognize bonefish as a gamefish, and the only restriction on killing and keeping fish seems to be that you can’t keep a fish that’s shorter than 14 inches–and flyfishers blame Hawaiian overfishing on the sparsity of fish inshore on islands like Oahu. Now mind, Hawaii is the bluest of states, and there’s nothing the islands love better than a good regulation. There are, for instance, no free grocery bags in Hawaii. If you go to the grocery without a bag, you’ll have to buy one. Same vein, your mai tai straw will be paper: there are no plastic straws on the islands. For goodness sakes, they restrict the kinds of sunscreen you can wear. Just take a gander at Hawaii’s Covid entry restrictions to get a flavor of the place—they require either a recent test or a vaccination card—but if you want to catch and kill all the bonefish in the sea, get busy.

Killing and eating bonefish is a cultural thing, I get it, and while for me eating a bonefish would be bad form, I’m not squeamish or outraged about other people eating them. Still, if they’re gonna, I’d rather Hawaii had reasonable limits for bonefish takes, and I’m not convinced that using monofilament gill nets to overfish bonefish is an important Hawaiian cultural tradition. Of course then I’m a Texan, and cultural insensitivity is an important Texas cultural tradition.

Texas banned gill nets for redfish 40 years ago and it was a memorable political battle, but for once we got something right. It protects our inshore fishery, and it converted a fish that was once viewed as a slightly trashy food fish into a gamefish—still a food fish, but no longer gill-netted into oblivion. Maybe it helps that redfish are widely farmed, and maybe it’s culturally insensitive to compare the Texas redfish fishery to the Hawaii bonefish fishery.  I just can’t help being a bit chauvinistic, plus I’m selfish. I want all the bonefish left in the sea for me to catch. 

In case you were wondering, the chain restaurant, Bonefish Grill, doesn’t serve bonefish.