THE OPEN PACIFIC
Men's Journal

There is a distinct sound that a big game fish makes when it hits a trolling lure. It's a deep, reverberating ka-thunk that sets people in motion as if a hand grenade had been lobbed in their midst. This sound suddenly reaches us over the roar of the powerful engines, and four heads snap toward it as one, four pairs of eyes scan the surface where the plastic squid had been skipping across the water just a moment before. And then all hell breaks loose. There's an explosion like a depth charge astern. One of the trolling rigs jerks with a crash, then doubles over violently, like a divining rod straining toward an artesian mother lode. Line zings off the reel with a sound that makes my blood race.

"Fish on!" yells crewman Mike Straight. With practiced motions he grabs the rod and leans back once, twice, striking hard to set the hook. "Big ahi. Steve, put on the belt!" I buckle on the fighting belt and Mike hands me the rod, then clears the five other trolling lines in a hurry. I jam the butt nock into the belt's gimbal cup just as the fish takes a hard run. Zingggg.

"Brace your thighs against the gunwale," Mike shouts over his shoulder. The ahi pulls me to my toes as the Yorktown slams into a roller. I almost go over the rail. I start to tighten the drag to slow the fish but catch myself. That's how big ones are lost. "Let him run," Mike orders as the reel sizzles. "Let him take all the line he wants. There's nothing you can do to stop him." The line shears through the water like a jigsaw, and for the next half-hour the ahi, or yellowfin tuna, a torpedo of a fish, one of the fastest swimmers in the sea, takes run after blistering run. From time to time I catch a glimpse of something white flashing through the water like a tracer bullet, easily ripping off whatever line I had struggled to reel in. My biceps are burning when the beautiful fish finally rises like a phantom from the depths and is gaffed aboard.

Twenty-foot rollers rush toward us from across the open ocean. From their peaks I can see Midway Atoll's sugary white beaches on the blue horizon. The tiny island looks adrift, lost at sea. Up in the steering console of the Yorktown, a thirty-eight-foot sportfishing boat, John Bone wrestles with the wheel as the vessel smashes through the heavy seas. The Yorktown lifts skyward as the waves roll under the hull, then slams down into the deep troughs. The boat is named for the World War II aircraft carrier that sank somewhere in these waters after taking three bombs and two torpedoes on a June day more than half a century ago.

On that day in 1942, the Imperial Navy of Japan launched a Kido Butai, a Carrier Strike Force, against Midway in a bold attempt to seize the atoll as a stepping stone for attacks against Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. At the time, the U.S. Navy was still reeling from the devastating assault on Pearl Harbor six months earlier. For the Americans the situation was desperate. But the Yanks held one secret advantage: their intelligence officers had cracked the Japanese code, and that made all the difference.

Admiral Nagumo's strike force steamed into an ambush. In one of the greatest naval battles in history, American aircraft flew desperate sorties from airfields on Midway and from three aircraft carriers, the Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet. Uncertain if they had enough fuel to return to base, American fliers crippled the Japanese fleet, sending four carriers, a heavy cruiser, 253 planes, and 3,500 pilots and sailors to the bottom. The Battle of Midway was Japan's last offensive, and it marked the turning point of the war in the Pacific.

If the vast Pacific is like the universe, its myriad islands like the stars burning bright in the midnight sky, then Midway Atoll is a tiny constellation at the far edge of the cosmos. Indeed, flying to Midway is as close to space travel as I've ever come.

The little nineteen-passenger Gulfstream turboprop jumped off the tarmac at Kauai's Lihue Airport at sunset, then gained altitude above the fluted cliffs of the Na Pali coast. Through the large oval window I watched Niihau and then the little rock outcrop called Nihoa slide by under the wings. The sky turned a deep indigo and the powerful Rolls Royce engines hummed through the night as the plane worked its way up the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, traveling from star to star. I followed our progress on the chart that Gail, the lone flight attendant, gave me, and tried to memorize the fantastic names: Disappearing Island, La Perouse Pinnacle, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles, Laysan Island, Pearl and Hermes Reef. Beyond all of these, at the very edge of the chart, was a little speck: Midway, quite likely the most remote inhabited spot on earth.

