Grander Man Kevin Nakamaru

Almost 30 years ago, Kevin Nakamaru found himself amid one of the hottest blue marlin bites in sportfishing history. But the Kona, Hawaii, native wasn’t trolling his home waters of the Pacific; he was targeting a ledge off Madeira, a small island in the Atlantic, 600 miles southwest of Lisbon, Portugal. Every 10th marlin he saw was larger than 1,000 pounds.

It was 1995, and Nakamaru, just 27, was at the helm of the 30-foot Pesca Grossa, fishing alongside some of the best big-game captains and anglers to ever target marlin. Heady stuff for a young skipper, but Nakamaru grew up among the pioneers of big-game fishing in Hawaii, including George Parker, the first man to catch a 1,000-pound blue marlin under IGFA rules; lure innovator Henry Chee; and captains Freddy Rice and his son McGrew, Gene Vander Hoek, Bart Miller, Bobby Brown, Jeff Fay and Marlin Parker, among others.

Young as he was, Nakamaru was well-prepared. He’d just spent three seasons fishing for giant black marlin on the Great Barrier Reef as a deckhand on the 40-foot Duyfken under the tutelage of the highly regarded big-game skipper Capt. Peter B. Wright. Nakamaru had honed his skills and found himself in the right place at the right time.

KONA, HAWAII BORN AND RAISED

Nakamaru is a third-generation Hawaiian. His great-grandfather came to the Big Island from Japan to work as a coffee grower and eventually owned his own farm. His grandfather Kaname and his father, Kent, were dentists, and his Pennsylvania Dutch mother, Judi, was a dental hygienist. Kent and Judi met as students at Temple University in Philadelphia. Nakamaru planned to follow in the family practice, but best-laid plans were hampered by his desire to chase big fish, a passion he developed at an early age.

Fishing was a family pastime. Nakamaru’s parents were members of the Hawaii Big Game Fishing Club and the International Game Fish Association. Judi set four line-class world records in the mid-1970s, and Kevin caught his first blue marlin at age 9 and his first big ahi (yellowfin) tuna at 10. As he got older, Nakamaru handlined ahi during summer break, and sold what he caught to local restaurants and fish markets.

“My parents let me use their boat, a 22-foot skiff, and sometimes my dad would fish with me on weekends, but commercial fishing wasn’t easy,” says Nakamaru, who is 56. “I just tried to make enough to cover expenses and have a little left over. The guys who were good at it started to recognize I was working hard, paying my dues, and eventually offered some advice. I started making good money for a summer job, and I was on the water, where I wanted to be.”

Nakamaru graduated from high school in 1987, and that summer, the ahi run was one of the best he’d seen. But he was enrolled at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, to begin his studies in dentistry. He would later change majors, earning a degree in fine arts. He returned to Kona for the summer after his freshman year and began attending a school of another sort. His instructor was Capt. Freddy Rice, and the classroom was the Bertram 31 Ihu Nui. Nakamaru rode along on charters with Freddy’s son McGrew Rice, who worked as the deckhand. The year before, the father-and-son team became the first to catch a grander blue marlin — over 1,000 pounds — during the Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament.

“I have to give Freddy and McGrew a lot of credit for my start,” Nakamaru says. “They taught me how a professional charter operation worked, and mentored me as a deckhand. We won several major tournaments during my time on board, and were top boat in the fleet on a regular basis. McGrew and I shared the best day of billfishing I ever experienced in Kona. We didn’t have a charter, so Freddy let us take the boat out ourselves. We caught a triple grand slam — four spearfish, three striped marlin and three blue marlin. It was a wild day of nonstop action.”

Nakamaru became a popular deckhand and worked with Kona legend Capt. Gene Vander Hoek aboard Sea Genie. Vander Hoek has set 32 IGFA world records as a captain, mate or angler. At the time, he was the only captain in Kona to catch four grander blues over 1,000 pounds. Nakamaru spent the 1990, ’91 and ’92 seasons working for Vander Hoek.

“Gene was a wizard at using live bait for marlin,” Nakamaru says. “He could tell when a bait was going to get bit before it happened. In 1992, he took delivery of a brand-new, 39-foot Rybovich, a beautiful custom boat, and taught me the importance of caring for it. He was meticulous. Some mates hated the cleaning and maintenance part of the job. I loved it.”

Nakamaru earned his captain’s license, and McGrew Rice urged him to go to Australia, the mecca for heavy-tackle marlin fishing, where Capt. Peter B. Wright was king of the hill. As luck would have it, Nakamaru was working part time on Humdinger under Kona skipper Jeff Fay, Wright’s friend and business partner. Nakamaru was cleaning the boat after a charter when Wright showed up.

