Waikiki Sunrise
12x12 Oil
During the summer between seventh and eighth grade I worked as a deck hand for my step father, John. We both knew I was not the greatest deck hand. Still, he let me work for him, probably to please my mom. Though my duties were minimal, my time working with John was a gift I will forever be grateful for. I learned about the sea, boats, huge fish and a lot about what men were made of … all of it by absorbing anything and everything around me. John was a man of few words. When he spoke to me, it was in head nods, grunts and snorts. But I always got the point.
One day, this mainland guy chartered the boat, a sleek 38-foot haole sampan called the Kakina. This was in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, in the days before everyone on earth decided to move there. The harbor was pristine, and beautiful beyond measure.
We left the pier around seven in the morning and cruised out to the marlin grounds, trolling big-fish lures on five lines, leaving bubbly trails in the rich cobalt blue of Kona’s astonishingly deep waters.
The morning crept by with no action, the three of us alone with our daydreams, John at the wheel, the angler lounging on a deck bed, and me leaning against the gunnel in the blazing sun. The clock in the cabin inched ahead, tick, tick, tick … then …
BANG!
One of the massive rigs started wailing, the rod dancing in its shiny chrome holder, line zinging off the reel threatening to strip it in a manner of minutes. The angler leaped up and ran to pull the rod out, then staggered toward the fighting chair, barely able to keep the rod from flying out of his hands. He managed to hang on as he fell into the chair, his face red and already sweating. I quickly strapped a harness around his back and clipped it to the reel.
And the fight was on.
Though he tried to do more, he could do nothing but lean forward and hang on, the rod bowed out over the water. This was a big fish, and within moments, it had sounded, gone straight down. As any fisherman knows, you don’t want straight down. With each fathom, the pressure on the line increases, more and more and more, until it feels as if you’ve hooked a garbage truck.
After hours of inching that fish up to the boat, with more than three-quarters of the line still off the reel, John suggested that the angler call it a day. Cut the line. They’d be there all night at that rate.
But the angler refused. He was landing that fish if it took a week. John nodded, then looked at the taut line, which went straight down off the back of the boat. He reached out to touch it with a finger and thumb. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly, and motioned for me to touch the line as he had. “Feel that?” He whispered. I did. A very slight vibration, or jerking, way, way, way down there. “That’s sharks eating his fish,” he said.
It was well into night by the time the angler managed to get that fish up, nearly killing himself in the process. When it was just off the stern, John reached down with the gaff and hauled it aboard. A huge tuna, must have been four or five hundred pounds. Too bad all that was left of it was the head, the rest of it long gone to oceanic sharks.
But that angler never gave up. I had to hand it to him. He fought all the way down to his last gasp. His trophy was a fish head … and a story to tell that would live on for years.
“Waikiki Sunrise” is not a new painting. I painted it early on. And like that angler, I struggled, boy did I struggle. I had one goal in mind: to capture a sense of morning light on the tall buildings. As I battled with it, the sharks in my imagination took huge chunks out of my self-confidence as a painter. But I pressed on. And on. And on.
My trophy is much like that angler’s — a story, a point, a lesson. Never give up. Never. He got his fish head and I got my morning light. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. Even if it did half kill us both.
