In Fiji, walu is the fish everyone has eaten and nobody talks about catching. It turns up in kokoda, in curry, grilled on the beach with a squeeze of lime, and it is so ordinary on the menu that visitors forget it is a Spanish mackerel with teeth like a bread knife and a first run that can smoke a small reel.
Our skipper out of Pacific Harbour was a big, cheerful man called Tui who ran a fiberglass boat with one outboard and a cooler full of green coconuts. He had a single rule about walu lures: pink. Not red, not purple, not the handsome blue and silver thing I had brought from home and paid too much for. Pink. He tied it on for me without asking and put mine in the cuddy like a confiscated phone.
We trolled the outer edge of the Beqa lagoon, where the reef drops off from bright turquoise into ink, in the late afternoon when the light goes gold and the water goes glassy. Tui steered with one knee and pointed out the house of every cousin he had on the island, which turned out to be most of the houses. Every so often he looked back at the lures and said something in Fijian that my friend later swore was a prayer and Tui later swore was a complaint about the price of fuel.
The first strike ripped the rod out of the holder so hard the clip rang. The fish made one long run along the reef, turned, came back toward the boat faster than I could gather line, and then went deep. When it finally came up alongside, long and barred and silver as a knife blade, Tui gaffed it clean and held it up like a man who had just been proven right in court.
We caught three more before dark, every one on the pink. My blue lure stayed in the cuddy the whole trip. That night Tui’s wife cooked the first walu in coconut milk and chili, and we ate it on the porch while the reef went quiet.
I have since fished the blue lure at home and caught nothing. Tui, informed of this by text, replied with a single pink heart.
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