In order to meet Brooks Takenaka at 5am, I fall out of bed at 430, groggy, dizzy, and luckily, jet lagged enough so that it’s not too much of a shock. I’m happy not to be driving, it’s hard enough to navigate Honolulu by day, all those street names made up of Ks and Ls and Is all run together. Luckily, I’ve overlapped in Hawaii with photographer and travel buddy Peter Carey and he’s psyched to tag along, even at 5am. That’s a good travel buddy.
We find the market with no trouble at all — when we pull in to the lot it’s lively under the bright lights, big guys in rubber boots are walking around moving palettes of huge fish, they’re laughing and joking with each other, standing outside smoking cigarettes. We check in at the office and meet Brooks, then we walk through a disinfectant bath into the warehouse. It’s cold and bright and there are long line of whole tuna (two kinds, note the fins), opah, and some billfish, chopped up into sections because apparently, the meat cracks if you try to deal with the entire fish.
Brooks is a super welcoming and funny guy with an engaging patter and a clear fondness for the ladies. Maybe hanging out with fishermen — and really, this is a guy’s world, I’m one of the very few women around on this dark, warm morning, — makes you appreciate the company of the opposite sex. He pulls me right in to the midst of 20-30 guys — all of them in rubber boots, carrying big knives — and introduces me. “She’s a writer from Seattle,” he says, “and she’s watching us, so try to behave!” And the action begins.
It all goes so fast. A guy reaches in to feel the cut from the tail, another to feel the core sample punched from the side of the fish. The guy next to me flips the gills back and looks at the fish’s insides. Brooks is calling numbers, someone is taking notes, yet another big guy in a white lab coat is scribbling things down and slapping tags on the fish as they’re auctioned off. It happens very fast, this cloud of guys moves along the pallets of fish, and then, we’re at the end of this lot and another auctioneer takes over.
There’s a culinary school in the market that morning too, all of them in their white jackets, listening closely as their teacher tells them what to look for, talking about knives and marine biology and fishing practices. Honestly, it’s a blur, and I’m happy to have Peter along taking pictures so I can just listen, so I can ask questions that I’ve since forgotten the answer to. I remember that it’s about oil — isn’t everything! — though it’s fish oil at this market, the fish with the highest oil content fetch the highest prices. Though interestingly enough, later on the docks I talked to a guy who buys for mainland markets and he looks for lower oil content, he says his clients don’t like the fatter fish. Some of the fish leaves this market for Japan, others stay locally and are served that day as sushi, still more end up in my local supermarkets in Seattle.
I’m amazed by how friendly everyone is. It’s a bit of an intimidating place, things move fast, guys who are over six feet tall and four feet wide, it seems, are walking around with big knives and swinging great sharp hooks about, and they’re smiling and chatty and asking us where we’re from and what we’re doing there. Bigger names than I have come through here with TV crews and celebrity chefs, so they’re used to the interest from outsiders, but I expected we’d be in the way. I remember being in a broker’s office in New York once, many years ago, where the guys would run you down if you were standing in the wrong place. Here they throw the “shaka” at you, and say, “Hey, careful, watch your step, move that way just a little please, if you don’t mind…”
We watch a boat come in, a wiry dog is resting his paws on the side of rail. Two guys stand around blowing big pink bubbles and chatting with us about fishing. One of the guys said he used to go to sea, but one time he came back and his kids called him “Uncle” so he decided it was time to work on land. “It kinda hurt my feelings, you know?”
Lots of these guys used to fish, and for one reason or another, they’re working the auction now. They know the fish in an almost intuitive way, they read the pinkish brown oily meat, the bounce of the body as they push on the side of the big tuna, the texture as they roll the samples between their fingers. They’re second, third, fourth generation handlers of fish in some way or other, they don’t so much learn this job as grow up in it, learning what to look for from their uncles and their fathers.
In the marina, Brooks tells us it’s okay to board one of the boats and we look at the swirling pink fishing lines and the array of heavy hooks. It’s not a very big deck — there are a pile of crab traps and floats taking up a good portion of it, and a work table and that’s about it. I peek into the claustrophobic cabin at a little table covered with junk food and I decide that’s boat enough for me for the day.
I like seeing this place, I like it a lot. I like watching the color of the sky change over the marina, I like the low rumble of the motors as the boats come in and I like these big friendly guys who are hard at work but still have time to say Good Morning to a couple of curious mainlanders. I want to hang out here every morning for a week, to have lunch with Brooks Takenaka when he’s not working so I can learn more about what he does and how things work at the market. I want to buy a big tuna, have it butchered and shipped to my home in Seattle and I want to eat it, flash fried with a little soy sauce and then sliced very thin, on top of a big pile of soba noodles tossed in sesame oil.
Peter’s excellent pics of our field trip are here.
Disclaimer: Travel and accommodation portions of my trip were sponsored by the Oahu Visitor’s Bureau in exchange for my blogging about my experiences in Hawaii.
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