As GTs go—giant trevally can grow to more than 100 pounds—the ones we caught were fairly small, mostly in the 10- to 20-pound range. That’s really just as well. After the initial thrill of realizing you’ve set your hook into a fish that even sharks avoid, the battle with a heavy GT becomes something like a weight lifting competition: lots of grunting and not much action. My friend Bob needed more than half an hour to land one weighing upwards of 40 pounds. At one point, Will and Bob and I had three GTs on at once, fish going in three directions, us slipping and tripping, trying to stay untangled, Deb madly attempting to capture the hilarity on film. Three grown men splashing around up to our hips in water, hooting and laughing, rods bent double, was a refreshing reminder of what fishing had meant when we all first tried it so many years ago, back when the fish on the ends of our lines might have been bluegills or bullheads or chubs. In a word, it was fun.
Our last day on the island, the sun shone brightly. It was going to be a great day for bonefish. But for our last hurrah, Bob and I chose to hang up the fly rods and go explore the deep blue sea, trolling from the back of the outrigger canoe with lightweight spinning rods and lures the size of the bonefish we’d been catching.
Bob hooked up first, and brought a nice yellowfin tuna almost to the boat. That’s when we found out why our lodge is named the Shark Place: only the head of Bob’s tuna remained. The next hookup (also by Bob) was a big wahoo that put up a hell of a fight, and became great ceviche later that evening. And then we both hooked up in a double that turned out to be two heavy yellowfins, and both fish were hooked badly: Bob’s was foul-hooked near the pectoral fin, and mine had the tail hook of the big Rapala in its mouth and the front hook snagged in its gill plate. Anyone who has hooked a large fish aft of its mouth knows that the fish has only to tilt its pectorals, and the harder you pull, the more it planes away. With two big tuna circling under the boat and crossing our lines over and over, it took us an hour and half to get them both in.
If not for the aching muscles, joints, bones, and titanium hardware Bob and I both have bolted to our spines, I’m sure it would have been quite comical. Let’s just say we’ve never paid more for fresh ahi in our lives.
Christmas Island has everything a fisherman of any level of sophistication could desire. For serious fly fishers, the bonefish can be satisfyingly difficult at times, the milkfish delightfully impossible. For those with a sense of humor and lots of extra tackle, a bucket of chopped bait will bring in all the giant trevally and comic relief you can stand. And for knuckle-dragging troglodytes, like, say, me, take 800 mg of ibuprofen, cinch on your back brace, and find out what a 50-pound tuna feels like on the end of a light spinning rod.
A helpful hint: In most lodges there’s generator electricity only in the day, but on Christmas Island it runs only at night. You might consider packing a heating pad.
Rich Chiappone published his first story in Gray’s in 1991. His most recent collection was Opening Days: A Fly Fisher Writes, from Barclay Creek Press. Chiappone teaches in the MFA program at University of Alaska–Anchorage and lives with his wife and cats on the Anchor River—where none of the fish eat grass.
