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fish up to the boat. I could see it flashing silver and blue under the surface. It was long, the biggest fish I’d ever seen!
    When the leader rose up out of the water, Baja Bill grabbed it with a gloved hand. The leader was made of wire and was attached to the lure. “This leader is wire because fish have sharp teeth!” he said.
    Ledward slapped me on the back. “You just caught yourself an ono, Calvin.”
    I stayed in the chair, stretching to see what the fish looked like.
    Baja Bill peered over the gunnel holdingthe gaff, a huge steel hook on a pole. He reached over the side and hooked the splashing fish. It thumped the side of the boat. Baja Bill knocked it out with a wooden mallet, then dragged it aboard.
    It was wet and shiny and long and silvery with blue stripes. It had about a hundred small, sharp-looking teeth. Good thing the leader was wire.
    Baja Bill stuck his hand in its gills and held it up. It was almost as tall as me!
“This,”
he said, “is a nice catch. My guess is it’s around forty pounds, and for an ono, that’s a big fish.”

    Ledward opened the fish box built into the deck, and Baja Bill lowered the ono into it. Ledward tore open a bag of ice and spread the ice over the fish.
    I couldn’t believe I’d just caught it. “He was strong,” I said, holding the rod with trembling hands.
    Baja Bill grinned. “But you were stronger.”

B aja Bill fired up and headed the
Kakalina
out to deeper sea.
    The engines hummed endlessly. It took ten minutes for my hands to stop shaking.
    Sometime around noon, I was lounging in the fighting chair watching two dark seabirds skimming the water, looking for food. Theyflew so smooth and perfect they almost put me to sleep.
    Baja Bill got on his radio and called the skipper of another boat. I could hear him talking about where the fish action was that day.
    Ledward came up to stand beside me. “Can you believe how close those birds can get to the water?”
    “I wish I could fly like that. What are they called?”
    “Wedge-tailed shearwater.
’U’au kani
is the Hawaiian name.”
    “Hey,” Baja Bill called from the flying bridge. He pointed. “Look.”
    About a half mile away, a swirling mass of birds circled the sea. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.
    Ledward gave Baja Bill a thumbs-up and hung on to the fighting chair as Bill swung the boat around to head toward the swirling black specks. “Birds like that mean fish.”
    Within minutes, we were cruising through them. It was the most amazing thing I’d everseen. Birds everywhere, like a cloud of them. And we were right in the middle of it.

    “Talk about a feeding frenzy,” Ledward said. “These birds are called noio. They don’t skim like your shearwater. These ones dive-bomb.”
    Boy, did they. From high above, they plunged down into the sea, snatching small fish out of the ocean.
    A fish the size of a pocketknife landed on the deck. Then another, and another. “Flying fish,” Ledward said, tossing them back into the water. “They’re being scared up by bigger fish down below.”
    We trolled back and forth through the birds, the lures jumping and plunging behind the boat.
    Birds swirled around the wake, and—
    Bang!
    Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
    Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
    A reel screamed! The rod bent forward, way more than when the ono had hit. It was an outside rod, starboard side, and it looked like it was about to snap in half.
    I jumped out of the fighting chair and scrambled into the cabin to get out of the way.
    Baja Bill brought the engines down and Ledward leaped for the jumping rod. Behind the boat, a monster fish burst out of the water, twisting and shaking and turning the water white. It was loosely hooked at the jaw. The lure flopped against its head.
    The long bill told me it was a marlin.
    “Yai!”
I yelped.
    The marlin fell back into the ocean with a
whoomp
of exploding water and vanished. Ledward struggled to pull the rod out of itsholder. The engines grumbled as the boat