Its tournament season and blue marlin season but all of the Kona fishermen have had a hard case of the blues this month. If you’re at all familiar with the Kona fishery or even Hawaii fishing at all, the name Jim Rizzuto should be a quite familiar name to you. Jim lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on July 2nd. He kept the whole thing quite a secret and even his closest captain friends had no idea. I was lucky enough to be one of his last stories when he gave me the front page story of our local papers sports section with the catch and release of a 100 lb. giant trevally. Jim and I always had a good time talking about fishing because unlike most of the fishing fleet that just trolls lures all day, I like to target a wide variety of big game fish from the bottom depths. That gave Jim a bunch of stories over the years that veered from the typical Marlin, ahi, spearfish, mahi mahi and ono stories that are typically the only thing to write about. On this last one, I gave Jim the important details on the catch and then, because he was so familiar with my fishery, I told him “just have some fun with it” to see what interesting angles he could come up with on the story and in true fashion, it was another great one. I know Jim wished that I would call him more often about my catches than I did but when we did get on the phone together; the conversations seemed to last forever. We could really get into some lengthy chats. Jim was also quite familiar to the “garage sales” crowd. Jim and I would run into each other often and let each other know if someone was selling fishing gear. Jim was quite the collector and I even found myself picking up interesting fishing things from time to time just to give to Jim the next time we ran into each other while doing the garage sale circuit.
Considered the “go to” expert on any kind of Hawaii fishing, there was very little that Jim didn’t know about the fish and the varied techniques to catch them. Jim started writing about fishing in the 60’s and when my dad and I arrived in Hawaii in the early 80’s, buying Jims Hawaii fishing books were a MUST if you wanted to go catching instead of just fishing. Jim also wrote for Marlin Magazine, Saltwater Sportsman, Western Outdoors, Hawaii fishing News and several more but the one that will be missed most of all is his weekly fishing stories in the Kona (West Hawaii Today) paper. Along with these great stories were often some eye catching photos and “The Big Fish List” that let all of us fisherman know from a fairly large list, the biggest of each species caught in the year so far. All of that seems like it will be a thing of the past. There doesn’t seem to be anyone picking up the torch to keep the Kona citizens up to date on the fishing scene.
