A Photos Worth

Aloha! What an exciting experience to be part of this great effort to perpetuate and celebrate our lifestyle and culture of fishing here in Hawaii! And I could not think of a better way to help than to celebrate our past! One thing I hope to do with future contributions here is to connect readers with some of our fishing history and offer a glimpse into days gone by. Most of the focus will be on the modern era of fishing in Hawaii, the origin of which is generally perceived to coincide with the start of the 20^th century. While I am not in any way knowledgeable about fishing history and techniques of the ancient Hawaiians, they are still the foundation of our modern day fishing and I hope to include some input from those that are more qualified. Ironically, there is a lot more historical information documented on the ancient or traditional fishing in Hawaii than contemporary fishing between 1900 and 1970s. This gap became really evident after talking with fishermen of the two generations before ours and this is what originally got me interested in recording our more recent fishing history.

Fortunately for me, research in this area means that I get to do a lot of interviews and talking story with some truly nice people. My hobbies have shifted and evolved over the years but talking to older fishermen is the one thing that I still do and have always enjoyed the most.  While some may take a little sensitivity to hearing the term “older fishermen”, I use it with great respect, knowing that there is much to learn for the fishermen of today from the experiences and wisdom of the old timers. I never get tired of hearing an experienced fisherman describe their life adventures pursuing the Hawaii shorecaster’s trophy of all game fish, the ulua. And as others will relate to this experience as I did with my late grandfather, I would often hear the stories more than once.

You also get some interesting perspectives listening to these stories. My grandfather mentioned that he hung up his fishing rods in 1949 because, at that time, he felt there were just too many other fishermen. He came to that conclusion one day where, after a hard day at work and long drive to out of the city, he couldn't find a spot to fish because the entire length of Nanakuli beach was lined with rods. Today, the sport is just as, if not more, popular and I cannot help but wonder what he would have thought of fishing in 2007.

Any time I talk to people, I make sure to always ask if they have old fishing pictures to share as I love coming across old photos and never pass up the chance to study them. And since the average working person took photos on the spur of the moment with their personal camera and their home as a backdrop, the images tell a lot about what everyday life was like at a particular time period. For an antique tackle collector like me, these photos tell a lot about what types of gear were popular or affordable for the fishing community at the time. But often times most frustrating of all, they tell just enough about the people in them to make me ask more questions!

The printed photographic image is a fantastic invention. I often wonder if Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the inventor of modern practical photographic reproduction, realized what he had done in the early 1800s upon gazing at that very first lifelike captured moment in time. When I look at old photos, it just baffles my mind to realize that I am able to look into the past with such detail. It seems as though the people in them could just walk out of the image and come to life. This is especially true with the older black and white or sepia images that endure years and years. Unfortunately, many of the later color photos of the 60s, 70s and even 80s have not held up so well since they were taken with cheap cameras designed for the “instant” lifestyle we have become accustomed to.

Yet even with as much detail that has been captured in these old images, all too often I come across photos of fishermen where I don’t know a single thing about the person or the story behind the picture. In these instances it is sometimes sad, considering the circumstances around how I find them. In the case of family photos, many times the photo subject has passed on and family members don’t know much. I also look through antique stores a lot but while I rarely find any fishing photos, I do see many family albums that sometimes date back to the 1930s. I often wonder how they end up for sale and can’t help but think that some family member should have been able to keep them. So on those rare occasions when I have come across a Hawaii fishing photo this way, emotions and questions are even more compelling.

On more than one occasion, I have had the feeling that I was guided to or somehow assisted in finding particular photos that I otherwise would not have ever come across. Now I’m not generally a superstitious person but it’s happened more frequently than what I would call coincidental. I do believe that our ancestors remain with us on this Earth in some manner, giving us a hand in ever so gentle and subtle ways. One friend had let me copy his grandfather’s collection of photos which were important records of early fishing clubs in Hawaii. Included were group photos of his grandfather and some fellow Honolulu Japanese Casting Club members taken during some of their activities. He said he tried for weeks to find a particular photo, that of a statue of the Buddhist guardian god, Jizo, erected by the club at Bamboo Ridge on the island of Oahu. He had all but given up and then, one day, it appeared on top of a stack of papers, as if someone had placed it there for him to find. The odd thing was that he was sure he had checked that stack several times over and no one else in his family (at least in this world) had anything to do with it.

Another collection of photos came to me rather mysteriously and out of the blue, with the previous owner saying he acquired them at the old Waialae Drive-In swap meet during the 1970s. They were loose photos and clearly from the 1930s but they lacked any information that people sometimes jot down on the reverse side. They were a great addition to my growing library of old photos but I was resigned to the fact that I may never learn anything more about them. Over a year or so, I often pulled them out to study and the more I looked at them the more something kept telling me to look closer. Enlarging them with the wonders of modern day home computers, I suddenly realized that I had seen some of the faces in these mystery photos somewhere else before. I pulled out my friend’s grandfather’s collection and, to my shock, the same men were staring back at me from those group photos. Unfortunately, to this day I have learned little about who these men were or anything more about the photos.

