Marlin fishing is eight hours of housekeeping wrapped around ninety seconds that ruin you for other fishing. You set a spread, you watch it, you adjust a lure that is not swimming right, you eat a sandwich, you watch it some more. The lures dig and pop and throw a little smoke of bubbles, the outriggers creak, the wake rolls out flat behind, and nothing at all happens for a very long time. Everybody knows this going in. Everybody signs up anyway, because of the ninety seconds.
Kadavu makes the waiting easier than most places do. The island sits south of the main Fiji group with the Great Astrolabe Reef wrapped around it, and the bottom falls away from that reef so fast that you are in two thousand feet of water while you can still see somebody walking on the beach. There is no long run to the fishing grounds. You clear the pass, the water goes from green to a blue that does not look real, and the lures go in. Sea birds work the current lines, the reef stands up white behind you, and if nothing bites you have still spent a day looking at that.
Our crew was two Fijian brothers who had grown up on the island and run the boat for a lodge, and who fished with a calm that made the rest of us feel loud. They did not talk much about marlin. They talked about the current, which they read off the way the birds were sitting, and they moved the boat according to a logic none of us could follow and all of us came to trust. Around two in the afternoon the older one stood up in the tower and said one word, and the whole cockpit turned around.
A blue marlin comes into a spread lit up. The bill and the shoulders go a color you have to see, an electric cobalt that switches on like something is powered, and the fish moves behind the lures with its dorsal up, deciding. It swiped once and missed. It came back. The rigger clip popped, the reel dumped line so fast the spool went soft, and then the fish was two hundred yards away and airborne, greyhounding across the surface in a line of white explosions while somebody in the cockpit made a noise that was not a word.
We got the leader to the rod tip in forty minutes, which the brothers said was quick, and they had the hook out and the fish swimming before anybody thought to reach for a camera. Maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, which in Fiji is a normal fish and everywhere else is the best day of somebody’s life. The younger brother watched it go down into the blue, wiped his hands, and asked if we wanted to put the lures back out. There were four hours of daylight left, so we did, and nothing else happened all afternoon, and nobody minded even slightly.
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