Vatu-i-Ra is the passage between Fiji’s two big islands, and it is where a substantial portion of the South Pacific tries to squeeze through a gap that is not quite wide enough for it. The current runs hard enough to stand the sea up on itself. The reef edges go from ankle deep to five hundred feet in about the length of a school bus. Everything out there that eats other things spends its day patrolling that line, and the fishing is not what anybody would call subtle. You drag a lure along a wall of white water at nine knots and either something with teeth removes it from your spread or it does not.
Wahoo are the reason people make the run. A wahoo is essentially a bad idea in fish form, a long chrome tube with a mouth full of razor blades and a top speed that nobody wants to think about too carefully while holding the rod attached to one. They do not follow a lure. They do not inspect it or think it over. They come up from below and behind at full speed, and the strike does not sound like a bite, it sounds like somebody dropped a length of chain into the reel. Frequently the fish is a hundred yards the other direction before anybody on board has finished the second of their life in which it happened.
We ran out of a village on the Nakorotubu coast with a skipper who owns a twenty-one foot open boat and refers to it as a fishing platform in the same tone other men use for cathedral. There is no tower, no chair, and no shade worth the name. What there is instead is a man who has fished that passage since he was nine years old and can read the color change from a quarter mile out the way the rest of us read a road sign. He rigs everything on single strand wire because wahoo go through anything softer without noticing, and he loses lures anyway, and he considers this the honest cost of doing business.
The first fish took a lure off the short rigger during a turn and emptied about half the spool before the drag persuaded it to reconsider. The second one bit the leader off cleanly and left us with a spoon-shaped hole in the tackle bag and everybody looking at each other. The third one we landed, thirty-eight pounds of striped chrome that came over the gunwale still perfectly willing to bite anybody in reach, which is why the skipper handled it and we handled the cooler lid. He carved a piece off it raw within about four minutes, salted it with lime and nothing else, and passed it around on the blade of the knife.
The run home went past reef after reef with the light going orange behind the mountains on Viti Levu, and the whole crew was quiet in that particular way that means everybody is doing arithmetic about airfare. Our skipper asked how the fishing was at home. Somebody described a slow morning on a lake. He nodded politely for a long time and then very kindly changed the subject.
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