Chapter 1: Raw Fish — The Key to One Woman’s Heart

A note on how this story is told: Heidi documents our life with a small voice recorder held just below her chin. She has always been the one with the presence of mind to capture things as they happen — recording moments, preserving details, keeping a running archive of memories I would otherwise let slip away. This account is mine, told from memory, shaped by time, and only mildly improved in my favor. But it exists because of her voice. Where I have erred on the side of self-flattery, Heidi will correct me. She always does.

The alarm on my wristwatch sounded at five o'clock, and my eyes shot open.

I had been waiting all night for this moment.

This is either a sign of deep personal purpose or a cry for help, depending on how you feel about pre-dawn spearfishing. I had been doing it every morning for months — rolling out of the hammock I slept in near the beach, grabbing my fins, mask, pole spear, dive light, and float line, and slipping into the dark Maui water before the world had any idea what was happening.

I was a teacher at the local elementary school. I also lived outdoors and caught my own breakfast. I had decided that this was a reasonable way to exist in one of the most expensive states in the country, and I had committed to it with the certainty of someone who has not yet fully mapped the social implications.

But that morning, my motivation had changed.

I was still fishing for breakfast. I was also, for the first time, fishing for the heart of one Miss Heidi.

The Encounter

The relevant event had occurred the previous morning in the brief interstitial territory between the parking lot and the classroom. I had a container of leftover fish that I was eating before school — a perfectly normal thing to do, in my considered view — when Heidi and I crossed paths.

She looked at the container. She looked at me.

"That's an interesting breakfast, Mr. Holloway."

Caught. Absolutely caught. I was a fish-breathed, saltwater-soaked teacher eating speared reef fish in a school breezeway at seven in the morning, and Miss Heidi was standing right there watching me do it. In a better world I would have been holding a cup of Starbucks and discussing the weekend.

"Good morning, Miss Heidi," I said, with the composure of a man who has decided the only available move is dignity. I held the container toward her. "Would you like a piece of palani?"

Palani is the Hawaiian name for the orangeband surgeonfish — Acanthurus olivaceus, for those keeping notes — a common reef fish found throughout the Indo-Pacific, distinguished by its deep blue-gray body, its orange shoulder stripe, and its sharp scalpel-like spines near the tail, which is either a defense mechanism or the universe's way of communicating that this fish would prefer you left it alone. I had not left it alone. I had speared it at depth in the dark and cooked it for breakfast. It was, in my experience, excellent.

Heidi looked at the fish with the kind of hesitation that is not quite reluctance. Then she took a small piece and chewed it slowly.

"Where did you get this?"

"I dove for it this morning," I said. "Do you like it?"

She considered this. "It's good," she said. "But — do you ever eat palani raw?"

I want to record my internal experience at that exact moment, because it is relevant context. Raw? Raw? My face was shaved. My knuckles did not drag on the ground. I had a college degree and a teaching credential and an apartment — well, a hammock near the beach, which is philosophically adjacent to an apartment. I was a civilized person. Who eats raw reef fish at seven in the morning in a school hallway?

"Gross," I said. "No. Why?"

"Fish is my favorite food," she said. "I think it would taste better raw."

Cute, sweet, apparently-dainty Miss Heidi. I looked at her. She looked at me.

I would call her bluff.

Tomorrow's catch was not going to touch the frying pan. At least not her portion.

Five O'Clock

The coconut trees were still asleep against their starry backdrop as I slipped into the smooth water. Dive light in hand, I began weaving through the maze of coral heads toward deeper water. My world shrank to the small cone of light thrown by a tiny bulb and three C batteries — a circle of illuminated reef floor moving ahead of me through the dark while everything outside it remained the particular black of pre-dawn ocean.

Reef sharks had crossed my path enough times that I had, over months of the same routine, become genuinely desensitized to them. When they materialize out of the dark at less than ten feet, you note them, adjust your angle, and continue. You do not panic, because panicking underwater at five in the morning is neither useful nor dignified, and because the sharks are usually not interested in anything you're carrying except the fish on your float line, which is a different problem that requires a different kind of attention.

