Crazy stuff you see fishing the reef dropoff

flat, shallow reef

Took a friend whipping on the south shore who hadn’t fished in more than 10 years. The afternoon trades were blowing and the sky was overcast, which made our initial dip in the water feel a little shocking.  Then it started to rain.  As we walked further out, the tide was waist high at times and rising, which made it harder to avoid stepping on the sea cucumbers and wana (sea urchin).  Not the most comfortable conditions for my friend to reintroduce himself to the ocean.

The fish weren’t biting on the shallow reef so we hop scotched our way to the outer edge where it dropped off into a 12 – 15 foot sandy channel.  We were trying to make out the shapes flitting around in the blue water beneath us, when a 4 foot oval brown hump porpoised out of the water 10 feet from us.  This only added to the spookiness of the evening.  Turns out it was a massive green sea turtle and it turned towards us and almost backed us into a deep hole in the reef; all we had to fend him off with was our poles.

The turtle eventually got tired of scaring us and bobbed back and forth in the open channel about 20 yds away.  We went back to peering into the blue abyss and I dropped a bait down. It immediately got hammered by what looked like black humuhumus, saddle wrasse, and dark and light colored kupipi. Then a 2 foot black fish appeared out of nowhere and just as quickly disappeared.  The swirling fish were about 10 feet down in the rolling water so we weren’t sure if we imagined that mystery fish.  But when I hooked a hinalea, the black fish lunged for it and missed, wisely staying far away from the surface.  The hinalea was released and we caught and released a number of fish  before the black fish attacked a kupipi larger than my outstretched hand and ripped it off the hook.

My friend, still shaken by the turtle that was bobbing up and down making noises like an old man snoring, was captivated yet a bit uneasy watching the cycle of life struggle below.  More determined to see what this dark marauder was, I dropped the bait down again, felt the rat-ta-tat-tat of a hinalea and then a half second later the line was peeling off my reel.  The powerful fish ran for about 3 seconds and then the pull of the line stopped.  A scuffed up hinalea was pulled up and when I lowered the hinalea back down it quickly got stuck in the rocks.

I strongly suspect the mystery fish was a roi (peacock grouper) and that it nailed the hinalea and holed up tight in the reef.  I couldn’t free the line and had to break it off.  Too bad because the roi are invasive predators that are so effective at catching reef fish that they are wiping out a lot of the native fish.

There’s literally a bounty on the roi. There are skin diver tournaments to see how many roi can be killed, and fishermen are being encouraged to catch and kill as many as possible.  It’s believed that since the roi were not indigenous to Hawaiian waters, the Hawaii fish here still haven’t figured out that the roi are just waiting to pounce on them.  From what we saw peering down into the edge of the reef, this appears to be true.

This photo was copied from the University of Hawaii’s Malamlama website.  Beautiful fish, really efficient predator.