The Nonouti Project

I don’t know if anyone has ever counted them, but the Pacific Ocean is filled with so many beautiful atolls that ‘numberless’ seems an apt description. Many of these have exceptional flats. And on many of these flats swim bonefish and other creatures that fly fishers love to hunt.

The big issue of access should not deter the adventurous. Inter-island flights, often in unidentifiable makes of planes with lots of internal rattles, connect many of these far-flung jewels. If no flights are available you can always leave your job, or take long service leave and hitch a ride on one of the many local freighters that supply the remoter islands. What you do when you get there is a big part of the adventure. You will need time, but if you’re resourceful you’ll work it out.

Several Australians and New Zealanders have been involved in remote island explorations, among them Gavin Platz of Tie ’n Fly Outfitters on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. A chance meeting, and the forming of a friendship with people in the Kiribati (pronounced ‘Kiribas’) Government, together with a genuine desire to make the lives of these remote island people a little better, has seen Gavin involved in pioneering a remote new bonefishing destination.

Christmas Island is the envy of many other Pacific islands. For having the foresight to encourage a system to protect bonefish from harvesting, someone from Frontiers travel agency deserves a medal. I suspect that the leading Christmas Island guides are among the biggest earners in the Republic of Kiribati, one of the poorest ‘countries’ on the planet. The Government has acknowledged this and is keen to set up some of the other islands similarly: enter the Nonouti (pronounced ‘Nonoosh’) Project.

The scourge of the flats on so many of these magnificent islands is monofilament gill nets. In Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, $60 will buy you 100 metres of Chinese-made net. The bonefish of the extensive flats of that vastly over-populated island have long gone, and now the outer islands feed this main island with dried bonefish (among other things). Many of the children of families in the outer islands go to Tarawa to complete their education and are sent sacks of dried fish, or they’re sold in the markets for around $1.20 each. It’s a tough place where the absolute basics of life such as electricity and refrigeration are luxuries.

GETTING THERE

It’s an adventure just getting to Nonouti. I like the slogan on the Kiribati government website: ‘For travellers, not tourists’. Yes, it is. The curiously- named ‘Our Airline’ flies Brisbane, Honiara, Nauru, Tarawa. Then there’s a local flight to Nonouti in a former Spanish military aircraft the likes of which I’d never seen before. It’s a rear-loader that felt very solid and carried a prodigious amount of people and cargo. We flew over other atolls and the view from 5,000 metres revealed flats that seared themselves into the imagination: perhaps some day. On descent into Nonouti the flats went so far we just didn’t know where to look.

A mixed dance group from the island welcomed us and their performance was spine-tingling. The men and girls danced and sang together, then separately. I got the impression the men’s singing and dancing was a warning to us not to even think about the local girls. Dance and culture remains very important to these people, and it’s not a dance for the tourist dollar either: this was the genuine article that had the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.

There are no sealed roads here. This is not Christmas Island, and there are no hotels as we would know them, no bars and no night-spots. This is the remote Pacific, the travellers’ version that has adventurous bonefishermen twitching with excitement.

That afternoon we had some solemn duties to perform. For our protection and for good fishing, we had to make our offerings to the ‘Old Men’ who watch over various sections of the island, most particularly the water. We visited villages—there are 12 of them on the island—where fish, coconuts and Moray eels dried in the sun, pigs, dogs and children ran free and there were nets hanging over waterfront trees everywhere you went. But it’s not a romantic simple life. It’s a tough life.

THE PROJECT

One part of the Nonouti Project involves Gavin selecting and training guides. These guys know what’s at stake. Most have travelled the islands as crew on freighters. They know exactly what’s going on at Christmas Island and they want a similar slice of the action.

The Island Council is also taking tentative steps to reduce the impact of netting on the bones, declare Marine Park areas, and ban the most effective and destructive form of netting, which involves setting a net and then having a line of people drive fish into it. These are small but very significant steps. If bonefishing is banned then something needs to replace it, and quickly: for these people we’re talking about food on the table and money in the pocket, in a place where there’s almost no such thing as employment as we know it.

THE FISHING

Finally, fishing. We headed north to flats that were close to the ocean. They were massive and dotted with deep holes and sand cays. Why did we start here? Because the father of Taan, one of the guides, had netted bones in this area for as long as nets had been available. The bones were there in singles, pairs and small nervous schools, and we picked them off: nothing big, but bones nevertheless. We walked many miles that day on a perfect incoming tide. John hooked a monster GT that had been hunting bonefish in amongst the potholes and coral heads. He was destroyed in less than 20 seconds. We were also humiliated by some triggerfish. More on them later.

