Anglers cast in unsteady economy
Kona man counts on tourists looking for big catch
KAILUA-KONA, Hawai‘i — For some, fish tales are a matter of pride. For Momi Bean, they’re a living.
A few dozen people crowd the poolside bar at the Kona Coast Resort this Sunday afternoon just before the summer season to hear the 33-year-old charter boat captain’s stories of the sea, and to taste the prized Hawaiian ono, prepared with Momi’s “secret Hawaiian glaze.” He has just 45 minutes to convince these urban time-share dwellers, many of whom have never even dangled a bread ball for carp in a city lake, that going after the famous Kona billfish is an experience they must not miss.
Reeling them in means he could fill this week’s frighteningly empty schedule and will sail, and therefore will get paid by the boat’s owner. Losing them means he puts off for a little longer his dreams for the coming year: running his own boat full time, and buying a home for his family.
“You can catch a fish from 3 pounds to 1,000 pounds out here,” he tells the folks as they “ooh” and “ahh” and gingerly finger the hooks on giant fake-squid lures. “It’s really something to see a 1,000-pound marlin come out of the water like a semitruck and do doughnuts behind your boat.”
When he arrives at the fish fry he has only one morning booked. By the time he leaves, he has only one morning free, having nearly filled the week with a mix of full- and half-day trips. He has hooked the crowd with tales of Kona’s glorious fishing past, of the celebrities that used to fish with his grandfather (“The first of three generations of Bean captains!”) and has landed them with the steaming-hot ono, which tastes even better in the strategically chosen pre-dinner hour, and looks even better when lovingly presented by his wife, Darcy. It is their weekly ritual.
Momi carries the legacy of the great billfish hunters that made Kona renowned in the early 20th century, the Hemingways and the Londons and the captains who took them to sea in search of big game. With about 100 other captains in Honokohau Harbor, the largest charter-fishing port in the state, Momi is part of an industry that pumps an estimated $17 million a year into Hawai‘i’s $10 billion tourism economy. He and the others also are part of tourism’s shadow workforce: those not among the 10 percent employed in the Big Island’s hotels and airlines, the only sectors identifiable as tourism per se. But Momi, and others like him, depend on visitors for their livelihood just the same.
And like many of them, Momi straddles the socio-economic divide between the people who visit the Kona-Kohala coast and the people who work in its tourism industry. The Big Island’s sunny Kona side has a split personality, with Microsoft millionaires and private-jet patrons filling the posh Kohala resorts north of the harbor where rooms begin at $250 a night, and less wealthy, but still well-off visitors, taking rooms in the lesser hotels and elegant timeshares to the south. Like many Kona fishermen, Momi has a healthy roster of wealthy clients who book him every year. But in the off-season, he draws most of his anglers from the weekly fish frys at the timeshare.
Instability has been the biggest plague for Momi and other tourism workers. As the rest of the state limped through the ’90s, the Big Island crawled, with arrival numbers that see-sawed and hotel occupancy rates that often trailed statewide rates by double digits. The island has narrowed that gap over the past three years, but last year was another soft spot, with arrivals flat and occupancy tumbling.
Foundering in the empty waters and looking for a new captain’s gig, Momi wound up taking out loans last year, and eventually moved his family of five into his sister’s house.
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| Three-year-old Nainoa Bean checks out the day’s catch as his father, Momi, slices some fillets on the tailgate of his truck. The elder Bean takes visitors out to sea on charter trips in search of big-game fish. He hopes to make enough money to run his own boat and buy a home for his family. |
“Some of the other guys, they don’t go out and do fish frys,” says Darcy, a stay-at-home mom to Avery, 6, Naia, 4, and Nainoa, 3. “But for us, this is it. This is our way of keeping it going.”
But the Beans are hoping this year will be different. This year, Big Island tourism marketers are shooting for a 1.7 percent increase in visitor days, that is, the number of visitors multiplied by the number of days they stay, the best figure outside of spending for measuring tourism’s economic impact. With $2.4 million in state money — more than twice as much as years past — the Big Island Visitors Bureau is promoting the island’s myriad events, including fishing tournaments, through national advertising campaigns and outreach to wholesalers and travel agents. Creating and promoting events is a major part of the state’s overall strategy to get visitors spending more, and this year the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority awarded $3.7 million to 28 Hawai‘i happenings, including $100,000 for Big Island fishing events.
Big Island visitors are up through June, and on the extravagant Kohala Coast, hotel occupancy rates are running at a healthy 77 percent, according to hospitality consultancy PKF-Hawai‘i. New flights from St. Louis and Los Angeles started in May and could be helping the numbers. And if events such as last month’s Hawai‘i International Billfish Tournament prod the pace along over the next 12 months, it could eliminate some of the circles of uncertainty that surround Momi.
Momi doesn’t know from week to week if there will be clients, from day to day if there will be fish. But a steadier stream of visitors could tame at least one of those unknowns, and might offer the financial foundation to move his family to their own home, and to become self-employed. Momi is now half-owner of a boat he calls the Hukilau — “to pull in fish.” The vessel came to him in a recent deal with a Mainland benefactor and he hopes to buy out his partner. Running the boat full time could raise his annual income by about 50 percent to $35,000, Momi says, a number that right now he can only dream about, even if he brings in extra cash by helping an angler win a tournament.