Sometimes my adventures do have happier endings. One of the very first photos that I found was in a Kailua antique shop and it recorded a man with his trophy sized oio. What struck me was that this fisherman was unusually well dressed for a fish photo and looked quite spiffy in his dress shirt and hat. I had that photo for about 2 years and often wondered about the man and his fish story. About that same time, I was doing research on fishing clubs that had come and gone and was contacting any one who might be able to help with information. I was making cold calls to people and many were surprised that I knew of their club since they had been inactive for so long. Despite that, people were always more than helpful.

One fellow I contacted about the Surfspinners of Hawaii had a wealth of information and photos of their club activities during the 1950s and 60s. I arranged to meet this fisherman at a Burger King restaurant where he and a few friends gathered for morning coffee. About mid-way of flipping through the pages of his photo album and marveling at the club’s impressive catches, my eyes were immediately drawn to a picture that looked all too familiar. It was the very same photo of the dapper looking young fisherman in his fedora. I blurted out with amazement that I had a copy of the same photo and the fellow looked at me rather puzzled. I naively asked him if he knew who the person in the picture was and his reply shot “chicken skin” across my whole body. “It’s me”, he said.

I don’t have too many experiences like that but I believe these two examples show just how small the islands are and how tight the fishing community is. That, fortunately, is often good for my research. Many times I’ve come to meet people after learning about them through other fishermen who give me names and information of the people in old photos that I’ve acquired. With pictures in hand first, I am able to learn of different events in these fellows lives, their interests and association with other fishermen, and understand a little bit about them before meeting in the present day. Those instances are a unique experience, where oftentimes I get to see their life experiences in sort of a time elapsed photography. When I have an image of what these fishermen looked like in their younger days, their fishing stories and the personal stories that they share come to life even more.

One man, whom I sought out after noticing him in a fishing club banquet photo, agreed to meet and talk about his experiences as a 20 something year old fisherman of the early 1950s. As we approached each other from a distance upon meeting and I recalled the image of him in the club photo, a smile broke out on my face. There in front of me was not the 77 year old man of today but the 20 something that was full of energy and fight to go after an ulua. We had a conversation over lunch where he explained how he and his gang fished extensively along the east coast of Oahu and the subject of Rabbit Island came up. I told him how my father explained to me when I was a young boy that the island was made off limits after the war because of unexploded ordnance and how some fishermen had been killed there. My heart sank as my new friend replied that it was his group on that trip and it was his younger brother that was killed in 1947. As he recounted the tragedy of that fateful day, I couldn’t help but see the image of that 20 – something year old fisherman again and how, as a young man, my new friend had to deal with the loss of a very close sibling.

My new friend had lost much of his personal photos and keepsakes of his brother throughout the years and hearing him talk about it left me with a sense of sadness. Memories are strong but they diminish little by little with each generation. It always seems a shame when things just fade away into history but that is, unfortunately, just part of life. The other day I was talking with a woman who was cleaning up some of her father's personal belongings after he had passed and she was in the midst of deciding their fate. Having gone through something similar with my own grandparents, we talked about our common experiences. There are so many things that "should be saved" or "a family member should keep" but the reality is that we simply have only so much time and room to keep track of the material things in our lives today. When I look into these old photos, windows that reach back into time, I find myself reminded that they captured special moments in the lives of the people in them. And then I eventually remember important thing is that what we do today and in the present makes our own special moments that need to be captured.

Some things to remember to help record your own fishing history:

Remember to bring a camera on your fishing trips. If you are like me and life demands make you shift priorities, good times tend to last only so long because people and places change. It really is important to capture these moments to remember.

Take informative photos too. I have a friend that took photos of all the places he’s gone to fish. While some trips were definitely once-in-a-lifetime events, he foresaw that he would one day put it all behind him. As part of the information you should record, make sure your photos show your tackle. Much as things don’t change in fishing, you’d be amazed at how much of a kick it is to look back and see how you used “antiques”. Those photos of “antiques” may also serve to document critical information for future historians.

As part of taking more informative photos, write down or record information on or along with your photos. Hand write them on hard copies if you still like paper or use one of the many options available today in photo editing and management software for digital images. Names and other information, like locations, date, and subject matter, all disappear from memory with the passing of each generation if not recorded.

Lastly, don’t forget to back up your photos and information. If you print hard copies, keep them in an environment that will aid in their preservation and not let them deteriorate over time (ie. store them in archival safe materials located in a cool, dry place, free of insects). In the past, the only worries were physical disasters like fire, flooding and bugs but if you are flowing with the current wave of technology and have digital photos, it is easy to forget that they need protection too. Computer crashes and virus attacks are the reality of the 21^st century. Make sure you have multiple copies of files and store them on various types of media to be safe (ie. CDs, back up hard drives or computers, online servers, etc.).

Now get out, catch some fish and take some nice photos that perpetuate our lifestyle and culture of fishing in Hawaii!