Among the most interesting aspects of many of these atolls are the problems associated with warm water during periods of low swell and neap tides. It gets too hot on the flats for the bones. We were coming off the springs, and over the next few days the flats warmed considerably and our catch rates fell away. We did have a couple of really good sessions when we found bones, and on one of these Gavin hooked a monster. In the islands you don’t hold your hands apart to signify the size of a fish: one arm is stretched out and the other hand indicates length. Both Gavin and the guide indicated the length of the fish from finger-tip to chest.

The guides carried rigged 11–weight rods for GT all the time, terminating in big subsurface flies. On one flat on a falling tide a big barracuda prowled the shallows. I love these things in shallow water. Looking for a lucky lip hook-up, I had time to get a fly rigged without wire in front of it. The cuda tracked the fly, accelerating all the time, snatched it in a boil not far out, turned and ran. Then came a slack line—but it was fun while it lasted.

We fished a sand cay out in the massive lagoon. We were dropped on shore to look for bones on the high tide. Our boatman dug up three ghost crabs, then headed off to the edge of the reef while we caught some small bones and bluefin trevally. An hour later we were picked up and the three ghost crabs had been converted into five trigger fish and a big cod.

TOUCHY TRIGGERS

Triggers are an incredible fish and there are plenty of them on the flats of Nonouti. We found one particularly rocky reef flat that crawled with them on an incoming tide. These are a fish with character. You rarely find them on pure sand flats unless they’re travelling. They really like that hard busted coral bottom. My suspicion is that their peculiar heads have evolved to deal with digging up crustaceans out of holes in the reef. They eat crabs, mantis shrimp and crayfish. Mantis shrimp have the most wicked set of claws on the planet, and a trigger’s snout is long and pointed with eyes set well back. You’ll find these fish ‘digging’ up patches of reef. They use their teeth to lift chunks of coral and their fins allow them to swim backwards as they hover over their prey, head down and tailing.

Triggers feed slowly and very deliberately: there’s a great deal of the ‘blue bastard’ about them. Land a fly too close and it’s all over, move the fly at the wrong time and it’s all over, sometimes move it at all and they just flee, yet sometimes they’ll grab the crab the moment it touches down. They swim in a very erratic path but often lie stationary, especially near a single rock. Small crabs seem to be a favourite, but the small crab flies we had were tied on hooks too light for stopping these very powerful fish. One day I hooked three in the space of half an hour. The first snapped the hook, the second crushed the hook, and the third managed to stay connected but the 20 lb fluorocarbon tippet was badly chafed.

A hundred metres to my left, John had a similar success rate. That night we went through my crab collection and picked out the most realistic patterns on the best hooks. We returned to the same spot on the same tide the next day and the triggers were still there, seemingly waiting for us.

Seems they’d also made their plans overnight: we couldn’t get a touch, in fact we couldn’t get a fly anywhere near them. We led them by metres and let the fly sink to the bottom. If they came across it they fled without us doing anything. They fled from leaders, they fled from flies and they fled from fly lines. I tried the tactic of casting well past them so the ‘plip’ of the fly landing was out of range, then when you have an idea of where they’re going you can either twitch it to catch their eye or even drag the fly into their path. But they spooked from any number of parts of that presentation. That was a great session for the triggers, but not for us.

COMMUNITY FOCUS

A perusal of Google Earth reveals that the island of Nonouti has some incredible flats, and apparently in spite of the netting, reasonable numbers of bonefish have been caught by just a handful of fly fishers on the exploratory trips Gavin has hosted. Through the local Island Council, foresight and assistance from their government, and most particularly from key local people who are keen to change their lives, things may get turned around. Perhaps bonefish could be taken off the menu. But what it will take to do this is for fly fishers to go there. This is one of those pioneer projects that could change the lives of many people throughout the Pacific.

I really, really loved the genuineness of these island people. Tourist numbers here in a year could be counted on both hands. There is still so much about this place that is original. Nails are not used: they make binding twine from coconut husks by hand because they can, and because anything else is probably not as good. Cigarette papers are made from pandanus leaves and Moray eels are caught in the most exquisitely hand-made traps. Pigs, dogs and chickens wander through the villages. The food is fresh every day from the ocean—yep, we almost got tired of eating crayfish.

At this stage there’s still much to do in terms of discovering the fishery, training the guides and winning over all the islanders to the cause—although that seems to be happening, and the outer villages want to build accommodation ‘outstations’ to save on travelling time. If any travelling fly fishers want to mix some great fishing with some genuinely helpful community work, that could potentially change a lot of lives and become an example to other islands that may also make the shift, this is the place to do it.

Trips to Nonouti are organised through Gavin Platz’s Tie ’n Fly shop in Mooloolaba. Only 60–70 spots will be available each year.