The lingering Kona Low storm we had last week finally cleared and the winds dropped for a day, so I prepped to kayak fish. Only problem was that all State and City beach parks were closed to enforce social distancing! When it was confirmed that fishermen could transit through the parks, I parked outside, wheeled my kayak through and launched on an empty beach.

The wind was initially light and I paddled my way to the bait spot. Small bait schools passed under me but I could never connect with them. Gave up and went out deeper than I have been, to try to avoid the sharks. This must’ve been the spot because 3 boats kept drifting into my social distancing space. I guess they had no problem accessing the boat launch.

Felt hard taps about 20 secs after dropping down a frozen opelu and I was on with a hard pulling, jerky fish. Tightened the drag and tried to get it up before Sharkey caught wind of what was going on. It pulled hard until about 15 ft from the surface and was pretty worn out at color. Hooked in the corner of the mouth on the rear VMC inline hook. CHEEEHAAAA!!!

Its tail was sticking out of the Promar floating net but luckily was too docile to try to squirm out. Definitely the biggest uku I’ve landed and was stoked to get another since local fresh fish in the market is really hard to come by because of food supply issues.

Missed a fish on the next drop that pulled the bait off. Then had a bait reduced to just the head. Dropped the head back down to catch the culprit and something that felt like a school bus ate it and didn’t want to be lifted off the bottom. I finally broke free of that. My next bait got picked up by a heavy, head shaking fish and I was able to stop it and bring it up a little before it got real heavy and jerky at the 5 min mark and the line cut midway up the 40lb fluoro leader. I think it was some medium sized jack that got sharked.

The east winds picked up at this point and all but one boat headed for safety. I took their advice and paddled in to a deserted beach.

The uku ended up being my personal best at 23 inches and 6.5lbs. Since I didn’t have many pics to put up I decided to video the fish cleaning process, and planned to pull stills of what it had in its stomach. Well, turns out it had a small opelu, a baby tang-shaped fish, and something that looked like a small squid, but they were pretty decomposed looking so I decided not to use the stills. Fishing buddy Kelly reviewed my slowly improving fileting skills and pointed out areas of improvement:

• Cut the fins off before scaling, so they wouldn’t get in the way
• Scale the fish completely even in the hard to reach spots
• Pat dry the fish if rinsed with water
• Cut with long strokes to leave a smooth edged filet

I decided to share the compressed 2 min video of the catch and time lapse fish cleaning so others could learn from my mistakes. Shout out to Thad, our JDM fishing tackle purveyor, for providing the super sharp, super strong “SK11” all purpose shears from Japan. I was able to cut through all parts of the fish including the center bone!

The fish was shared with family and friends, consumed raw with citrus finger limes, steamed, baked and fried.

I made a point to emphasize that the fish was only touched by my Coronavirus-free hands through the whole process, unlike a fish you find at the market. 😉