The Great Sea Reef runs along the north side of Vanua Levu for well over a hundred miles, and most visitors to Fiji never see it. Fijians call it Cakaulevu. It is a long way from the resorts and a short way from a lot of villages that have been fishing it since before anyone wrote anything down. The fish we came for is the coral trout, which is no relation to a trout at all. It is a grouper, red as a fire engine with electric blue spots, and in Fiji it is called donu.
We went out from a village down the coast from Labasa in a fibreglass longboat with a forty horse outboard. The boatman, Jone, steered standing up with the tiller between his knees and read the reef by colour. Dark blue was deep. Pale green was sand. Brown was coral close enough to take the propeller, and he slid around those patches without slowing down while I held the gunwale and admired his confidence.
Coral trout live under bommies, the coral heads that rise off the bottom like mushrooms. They sit in the shade at the base and rush out at anything that swims past looking lost. Jone would idle up to a bommie in twenty feet of water so clear you could count the fish, and I would cast a soft plastic past the coral and hop it back along the edge. The strike is a thump and a flash of red. Then the fish turns for home, and home is a cave made of something close to broken glass.
You have about five seconds. Lock the drag, keep the rod low, and pull like you mean it. I lost the first two fish and both lures to the same bommie. Jone looked at the coral, then at me, and said the donu down there had a tackle shop now. The third one I turned. It came up glowing, four pounds of red and blue with a mouth like a bucket, and Jone held it up to the sun and announced that this one was for his grandmother. I took that for a joke.
It was not a joke. His grandmother met the boat on the beach, looked over the catch, and picked the fish herself. The other three were cooked that night in coconut milk with lime and chilli, and eaten on a mat with cassava. Somebody asked how many lures I had lost. I said five. He said the reef had been collecting since long before I started fishing, and passed me more cassava.
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