From a sunny 84 to minus 16

This past Tuesday on the Big Island of Hawaii the temperature reached 84 degrees midday. Thursday morning when I got up to go to my part-time job in Palmer, it was -16 in Big Lake. Yes, I guess we’re back home in Alaska!

I got out fishing one evening while in Hawaii. The location was a small bay maybe a mile from where we were staying. This particular bay has a public boat launch, a small section of beach, and was otherwise surrounded by either a seawall or rocky cliff faces maybe 10 to 15 feet above the waterline.

I had tried fishing in this same bay a couple of times during the early morning hours. While I saw several small reef fish, maybe a half-dozen eels (the biggest being maybe 3-feet long) and a “puffer” fish in the incredibly clear saltwater, I never did get a solid bite on either the tako (octopus) or the shrimp I was using for bait.

There was a lot of both commercial and private boating activity, starting at first light, in this bay. Snorkeling charters, scuba charters, sightseeing boats, private fishing boats, and canoe racers were coming and going throughout the daylight hours. If I was a fish, I would have been keeping a low profile too!

After it got dark and all the boat activity was done, fish did move into the bay. For the couple of hours that I had a line in the water after dark, I saw a fairly large school of bait fish (some as long as 8-10 inches) splashing and literally jumping out of the water probably a half-dozen times. I don’t know what was chasing them but whatever it was, it never bit on my tako-baited hook either.

Several times I felt fish bumping my fishing line but I never did get a solid bite. I got hung up three or four times on the bottom and ended up breaking off a couple of sets of weights and hooks. It’s tough to see what you’re doing in the dark, even with the couple of street lights shining off in the distance in the parking lot of the boat launch!

Both my wife and I really enjoyed the Big Island. It’s my favorite of the three Hawaiian islands we have visited over the years because of the diversity of climates and places you have to explore.

We stayed on the western side of the island near Kona. This side experiences less than 10 inches of rainfall each year! As we drove around the west side and explored the road system, we actually saw cactus growing wild in the grass fields. Who ever heard of cactus in Hawaii?

The eastern, or Hilo side of the island, typically gets over 150 inches of rainfall each year and is your basic tropical forest environment. We never got over there but we plan to go back and explore the eastern side of the island to compare.

The island has two large volcanoes which are responsible for the climate difference between sides. The northern volcano is dormant while the southern one is actively pumping out lava on a nearly daily basis. That’s something else we ran out of time on – a visit to the area on the south side of the island where the lava is flowing into the ocean and creating an ever increasing landmass.

They say if you visit the lava flows right at dusk, you can see the glow of the flowing lava from a good ways off. That would be fun to see but I’m not sure how close I want to get to 3000 degree melted rock!

We did make a trip up to the Waimea area, which is the home base for some of the largest cattle ranches in the United States. Along the roads in the area is where we saw a lot of the cactus noted earlier.

This also is the area where a lot of hunting on the island occurs. The only time we experienced any rainfall while visiting Hawaii occurred as we drove into the town. A light, misty rain was falling, but it only lasted about 30 minutes before the sun came back out.

The town of Waimea is located at an elevation of about 2500 feet above sea level. The temperatures here were 7-10 degrees cooler than down near the coast and, instead of seeing everybody dressed in shorts and tee-shirts, the locals were all wearing long pants (mostly blue jeans) and button shirts.

At one shop in the main shopping center in town, we stopped in and I enquired where the two locals inside had gotten the sharpening steels they were carrying in the knife scabbard each had on his belt.

I hadn’t seen any sort of outdoor tools carried by anybody in Hawaii until meeting these two guys. They noticed my Alaska tee-shirt and we were soon discussing hunting, fishing, and outdoor activities in general.

After five minutes, it was like we had known each other for years – the people of Hawaii are really friendly!

We’re already planning our next trip to the Big Island. I’ve got fish to catch and pigs to hunt! Aloha!

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by e-mailing sports@frontiersman.com.