These islands are the forgotten Hawaii, a galaxy of reefs, rocky outcrops, and sandy beaches stretching northwest across the Pacific for some 1,200 miles beyond Kauai, the most isolated of the main Hawaiian Islands. Little known, rarely visited, and for the most part uninhabitable, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have been off-limits to virtually everyone except military personnel and a handful of wildlife biologists for nearly a century.

From its discovery in 1859 through the early decades of the 20th century, Midway Atoll was a place apart, a tiny strand of coral at the edge of the imagination. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt placed Midway under Navy jurisdiction to protect the atoll's seabird populations from Japanese plume hunters. Later that year, Roosevelt sent the first round-the-world telegraph message through a cable link on Midway. But it was the events of June 4-6, 1942, that brought these obscure islets to the world's attention. From then on the atoll's strategic importance was not in doubt, and the U.S. maintained a strong military presence here throughout the Cold War.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent military cutbacks, the military's tenure ended in June 1997, when a skeleton crew of five Navy officers set sail from here for the last time. The necklace of three low-lying coral islands and a frothy reef, all encircling an exquisite twenty-five-square-mile turquoise lagoon, was transferred from the military to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). In a ground-breaking arrangement, the USFWS subcontracted with private companies to provide wildlife-oriented recreation on the atoll.

Ironically, the Navy may have saved Midway's wildlife from the complex web of problems that has cost the main Hawaiian Islands more than 80 percent of their indigenous species, the most devastating loss of an archipelago's wildlife anywhere on earth. The atoll is home to the largest Laysan albatross colony and the second largest black-footed albatross colony in the world. Each year the diminutive atoll hosts an extravagant display of more than two million birds, including shearwaters, petrels, tropic birds, boobies, and terns. Perhaps most impressive are its great frigatebirds, which hang in the sky for hours on end, barely changing positions, like stationary kites with eight-foot wingspans.

Midway is also one of the last refuges of the endangered Hawaiian monk seal and the threatened Pacific green sea turtle, as well as an important sanctuary for the Hawaiian spinner dolphin. The reef teems with some 266 species of fish, and the offshore waters are busy with blue marlin, Pacific sailfish, tuna, wahoo, and mahimahi.

As the Gulfstream droned through the night, I had an eerie feeling that I was speeding back through time. The airship itself spoke of a more romantic era, a time when air travel was still infused with a sense of adventure. The anachronistic sound of the propellers, the lavishly appointed cabin, even Gail with her prim blue skirt reaching well below her knees and her freshly starched white shirt, seemed out of place in the 1990s. I couldn't shake the feeling that my fellow passengers and I had somehow boarded the ghost of the Pan American Clipper, the luxurious flying boat of the 1930s that stopped overnight on Midway to refuel en route to the Far East.

Five hours later, lights twinkled improbably in the blackness outside the aircraft. The Gulfstream steered towards them, then touched down and taxied to a cavernous hangar. It was one thirty in the morning. Exiting the aircraft, I heard a chaotic whistling and screeching and clacking that rose from the darkness beyond the runway floodlights.

A figure stepped from the shadows and introduced herself as Barbara Maxfield, of the USFWS. She ushered me under a giant sign proclaiming Naval Air Facility Midway, past a brace of enormous ship anchors, and into the hangar, where I was assigned lodging. A few minutes later I settled into my room in Bravo Barracks, a former bachelor officer's quarters. I snapped off the light and fell asleep to the bizarre hullabaloo emanating from just outside my window.

The source of the strange noises was revealed the next morning when I opened my door onto the hallway and was greeted by an enormous bird with huge, webbed feet. This creature, which looked like a giant seagull, had the most piercing, intelligent eyes of any bird I have ever seen. It was an albatross, and I followed as it waddled down the long linoleum corridor and out the door into the bright sunshine, where it introduced me to thousands of its close friends and relatives.

"Incredible, isn't it?" asked Barbara. She had sidled up to me while I stood, dumbfounded, trying to comprehend the scene before me. There were albatross everywhere, tens of thousands of them. There were albatross wheeling in the sky on great seven-foot wings; albatross sitting on the nests that covered virtually every square foot of the island; albatross incubating huge eggs that looked like something out of the Flintstones. Strangest of all were the pairs of albatross performing their highly ritualized mating dance.

Two albatross approached each other with heads bobbing and weaving. After circling each other for a minute or so, the birds loudly clacked their beaks together, took turns bowing their heads and raising their wings, then pointed their beaks skyward and trumpeted their passion to heaven on high. But the music they made didn't sound like instruments; it sounded like cattle mooing.

