Out Of My League

Over this past weekend I was eating some delicious Monchong... What's Monchong you ask? Well, it's a fish, of course (this ain't no land-animal blog...). A deepwater Hawaiian fish, to be exact. I'd had it a few times in Kauai when my beloved Opakapaka is out of season and recently I've found it at the 'Bowl, my favorite local grocery store, flown in fresh.

It was so fantastic that I decided to wikipedia it. Well, Monchong doesn't appear to be too popular (or maybe there aren't too many Wikipeople in Hawaii) - wikipedia came up blank. Google didn't do much better, but I did find some fish charts from some Hawaiian site. Geez - I hope I'm not letting the cat out of the bag here about this great fish. I guess it's good that I don't have zillions of readers. (yet)

Turns out "deepwater" means DEEPwater. (True, for a dry fly fisherman anything deeper than about 3 feet is of little interest.) Monchong are routinely caught at depths over 250 fathoms. [...back to google... 'fathom'... Ahh... so much for that Berkeley education...] Over 1500 feet deep! Crazy. Something about a fairly small fish - up to 2 feet - being down so deep really struck me. Imagine a poor trout swimming around lost down there, in what must be almost complete darkness. Poor little guy.

Anyway - sorry, this post wasn't really about dry fly fishing. Hey, it's January, and my mountain streams are covered in ice. I guess I've got Hawaii on the mind...