“Are you Kevin?” Wright asked. “I hear you want to go to Australia.”

Nakamaru was shocked. Was this his shot? If he could get to Cairns by August, Wright said he’d give him a job for the upcoming season. The fateful encounter would not have occurred without the endorsements of the captains he had worked for and his reputation as an intelligent, hard-working deckhand with a burning desire to learn the game.

GIANT MARLIN DOWN UNDER

Nakamaru landed in Cairns, a small city on the Coral Sea and gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, home of the world’s best giant black marlin fishing. While Cairns is best known for big marlin, the arrival of the big fish in October is preceded by several months of exceptional light-tackle fishing for Pacific sailfish and small black marlin inside the reef. Nakamaru arrived in August and jumped into the thick of it.

“The light-tackle routine was tough,” he says. “It was fast fishing, especially the way Peter did it, and nothing like anything I was used to in Kona. I initially felt like I couldn’t keep up, but Peter pushed me, and things started to click just in time for my first Dunk Island Light Tackle Classic. We were competitive and ended up catching the winning fish in the last hour on the last day. It was a big boost to my confidence.”

The giant black marlin showed up early that year, and by the first week of October the bite was in full swing. Wright’s other deckhand was Scotty Levin, a young Virginia native hot off a multiyear tour aboard Jerry Dunaway’s Madam & Hooker mothership/game boat operation. Levin spent the 1989 season on the reef and took the first deckhand position aboard Duyfken. Nakamaru and Levin bonded immediately and crewed together with Wright for three seasons in Australia.

“We were kids in our 20s,” Levin says, “and Kevin was pumped to be fishing with Peter. We quickly became a well-oiled machine. Kevin was an awesome wire and gaff man on big fish. Peter and I called him the Ninja, especially when we were into tunas. Kevin loved catching tuna.”

The fishing didn’t disappoint. “Ninety-two was an awesome year on the reef, with lots of big fish,” Nakamaru says. “We weighed a 1,210-pound black that year and released 18 over 800 pounds, including two over 1,100.” That year, Nakamaru met another enthusiastic fisherman who would become a lifelong friend, Tracy Melton.

“When I asked Kevin where he was from and he told me Kona, I said, ‘I know who you are,’ ” Melton recalls. “I’d heard his name while fishing aboard Capt. Marlin Parker’s boat in Kona in March of 1990. Kevin is infected with fishing. It’s all he wants to do. While other deckhands were partying and staying up till the wee hours, Kevin was headed back to the boat to get ready for the next day of competition. It’s always fishing first with him.”

Melton went on to launch Melton International Tackle and used one of Nakamaru’s paintings of a jumping marlin on the inaugural Melton catalog.

Once the ’93 season on the reef concluded, Nakamaru convinced Levin to come to Kona and charter-fish with him. Nakamaru leased Sea Baby III and went to work getting it ready. The boat had to be exactly the way Nakamaru wanted it, down to every last wire and screw.

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“He took boat preparation and care to the extreme, and it paid off,” Levin says. “We had a super-successful summer in Kona, winning the Firecracker Open marlin tournament for our charter, who happened to be Tracy Melton and his father. Tracy caught the only qualifying marlin in the tournament, with minutes left before lines out on the last day, and we were in the money. The fishing was great; the clients were great. We had a fantastic time together, but all the talk on the docks was about Madeira.”

MARLIN MECCA

Capt. Roddy Hayes, a British charter captain, had reported staggering numbers of Atlantic blue marlin over 500 pounds and bigeye tuna over 300 from his base in Funchal on Madeira. By sheer coincidence, when Melton got back to his office in Southern California, there was an order for trolling lures from Hayes sitting on his desk. Melton called Hayes and booked the next available charter dates. Melton went to Madeira and caught several big blue marlin, including his first grander, a 1,083-pounder on 80-pound standup tackle. He reported back to Nakamaru and said he was going to try to get a boat in Madeira. Kismet struck in the form of a wooden charter boat built in Australia that had the proper Portuguese paperwork. Levin flew over to inspect the vessel, and Nakamaru arrived to Portugal in May to do whatever work was necessary to make the boat fishable.

A few days before the boat was scheduled to be shipped from Portugal, Nakamaru arrived in Madeira and met Hayes and his wife, Susan. He was invited aboard the Margarita the next day to fish for tuna, as it was well before the usual marlin season. But the water was unseasonably warm, so Hayes told Nakamaru to put out a marlin spread. Two hours later, they were into a doubleheader. The smaller fish came unbuttoned, and the larger one was 700 pounds. They caught another 700-pounder the next day before Nakamaru headed back to Lisbon to load the boat for the trip to the island.

