The best diving was on the outside of the reef, although there was some fishing on the inside. There were certain spots where the outside reef had a sheer drop-off. The top of the reef might have been at 25 ft. and the ledge would’ve dropped straight down – probably more than 1000 ft. The fish that I first discovered, the Genicanthus bellus – its normal habitat is more than 90 ft. Diving back then, I was diving on regular air, not mixed gas. We didn’t have dive computers. I carried a ceramic disc encased in its housing that absorbed gases at theoretically the same rate that your body did. There was a little meter and when it reached the red zone, it meant that you were in your saturation zone, and you’d have to not come straight up, but hang off at various depths to outgas slowly. The Genicanthus bellus had never been seen before. It took me two bottles to catch it.
Was this at 90 ft.?
I’m not sure what depth it was. It was definitely deep and it was on a sheer wall, a drop off. So I was able to catch it by forcing it up towards the surface. As the fish got higher and higher, its air bladder expanded and it became difficult for it to swim back down. I was able to catch it that way. It did take me two bottles. I ran out of air on the first one. Then I went back down and found it again – struggling to get back down – and caught it.
I sent it off to Jack Randall at the Bishop Museum to identify, and he’s the one responsible. He’d asked me if I wanted it named after myself and I said, no, and it was named Genicanthus bellus.
And did you know when you saw it – when you were diving – that it was something special?
Yes. I’d never seen anything like it before. I didn’t know if it was a new species, but it was very beautiful. A very unusual fish. The genicanthus is from the angelfish family. It’s a very good aquarium fish. I was diving solo, so I was the only person out there diving, which was probably a little bit reckless. Most people would dive in pairs, but as fish collectors, if we did dive in pairs, we would go in opposite directions so we didn’t dive within sight of each other.
And this was collecting fish for the Los Angeles aquarium market?
Well, one of our customers was in Los Angeles. Some of our customers were in other parts of the United States, and we even shipped out to Germany. We were probably the only shippers who could reach Europe. The fish out of Tahiti were shipped to Hawaii, reacclimated in the aquarium, and then shipped out from Hawaii to reach Frankfurt. The fish were put into special bags that we inflated with pure oxygen, one fish per bag. And those were put into Styrofoam insulated containers and we would load those into LD3 containers, which is a special container that fits in the belly of the plane. The shipper would get a better freight rate that way. We would ship out these boxes of fish, sometimes 20 or 30 boxes at a time.
