Colorful Cooler

[lawaia]

A buddy and I were all set to do some offshore deep bottom jigging between islands here in Hawaii when weather alerts warning of thunderstorms and waterspouts started popping up.  With the winds almost nonexistent and the seas rarely as calm, we decided to go anyway, hoping that the weather forecasters were wrong.  Turned out they were both right and wrong.  They were right that there would be thunderstorms because, all night long, we saw lightning flashes over the islands of Oahu, Molokai, and Maui but where we were the skies were clear and we could see a gazillion stars above us.  Best of all, the fish were biting!  The cooler is full of colorful Hawaiian bottom fish, most of them opakapaka a delicious pink snapper.  Aloha.

[Bryan Young]

Ooh, yum...Opakapaka is my favorite.  My second is Moi.

Glad you caught taape...schools of this invasive fish is eating up everything in sight.  They are good eating too, btw.

[Ron Jones]

Great haul!! Wish I could do something like that on Oahu. Taape is nummy and I am starting to have decent sucess catching them.

Enjoy your dinner
Ron

[saltydog]

Looks like a lot of good eating.

[Bryan Young]

Great haul!! Wish I could do something like that on Oahu. Taape is nummy and I am starting to have decent sucess catching them.

Enjoy your dinner
Ron

Ron, please catch the entire school.  There are so much and it's sufficating local fish.  Taape was brought in for aquaculture and a few got out...and you know what happens next.  I believe last year, they halled out 3 tons of Taape, and it didn't even make a dent in the population.  They are good eating and good bait...

[Ron Jones]

I'm trying. The girls get them out of the bigger tide pools. Not much bigger than a half a pound, no where near a tittie-bream but still can make a meal out of a few. The big ones get soft.

Ron

[lawaia]

Ooh, yum...Opakapaka is my favorite.  My second is Moi.

Glad you caught taape...schools of this invasive fish is eating up everything in sight.  They are good eating too, btw.

Bryan - You're right about the taape being good eating.  We caught and ate a lot of them when we used to do a lot of shallow bottom fishing.  Back in those days the taape were established but not in the large schools of today, and they were mostly found in the shallower waters, maybe 150' or less.  The scary thing nowadays is that the fish in the cooler pictured in my OP were all caught in the deep, the great majority being the 'paka, but also including a few taape, an uku, an ulua, and even a weke ula.  Hopefully our deep water snappers can eat enough of the taape when they venture deep to keep them from taking over!

BTW, I believe the taape (and the roi) were purposely brought to Hawaii and released into the ocean to provide a shallow bottom snapper alternative to the deep snappers.  The taape never caught on as a food source because its green/yellow/blue appearance wasn't attractive to the consumer used to the red and pink onaga, ehu, 'paka, etc.  The roi established itself but in lesser numbers than the taape (thankfully) but it has a tendency to and reputation for carrying ciguatera, so the public shuns eating it.

Introducing taape and roi were a couple of BIG mistakes made back in the day when the science wasn't as good as today.

Ron - I'm surprised you can find taape in tidal pools.  Hope they aren't going for domination of tidal pools as well as nearshore and the deep!  Catching them and removing them from the sea are good things to do, no matter where.

Aloha and tight lines.

[Ron Jones]

The last ones we got were out of Ko Olina. The pools over there keep a lot of fish and the snapper hide under larger rocks in ambush. The one we got was maybe 6 inches long or so.

Ron