Kadavu is the Fiji that the brochures skip, which is the point of going there. It sits south of Viti Levu, an hour by small plane, with no roads worth the name and a reef off its eastern side called the Great Astrolabe, named for a French ship that very nearly ended its career on it in 1827. The reef is a hundred kilometers long. On the outside edge the bottom drops from waist deep to a thousand meters in the space of a tennis court, and that is where the giant trevally live.
I went with a skipper named Seru who runs a center console out of a village on the lagoon side, and who learned the reef from his grandfather and the trevally from losing to them. Popping for GTs is simple to describe and ruinous to do. You stand on the bow with a rod built like a pool cue, you throw a popper the size of a beer can at the white water where the swell breaks over the coral, and you rip it back as hard as your shoulders allow. Then you do it again. Seru says most people last forty minutes before they ask how the morning is going.
I lasted thirty-five. On the next cast the popper disappeared in a hole in the ocean with a sound like a bucket dropped down a well, and the rod loaded so hard I thought I had hooked the reef. I had not. The reef does not run. The fish went straight for the coral and Seru backed the boat down into the swell, shouting to lock up, lock up, and I leaned on it with everything I had and about half of what I did not. The drag was set at something that would tow a car. The fish did not care.
It took ten minutes to get it off the ledge and another five to get it to the boat, and when Seru lifted it over the gunwale by the tail and the shoulder it was silver going to black at the edges, with a head like an anvil and an eye that looked at me with real contempt. Thirty kilos, he said, maybe more. We held it in the water until it kicked, and it went back down to the coral to tell the others.
We got two more that morning and lost four, including one that broke a hook I was told could not be broken. Back at the village they fed us cassava and fish in coconut milk and asked how we had done, and Seru said the visitor did fine, for a visitor. I took that home and had it framed.
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