“That’s what’s coming up when I start my business,” he says. “This is an opportunity for me to make a living on my own.”
A day on the water
Bob Boyden has signed up at the fish fry for one of Momi’s excursions and shows up at Honokohau Harbor, with his son-in-law and grandson, at 6:15 a.m. sharp on a Monday. After a stop at the pier-side deli The Fish Dock for bear claws, coffee, and a hat with a big blue marlin logo to shade grandpa’s thinning pate, they board “The Wild West,” with Momi as their captain.
“Listening to him helped,” says Bob, a 64-year-old real estate agent from Whidbey Island, Wash., who spent his boyhood on a dairy farm. “I’ve thought about it, but never had the guts to do it.”
Bob is not the kind of fisherman that made Kona famous, but he is the type of casual tourist angler that is a growing part of business these days. Kona still has a solid base of wealthy, die-hard fishermen who come exclusively for tournaments, and who Momi and tournament organizers say will drop $20,000 on a three- or four-day trip.
“These guys are millionaires, every one of ’em,” Momi says.
Momi gets a chance to at least taste their lifestyle if he’s lucky enough to have a tournament’s winning team aboard. This year, roughly $1 million in tournament prize money will be offered in Kona. Momi is already booked for several events offering purses totaling $500,000, 40 percent of which would go to him and his crew. A win could make a nice contribution toward the $40,000 Momi figures he needs for a house.
The affluent tournament hounds paint a stark contrast with middle-class Momi. But even the captain’s regular clients are as different from him as Kohala’s cushy resorts are from the rugged lava they sit on. Bob will spend $350 on today’s half-day trip. Momi will take home $85. His mate will take home $55. The rest will go toward expenses and the boat’s owner. They will split whatever tips Bob is generous enough to give. Most of these casual anglers, according to a preliminary report by the University of Hawai‘i’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, are professional men from the Mainland, in their 40s, making $100,000 a year or more.
The early morning brings Bob and his boys a few 12-pound skipjacks, a couple of ahi; but just before noon, 10-year-old Ryan hooks a 31-pound mahimahi.
“C’mon, c’mon!” Dad and Grandpa yell as Ryan reels and reels until the stub-headed creature arrives next to the boat. Momi’s mate for the day, Del Wheaton, hauls the shimmering aqua-green fish over the side to the whoops of the crowd.
“That’s my first grandson,” Bob says with a puffed chest, “so we’re going to get that first fish mounted.”
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| Momi Bean cruises through Honokohau Harbor on his recently acquired boat. He hopes to go into business for himself some day. |
Today is a good day for Del, too. Momi’s usual man is sick, giving Del a chance at some unexpected cash. Like many in Kona’s tourist fishing business who do not own their own boats, Del goes from boat to boat, taking whatever work he can get, which is sometimes as captain, sometimes as crew.
But in the slow times, like last fall, Del tries to make ends meet by fishing on his own for something to sell at markets and restaurants.
“All charter boat fishermen live on the edge — the edge of everybody else’s hands,” Del says. “Even me going and catching fish on a commercial boat. If there are no tourists here, there’s nobody to eat the fish. I’m 100 percent dependent on the tourists. If we had no tourists here eating the fish, I’d pretty much not be able to get a high enough price.”
Some of 31-year-old Del’s plans could hinge on the number of visitors to the island this year, as he and his girlfriend consider an October wedding. The honeymoon could be in Mexico’s Cabo San Lucas, where Del hopes to work a fishing tournament. But if things are rough, he jokes, plans could change.
“It might be an overnight fishing trip on my skiff,” he says.
Del and Momi make it their business to give the visitors their money’s worth, and by the time Bob and his family carry their fish off the boat to the delighted squeals of mom and grandma, the former landlubber is ready to go again.
“We’ll be booking another trip next week,” he says eagerly as Momi hands him his freshly filleted catch.
Trickle down
A second trip for the Boyden family will also be good business for The Fish Dock. Bob’s $20 transaction earlier in the day is one that takes place 50 times a day at the pier-side deli — as long as visitor traffic is good, says store manager Colleen O’Brien.
“We’ve been steadily going up every month since we took over, and each year we think we can’t do any better,” she says of the business she and a partner opened four years ago this summer. “The last two years, the incentive groups have made a major impact on all the boating activities — the Zodiacs, the whale watching, the parasailing. They do them all.”
This year, The Fish Dock expects to clear about $750,000 in sales, Colleen says, getting a big boost from those groups that flood the coast’s resorts.
Their worst time was in January 1997, she says. The weather was bad and the fishermen didn’t leave the harbor.
“When we first started, they were our business,” she says.
Colleen and Del and Momi will be watching to see whether the next several months bring them more or fewer visitors than years past. They may not see the official statistics, might not even know where they’re kept. But they will know by their own thumb measure, and by the dreams they are able to reach.
For Momi, a half-acre somewhere quiet would mean it’s been a good year. To help it along, he’ll spend the next several months trolling for fish and for visitors — and keeping his fingers crossed.
“Maybe,” he says, “I’ll win a big $200,000 tournament this year.”
