Stan:
Here's the article the way I wrote it. They ran it with the big pic of Steve on the beach and a smaller one of Steve with a tuna. When it appeared, they had garbled the sentence about a trip Shirley and I took there 20 years ago.
The only serious error was the attribution for the final quote. They credited Steve rather than you. I was pretty clear that it was you.
Jim
It's time to think about Christmas again. Christmas Island, that is, the number one gift on every lure-casting fisherman's holiday wish list.
Kona fishing captain Steve Petras just returned from a thrilling trip to the historic equatorial island after a week of battling giant trevally, bluefin trevally, bonefish, wahoo and yellowfin tuna on fishing grounds as good as they may have been when Captain James Cook discovered the equatorial atoll on Christmas Eve, 1777.
Steve had gone to Christmas Island specifically to “whip” big surface plugs for ulua on spinning gear and got all the action he could have hoped for.
“I had hooked a few ulua off the rocks here in Kona before I went down there but lost them all,” Steve said. “So my first Christmas island GT was my first ulua ever. And I didn’t have to wait long to catch one. I hooked up on one of my first casts!”
From his stable perch on a flat-bottomed wooden outrigger canoe, Steve had tossed out a big Yozuri pencil popper and worked it across the surface. The lure splashed and jumped from side to side like a frantic baitfish trying to escape an unseen predator. When the lure was only 15 feet from the boat, a big ulua flashed into view and smacked it hard.
“I couldn’t believe how big the fish was,” Steve said. “It missed the lure so I whipped it right back out and started retrieving it again with the same back and forth action I had used when fishing for roosterfish on trips to Costa Rica. This time, three came up on it.”
In the face of competition from its schoolmates, the ulua made sure it inhaled the plug so it couldn’t get away again. Steve battled it to the boat in a 50-minute tug of war, held it up so fishing buddy Stan Wright could take its picture, and estimated it at 40 pounds. After carefully removing the hooks from the fish, he slipped it over the side to swim away to safety.
Steve, Stan and Tim Dykman, the third member of their party, would release all of their fish on this trip. Catch and release is now standard practice on Christmas Island and is the major reason the fishing is back to the greatness of its heydays of 30 years ago.
“We would catch four or five ulua a day like that and then I started taking the hooks off the plug because I couldn’t reel any more in,” Steve said. “These were big, hard-fighting fish. The largest I boated would have weighed 80 pounds but I lost several over 100. You’ve never seen anything like a 100-pound GT busting a top water plug!”
For even more action, they switched from tossing toward the reef to casting into deep water. On the deep side their lures attracted explosive strikes from `ahi and ono. These were old familiar adversaries from their Kona fishing adventures but their Christmas experience was an eye-opener. Back home in Hawaii, they caught their tuna and wahoo trolling and seldom saw a strike before hearing the scream of a trolling reel against the background of a noisy engine. Casting from a quiet, motionless, Christmas island skiff, they could see and hear the gamefish slam the lure and take off fighting.
For Tim Dykman, the draw of Christmas Island was the bright silver star of saltwater flyfishing -- the bonefish. The lagoons, flats and channels of this, the world’s largest atoll, are the fighting grounds for millions of oio. In a trip my wife, Shirley, and I took there 20 years ago, we chummed the shallows and gathered schools of 5 and 6 pounders feeding at our feet like hens squabbling for chicken feed in a farmyard.
Tim, a longtime friend of Steve’s from Southampton, NY, turned 60 during the trip and his birthday gift for himself was to catch bonefish until he was too tired to make another cast.
“Tim and I have fished all over the world together for many different kinds of gamefish,” Steve said. “On that trip, he got all of the bonefish he wanted. None were fatties, but there were plenty of them.”
Steve and Stan were always looking for bigger stuff, and found plenty of it.
“I fly-fished for bonefish for a half day and caught a couple, but I was just chomping at the bit to go out on the reef,” Steve said. “I did some shorecasting for smaller fish –omilu (bluefin trevally) and white ulua up to 20 or 25 pounds. But I was always looking for the excitement of hooking fish that really put my gear to the test.”
Spinning gear, that is. Indeed, Steve makes his own rods, which are popular here with the Kona fleet. For the challenge of 100 pound fish, he matched the rods with heavy-duty Van Stahl reels loaded with 50-pound-test Power Pro line (a superbraid made with Spectra).
“For ulua, you need the heaviest spinning tackle you can buy,” Steve said. If you hook a good one on 20-pound nylon monofilament, it will take forever. You just can’t pull hard enough. With the 50-pound superbraid I was cupping the spool to put 30 pounds of drag on the fish.”
Steve linked the line to the lure with a length of 80-pound test fluorocarbon (“Yozuri pink”) and says that was enough to protect against ulua teeth.
“No GT chewed me off, but we lost cudas and wahoos to bite-offs,” Steve said.
And occasionally both Steve and the fish had to do battle with the famous Man-o-War birds of Christmas Island. Here in Hawaii we call it the “iwa,” meaning “thief” because the big black winged marauders attack other birds to still their catch. A
They will even try to take food away from fish, making the iwa a nuisance when it power dives to take a top-water lure and fly away with it.
The GT, however, is big enough to fight back.
“We had one ulua take the plug right out of an iwa’s mouth,” Steve said. “It almost took the bird’s head off.”
The birds do seem to serve one good purpose, however. Just as the Man o’War birds track the actions of the fish, the big swimming predators watch the birds above and go where their wheeling and diving takes them.
Be prepared and not just with the right tackle, Steve advises all who would go there. Because the atoll is jus a few degrees north of the equatior, the temperature is very hot and wading the flats can be brutal. The boats are built with a small canopy for a bit of shade, “but bring lots of sunscreen,” Steve says.
It is definitely worth the heat, says photographer and former host of “Let’s Go Fishing.”
“I first started fishing Christmas Island 25 years ago and I really believe the fishing is better today than it was back then,” Stan said.
I enjoyed your report so much I thought more people would see and enjoy it if you make it under a new post. You could, and should be regularly posting things under your own by line... LOL Go for it, enquiring minds want to know.
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