There is a color of water in Fiji that does not photograph correctly. Over the sand it goes a pale blue that looks lit from underneath, and then the reef drops away and the same water turns the deep indigo of an ink bottle, all within about one boat length. The line between those two blues is where the giant trevally live, and everybody who fishes the South Pacific ends up standing on a bow somewhere along it, throwing a lure the size of a banana at it.
We ran out of a small bay on the north side with a boatman who had grown up on that reef and clearly considered the whole ocean a familiar hallway. He never used the chartplotter. He watched the surf line, timed the sets, and put the skiff into a reef pass at the exact moment the water flattened, which he did nine or ten times that morning without once appearing to think about it. The chartplotter, we noticed, was not even switched on.
A popper on a reef pass is deliberately ridiculous. You heave it out onto the seam, then rip it back in big sweeps so it chugs and spits and generally behaves like a fish having the worst day of its life. The point is noise. The point is to sound like a problem. You do this for an hour, your shoulders file a complaint, and then the water behind the lure lifts up in a way that turns your whole nervous system on.
What happened next took about thirty seconds and is what everyone means when they talk about GT fishing. The fish ate on the surface with a sound like a chest of drawers being dropped in a swimming pool, turned, and went straight for the coral, because that is the entire strategy and it works most of the time. There is no finesse available. You lock the drag, lean back, and find out what everything is rated for. Our boatman watched the line angle, said one thing, "hold, hold, hold," and then the fish came up out of the wrong side of the pass, beaten, broad as a car door, in that chrome and slate gray they wear before it fades.
We got two photos, a very fast release over the side, and one of us a set of knuckles the reel handle had rearranged. On the ride back the boatman said the fish was, in his estimation, a medium one. We have thought about that sentence for two years. Somewhere out on that reef there is a large one, and we have decided we are in no hurry to be introduced.