“Our first year in Madeira with Kevin at the helm of the Pesca Grossa was 1995,” Levin says. “It was the most amazing marlin fishing I’d ever seen. The average size fish was 800 pounds, and we saw 1,000-pounders languishing in the sun on the surface with their fins sticking out of the water. It was otherworldly.”

But the boat still needed a lot of work. “No matter how much lipstick I put on the old girl, things would break, but we kept it together until one of the engines blew in August,” Nakamaru recalls. “We managed to get new BMW diesels delivered and installed in 10 days’ time. Luckily, the season ran well into November, and we hit our stride shortly after the repower. Before the engine went, we had a charter trip that started with a 550 the first day; the next, an 850 in the morning and a 1,075 in the afternoon. The fishing just kept getting better. We even caught a 1,200-pound blue on a crew day when we didn’t have a charter.”

Nakamaru returned to Madeira for the 1996 season, but Levin couldn’t make the trip. Working with Steve “Hoggy” Haygarth as his deckhand, Pesca Grossa finished the season with 75 blue marlin over 500 pounds, including many granders, and 75 bigeye tuna over 200 pounds, the biggest hitting the scales at 330.

On June 26, Nakamaru had television producer Ken Corday aboard as part of a multiday charter, and he caught a 1,100-pound blue marlin. He returned the following spring for a repeat performance. As the charter days progressed, Corday had released a 550 and a 750 when they hooked up with another blue that, at first, seemed small because it kept swimming toward the boat. When it was finally brought alongside, it was another 1,100-pound fish, caught exactly one year to the day after landing an 1,170-pounder.

HOME AGAIN

Nakamaru had another great catch during the 1997 season. While staying with Melton in an apartment in Funchal, he met Elizabete Abreu Andrade, his future wife. Born and raised on Madeira, she worked in an Italian restaurant downstairs from the apartment. She loved fishing and over the next couple of years would join Nakamaru in Kona during the off-season. They raised two daughters on the Big Island.

The bite in Madeira came to an abrupt halt in 1998, and marlin didn’t show up in numbers for almost 10 years. Melton put Pesca Grossa in storage in 2000, and Nakamaru began work on a new project in Kona with Terry Fohey, who had been a client in Madeira. Fohey had caught a 1,188-pound black marlin and a 1,075-pound Atlantic blue marlin with Nakamaru. Together they restored the 1963, 37-foot Merritt Northern Lights. The boat began chartering in Kona during the summer of 2000 with McGrew’s son Kaulike Rice as deckhand. During the first summer, the crew landed a 1,115-pound Pacific blue, making Nakamaru the first person to land three species of marlin over 1,000 pounds — an Atlantic blue, a Pacific blue and a black.

“It was something no one else had ever done, and it left me with the realization that I had nothing left to prove to myself,” Nakamaru says. “All the pressure I put on myself over the years to chase the biggest marlin was lifted, and I was able to relax and enjoy fishing for whatever the fish gods brought my way.”

Nakamaru ran Northern Lights for 10 years while also fishing the Bisbee’s Black and Blue tournament in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, aboard Anthony Hsieh’s Bad Company. His buddy Tracy Melton was an angler on the team. They had an impressive record of wins with Nakamaru’s help. “Kevin has a way of keeping everyone focused when a big fish is on the line,” Melton says. “His influence in the cockpit was a critical part of many of our most impressive catches.”

In 2010, Nakamaru set the Kona single-day catch record for a non-sonar boat, landing eight blue marlin and six ahi tuna over 120 pounds on a charter with the David family, who operate L&H Sportfishing in Miami.

Nakamaru purchased Northern Lights outright 12 years ago and continues to charter it while also running a beautifully appointed Spencer 54. “Running a two-boat operation with my friend John Polisheck is a challenge, but we’ve found balance using the 37 for charters and the 54 for tournaments,” Nakamaru says.

In recent years Nakamaru has become the go-to guy for anglers wanting to catch Pacific spearfish on light tackle and fly. He takes out clients from around the world who want to catch these elusive billfish and has helped many complete an IGFA Royal Slam on fly, catching all nine billfish species.

He returned to Madeira for a family reunion in 2007, when Elizabete caught her first grander blue marlin. He plans to restart an operation out of Funchal with Melton aboard Grander.

Asked about his legacy — the places he’s fished, the legends he has rubbed elbows with and the huge marlin he’s caught — Nakamaru remains humble, with a deep respect for those who came before him. “I would like to be remembered for helping groom the next generation of great Kona captains,” he says. Many of his former deckhands have gone on to become top crewmen and captains around the world.

Melton sums it up nicely: “Kevin makes everyone he fishes with better.”