The Somosomo Strait runs between Taveuni and Vanua Levu, and most people who know its name know it for the soft coral. Divers fly halfway around the world to drift the Rainbow Reef. What they do not always notice is that the current pushing all that color open is also a conveyor belt, and parked at the bottom of it, where the reef falls away into blue, are the dogtooth tuna. A dogtooth is not really a tuna at all, more a reef bonito that grew up wrong, a slab of slate and silver with a mouth full of teeth that have no business on a fish that shape. October in Fiji is the front end of the warm season, and it is as good a time as any to go and annoy one.
I went with a skipper named Epeli out of a village on the Taveuni side, in a twenty-four foot longboat with a sixty horse outboard and a cooler for a seat. The tackle was all heavy. Four hundred gram jigs and a rod that bent about as much as a fence post. He explained the fight before we dropped a line. A dogtooth eats the jig on the way up, then turns and goes home, and home is a ledge forty meters below you with coral on it. The first ten seconds are the entire fight.
He was not exaggerating. The first drop, on a ledge in eighty meters, something ate the jig on the third lift and took thirty meters of line down and across the reef so fast the rod tip was in the water before I had both hands on it. Then nothing. The braid came up cut clean as a shop ribbon. That one lives there, he said. The second fish did exactly the same thing on the same ledge.
So he moved us to a pinnacle farther out in the strait, where the current wrapped around the top and pushed the baitfish, and anything chasing them, off the wall and into open water. The third hookup came on the first drop there and this time there was nothing to run to. The fish went down, found nothing, and came up slow and heavy and angry. It was a dogtooth of maybe twenty-five kilos, and at the side of the boat it looked at me with an eye the size of a coffee saucer and a grin. We took the picture and sent it back down. There was a reef shark idling under the boat by then, and Epeli said the fish would have to be quick about it.
On the way in we passed a dive boat anchored on the reef with everyone in the water looking at coral. Epeli said the divers and the fishermen come to the same strait and look in opposite directions, and both go home talking about something they saw for ten seconds and did not get to keep.
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