"They don't have it quite down yet, but they're working at it," said Barbara approvingly.

She explained that these dancing birds were adolescents, back on Midway for the first time since hatching here seven years ago. Since they were fledglings they had wandered at sea, never touching land. Now they were back in the old neighborhood, navigating albatross society for the first time. It was bound to be awkward. But they would eventually find a mate for life, which could be sixty years or more, and together they would return to Midway every year.

I came to love these birds during my time on Midway. They had no fear, allowing me to crawl within a few inches before they turned that penetrating gaze upon me. In the evenings when I ran to Frigate Point, at the western tip of Sand Island, to catch the sunset, they lined the path by the thousands. The birds turned their heads and watched me pass, shrieking and whistling and clacking their beaks with applause as I ran by.
That first morning, Barbara and I jumped in a golf cart for a tour of Sand Island. We stopped first at a burned-out concrete building. In 1941, this hulk was the Navy's communication command post, a supposedly bomb-proof structure. On the night of December 7, 1941, Japanese destroyers Ushio and Sazanami were returning from the attack on Pearl Harbor when they decided to linger awhile and wreak some havoc on Midway. While Japanese planes strafed the airfield and burned the seaplane hangar, the warships lobbed hundreds of shells at the atoll. In a weird foreshadowing of the "smart bombs" used in the Gulf War, one of the shells snuck down an air shaft and blew up the impregnable post. First Lieutenant George Cannon became the first Medal of Honor winner of World War Two, posthumously, when he refused medical treatment until the communications system was back on line. He died of his wounds later that night.

Other poignant reminders of the war are scattered throughout the two main islands. At the waterfront on Eastern Island, a rusting cannon guards the approach to the pier. On larger Sand Island, gun emplacements, ammunition bunkers, and the little armored pillboxes that sheltered a single rifleman stand witness to the events of June 4-6, 1942.

During the Cold War, the atoll was a vital component of America's defense structure, with some 3,000 military personnel stationed here. In 1968 alone 313 ships and 11,077 aircraft stopped here on their way to and from Vietnam. In 1969, President Nixon and Vietnamese President Thieu held secret meetings in the Midway House halfway between their countries.

And then nothing. A rich past and no future. The next two decades saw a stream of departing servicemen, a diminishing strategic importance, and a shrinking share of the Pentagon budget. Finally, in 1993, the death knell rang in the form of a terse statement announcing that Naval Air Facility Midway was to be "operationally closed."

One night I joined my barracks mates, Dave and Ann, a cameraman and a producer from a Seattle television station, for a night on the town. We rode our Schwinn cruisers, 1960s-style bikes with upright handlebars and front baskets, through the warm night, dodging albatross crossing the curvilinear streets of the base neighborhood. We rode to the All Hands Club, the former NCO bar where the diverse elements of Midway society gather after hours.

There are currently about 200 people living on Midway, mainly the Thais, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos who operate the island infrastructure, pilots and aircraft mechanics, adventure-travel company personnel, and the USFWS folks. But it doesn't matter who you are or how long you've been there, whoever happens to be on the atoll is warmly absorbed into the community.

When Dave, Ann, and I walked through the wood-paneled doors of the All Hands Club we stepped back into the Age of Aquarius: the bar hadn't changed since the Vietnam War. Creedence Clearwater Revival was blasting on the jukebox. The mod mural might have been done by Peter Max. And the prices listed behind the bar, Budweiser: fifty cents; Heineken: one dollar, stopped us in our tracks. Suddenly feeling flush, I ordered a round for the house.

"That will be $8.50," said Unni, the bartender. Big bucks in 1968.

The next day I caught a glimpse of Midway's future. Sparkling sunlight danced on the water as Larry Millwood, then owner of Midway Dive & Snorkel, one of the companies subcontracted to handle adventure travel on the atoll, piloted his forty-five-foot custom dive boat, the Spinner D, across the shallow lagoon. The water was like glycerin, so clear we could see every detail on the sandy bottom twenty, thirty feet down. Unfortunately, the winter currents were too powerful for diving, but Millwood told me all about what I was missing.

"This is diving's last frontier," he flatly declared. "The Caribbean has been done to death, and so has the rest of the Pacific. All the divers I talk to want a new challenge, unknown terrain, and that's what this place is all about."

