The Bligh Water runs between Fiji’s two big islands like a wide blue hallway, and getting out into the middle of it takes long enough that most of the boat falls asleep on the way. You wake up when the engines come down. There is nothing out there to look at. No land close enough to matter, no bird pile, no color change worth mentioning, just open ocean going about its business in every direction. Then the skipper taps a screen and there it is, a pinnacle rising out of six hundred feet of water and topping out around a hundred and twenty, an entire underwater mountain that nobody would ever know about without electronics and a reason to go looking.
The reason is dogtooth tuna, which are not really tuna and are not remotely reasonable. A doggie is built like a fire hydrant with teeth, lives tight to structure, and has exactly one plan when hooked, which is to go home. Home is the rock you are floating over. Every piece of tackle on the boat exists to argue with that plan. The jigs weigh about as much as a hammer, the braid is rated for numbers that sound invented, and the drag goes down so hard on the first drop that a careless thumb loses skin. Somebody asked whether all of it was overkill. The skipper said it was, right up until it wasn’t, which took roughly forty minutes.
He grew up in a village on the north coast and runs the boat by the tide instead of the clock. He would look at his watch, then look at the water, then move us two hundred meters for reasons no one else on board could see. Twice he shut the whole operation down and made everybody drink tea while the current ran the wrong way across the top of the pinnacle. Nobody argued, partly out of politeness and mostly because he was the only person aboard who had ever landed one of these things and he clearly wanted that to happen to the rest of us.
Mechanical jigging is honest work and it does not pretend otherwise. You drop to the bottom, then wind and lift, wind and lift, all the way up through a hundred and twenty feet of water, and then you do it again, and somewhere around the fourth drop your shoulders begin filing complaints. The bite came on the twentieth or so, halfway up, and it did not feel like a bite. It felt like the jig had been unbolted from the rod. The reel gave up sixty feet before anyone could get a hand near the fish, the line went into the rock, and that was the end of the conversation. The second one, an hour later, came off the top of the pinnacle instead of the side, and we got it up into the blue where you could finally see it, short and deep and silver over a black back, more shoulders than fish.
Back at the mooring somebody asked how many we had actually landed. The honest number was one, out of four that ate. In most fisheries that is a bad day. Out on the Bligh Water it is called even, and the rock keeps the other three as rent.