hut under the royal palm trees on the eighth day of May, 1819, at the age of 61. His body was burned in a firepit and his bones were buried in a secret cave by his main kahunas, who never disclosed the site. King Kam has many monuments in Hawaii, but no tombstone. The same kahunas who buried his bones also ate his heart, for the power that was in it -- just as Kamehameha himself once fed on the heart of Captain Cook.
KICKING ASS IN KONA
At the end of the Kailua Municipal Pier is a huge set of scales, maintained by the Japs from the local icehouse who routinely buy every fish brought into the harbor and send it off to Tokyo, to be chopped up into sushimi, then refrozen and sent back to Los Angeles. Sushimi is big business all over the Pacific, and Japanese fish brokers control most of it.
A license to run sushimi out of Hawaii is better than having a slot machine concession in the Las Vegas airport. There is always more demand for sushimi than the market-fisherman can supply. The only thing that varies is the price -- which ranges from five and sometimes ten dollars a pound at Christmas, down to twenty cents a pound at the peak of the sport-fishing season, which runs from May to September on the Kona Coast and yields between five and ten thousand pounds of sushimi for the market every day.
Ahi, the big yellowfin tuna, is not a real crowd-pleaser on the pier; but it sells for a lot more money. Ahi is sushimi -- in LA and New York, as well as Tokyo -- and in the weeks before Christmas when demand is running high, the dockside price for a big ahi in Kona can run up to five and sometimes ten dollars a pound.
Usually it is down around a dollar, which makes it a nice fish to come in with. But ahi is not the glamorous fish in Kona. This place is famous for marlin. Big marlin. And that's what the crowd on the pier wants to see. Any boat flying the traditional dark blue marlin flag on its fantail will change the mood of the crowd very suddenly.
The Kona Coast is the fishing capital of Hawaii, Kailua Bay is the social and commercial axis of the Kona Coast; and the huge gallows-like rig of fish-weight scales on the pier in front of the King Kam Hotel is where the fishing pros of Kona live or die every afternoon of the week -- in full view of the public, such as it is.
Sport fishing is big business in Kona, and four o'clock on any afternoon at the end of the city pier is showtime for the local charter captains. That is where they bring their fish in to be weighed, and to have their pictures taken if they're bringing in anything big. The big scales at the end of the pier are where the victors show their stuff, and the vanquished don't even show up. The boats with no blood on their decks don't even come in to the pier; they take the short way home -- to the harbor, eight miles north, and those last few miles in from the buoy can be a long and surly ride for a skipper with a boatload of clients who paid $500 a day to catch nothing at all. The Honokohau at sundown is not a happy place to be. As each boatload of failures ties up, the harbor curs rush to the edge of the black lava cliff that looks down on the dock and start barking. They want the leftover lunch meat, not fish, and it is an ugly scene to confront at the end of a long day of failure at sea.
On any given day most boats will go back to the Honokohau. But the few return to the pier, where the scene is entirely different -- especially on a "hot day," when half the town has already been alerted by triumphant radio calls from far out at sea to prepare the scales for serious action when the fleet comes in.
The crowd will begin gathering on the end of the pier around three. Jimmy Sloan, the commercial photographer who has the pier concession, will be there with his camera to make the moment live in history on 8 x 10 glossies at $10 each. And there will also be the man from Grey's taxidermy,