"There are lots of shipwrecks waiting to be found on the outer reef, not to mention all these incredible coral heads in the lagoon," he pointed with his chin as the vessel passed above an expansive purplish mound rising like a balloon from the white sand bottom.

"But outside the reef is where the real excitement is," he continued. "Out there we've found these wild lava formations, all these tubes and weird overhangs. But what really blows me away is the fish traffic. It's real high energy, like standing in the middle of the freeway, watching all these uluas, jacks, snappers, rays, and reef sharks fly by." He paused, scanning the surface. "Hey, check out the spinners!"

About a quarter-mile away the lagoon's resident pod of some 200 spinner dolphins spotted the boat and made a bee-line for us. Soon the Spinner D had an escort of leaping, diving, corkscrewing dolphins. A dozen or so of the sleek gray swimmers rode the bow wave while others flashed in and out of the water. Leaping high into the air, they snapped off rolls and backflips. Some, like show-offs at a playground, spun three or four full revolutions before smacking down into the lagoon.

"These guys love to play," said Millwood. "And they're a blast to dive with."

There was something about John Bone that reminded me of Rick in Casablanca. There was a slight physical resemblance to Bogart, a penchant for turning up in out-of-the-way-places, and a self-assurance that some might interpret as cockiness but which I found perfectly appropriate for this setting. A former Alaskan bush pilot who went on to fly jets for Delta, Bone is the owner of Midway Sport Fishing.

"This is a completely unexplored, untouched fishery," Bone was saying as he piloted the Yorktown out of the lagoon through Brooks Channel and into the open ocean. Though we were sitting high up in the steering console, the big Pacific swells were towering above us. Down below, Mike Straight was setting up the trolling rigs, while Richard LeClerk, the Department of the Interior lawyer overseeing Midway's transfer from the Navy to the USFWS, gripped the rail with a determined look and white knuckles.

"These fish have never seen a hook," Bone shouted over the wind, looking perfectly composed as the waves batted us about. "It's like a Hemingway story from the 20s and 30s. Every day we come out here and explore a little more, but we never know what's going to come up over the rail!"

I flipped through the daily fishing log, and found that what's been coming up have been big fish, and lots of them. Ulua, or giant trevally, true bulldogs of the fish world, have proven to be a mainstay: a world record 105-pounder was caught by one of the first visitors. Blue marlin weighing up to 850 pounds have been tagged and released. Inside the reef, salt-water fly fishers have been exploring the crystalline shallows of the lagoon from the open decks of the Glacier Bay catamarans in Bone's fleet, hooking into trevally, amberjack, Pacific pompano, and gray reef sharks. Tiger sharks weighing upwards of 1,000 pounds have been seen cruising inside and outside the reef.

When I pointed this out Bone chuckled one of those Bogart chuckles. "The tigers are scared to death of the big uluas," he said wryly. "I tell you these fish are bruisers, and they're ready to rumble."

Suddenly we heard a loud ka-thunk. I slid down the ladder like a fireman and saw one of the trolling rigs jerking towards the water. I buckled on the fighting belt, Mike handed me the rod, and I began the fight of my fishing life.

At some point during my sojourn on Midway I realized that, were I an albatross, I would stake a claim to the grassy knoll overlooking the waterfront. Where warships had once been moored, these days the Yorktown, Enterprise, and Spinner D tug gently at their lines. There is always a fresh breeze soughing through the ironwood trees here, great seabirds circling endlessly in the sky, sometimes dolphins playing in the shallows and green sea turtles bobbing in the swells.

Many places on Midway inspire me, especially Frigate Point, with its lonely sweep of sand, but it is here at the eastern end of Sand Island that I feel the powerful resonance of the atoll's past blend with the positive energy of its future. This is where the wildlife, and the people who come to experience the wildlife, will meet. Sipping a tumbler of John's scotch in the cool evening air, listening to Mike, John, and Richard talk about the day's discoveries and tomorrow's possibilities, I lean back in my chair and put up my feet. Breakers smash on the outer reef with the sound of distant cannon fire.

"Tomorrow we'll rig the fly rods and set out in the catamarans," John is saying. "We'll explore the lagoon, hook you up with a big ulua, an amberjack, maybe even a pompano or two."

Who knows? I think. On Midway you can never tell what's going to come up over the rail.

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