The deeper logic of pre-dawn spearfishing is this: at night, many fish go dormant. They hide themselves into holes in the coral and essentially turn off, which makes them easy to find and not particularly difficult to approach. In the forty-five minutes before the sky begins to lighten and the fish regain their senses, a diver with a light and a pole spear has a meaningful window. This is not sportsmanlike. It is, however, effective, and I was operating on a budget that had no room for the organic aisle at Whole Foods — which Maui does not even have, but the point stands.

I took the surgical tubing on my spear, wrapped it once around my thumb, pulled the pole back along my hand, and gripped it ten inches from the three sharpened prongs at the business end. Locked and loaded.

Down I dove, attention falling on a car-sized outcropping of coral at depth. I swam to a large hole in the coral face and directed my light inside.

Palani. Sleeping palani, glowing gold in the beam, completely unaware that it had become the subject of a romantic gesture.

I sighted down the spear shaft and released my grip. The pole slid forward with a burst of elastic power. Head shot. I removed the fish quickly and clipped it onto the fifteen-foot float line trailing behind me. Less time handling the fish means less chance of a shark deciding you’ve provided a buffet service — that is a consideration that adds genuine urgency to one's technique.

Two palani and a kumu — a handsome goatfish, red-striped and thick-bodied — by the time the stars began to fade. A respectable catch. I surfaced, pulled off my mask, and let the trade winds hit my face.

I went home and made sashimi.

The Plate

Sashimi requires almost nothing. Slice the fish thin against the grain, arrange it on a plate with care, add a small bowl of shoyu — soy sauce, in the language spoken by people who haven't spent time in Hawaii — and a pale green mound of wasabi, the ferocious Japanese horseradish paste that operates on the nervous system like a polite but insistent warning shot.

That morning I walked into school carrying a plate of beautifully cut raw palani, presented with more intention than I had ever given to a breakfast before in my life.

I found Heidi in the hallway.

I held out the plate.

She looked at it for a moment — really looked at it, the way she looks at things, which is to say completely and without hedging. Then she picked up a piece, dipped it in the shoyu, touched it to the wasabi, and ate it.

Her expression changed.

"That," she said, "is really good."

It was a small thing. A plate of raw fish handed from one teacher to another before the first bell. But I have thought about it many times since — the moment when something shifts, when the ordinary morning suddenly contains more than it did before, when you realize that this person, right here, is the most interesting thing in whatever room you're in.

I went to teach my class. She went to teach hers. But my life had, quietly and without announcement, become a bit more interesting. And my fish preparation methods had become significantly simpler.

What Happened Next

One evening, a few months later, Heidi and I were sitting on the beach watching the sun drop into the ʻAuʻau Channel — that slow, indulgent Maui blaze where the water turns gold and the trade winds ease off just enough to feel like permission.

"I want to get a sailboat," I said, "and sail between the islands."

Heidi looked at the water. The water was, objectively, extremely large.

"We should sail to the South Pacific," she said.

There is a specific kind of evening in Maui that should come with a liability waiver. The light does something to your judgment. Whatever reasonable instincts you had been using to navigate your adult life simply... stop working.

I said: "Yes. Absolutely."

Because it was Heidi. And because saying "let's maybe not do the big scary thing" was not how I wanted that sentence to end.

Just like that, we had a plan. It was not a good plan — not yet. It was more of a direction. A heading, with no chart, no timeline, no particular estimate of what lay in between. But we had said it out loud, to each other, on a Maui beach at sunset.

In sailing, that makes it real.

Next chapter: Josh flies to Honolulu with his savings, sleeps on rooftops, and goes looking for a boat capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean. He has the qualifications of someone who has read several books about this. A German man named Klaus doesn't help.

👉 Read Chapter 2 — Tiny Bubbles: She Was Not Impressive

This story is based on real events. Some names, dialogue, and identifying details have been changed or recreated for narrative purposes.

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