I ask Justin Lee what he wants to do with his night off. His wife, Sonnaly, is working, and his in-laws are watching their young kids, Elle and Pa'akai. It's drizzling rain, the wind is up and the sky overcast. A hurricane passing to the south has whipped up a historically large swell, so Justin, a champion spearfisher, decides to hunt on land instead.
At 38, Justin is a world-class hunter both on land and at sea. He's sponsored by premium brands like Traeger grills, Yeti coolers and Aimrite spearguns. He's downed an eight-hundred-pound elk with a single arrow. He's ranked in the top twenty-five in the world for competitive spearfishing. I, on the other hand, have barely hunted, and for nothing like a giant elk (fish, doves, turkey, deer and gator). Like most of us, I have to choose between doing fun things and doing adult things. Justin seems to have made all the right choices to bring those two things together, and I'm spending a long weekend with him to see how he does it.
We drive down backcountry roads and through a few locked cattle gates. "If you're respectful and let landowners dig into your cooler, they're happy to let you hunt their land," he says. This applies especially to this former sugar plantation community of Honokaa on the north shore of Hawai'i Island. The landowner has declared open season on pigs, no limit. Wild pigs are invasive and destructive; they increase soil runoff by rooting in streambeds and cause deforestation. Landowners are only too happy to get rid of the scourge. But we're not going after some run-of-the-mill pig: The landowner wants Justin to hunt down a giant boar that reportedly eats newborn calves.
Justin, dressed in camo, looks like a bush wearing a ballcap. Instead of quietly stalking, we take off on a fast walk. He points out wary pigs that somehow know to stay beyond the range of his Matthews bow. Such high-performance bows are customized to a specific hunter's arm anatomy, so it's unlikely I'll have any luck with it. I hold back and watch. "They smelled us. Now we are downwind. We'll walk right up on them," Justin says. But the pigs are spooked by the cows that we've spooked. Justin zigzags us among watering holes and groves of kukui (candlenut) trees, scaring roosting wild turkeys. Eventually we catch a small group of pigs unaware. Justin stalks, draws and fires a silent arrow.
It's a perfect shot. The pig, a sow, drops instantly. Dressing the kill, we find that the arrow had penetrated both the head and heart, so it's a clean and merciful kill. Justin targets sows over boars when he can, as a sow can have litters with as many as ten piglets, and "if she's not nursing new piglets, she's pregnant again," Justin says. Later, he tells me he'd never made such a clean shot. But this is no dumb luck; this is experience in action. We never do find that calf-eating monster, but we may well have prevented ten more from being born.
Champion spearfisher and hunter Justin Lee ascends in the waters off Panama with the largest ahi he's caught to date (190 pounds), along with fellow spearfisher Kimi Werner (ABOVE). Lee's prowess at spearfishing has taken him around the world for competitions, but he's most at home in the waters off Hawaii Island, where he grew up and where he lives today.
Whether hunting or fishing, Justin attributes his success to "understanding animal nature," he says. To get close with short-range weapons like bows and even closer with spearguns, you have to think like your quarry. "You can't make aggressive movements towards ulua," or giant trevally, a prized game fish. Instead of stalking, Justin wedges himself into the reef, watching other fish like a predator while almost blindly aiming his speargun to where the target ulua will be. He can wait a long time; both his breath hold and patience are preternatural. So is his endurance: Most spearfishing competitions last six hours, involving dives deeper than you can safely go on recreational scuba, all while battling powerful, wounded fish. But for Justin, that's a typical Saturday dive on the Hamakua coast.
Justin was an athlete from the start; he took to volleyball and swimming in high school, winning the state competition in fifty- and hundred-yard freestyle, becoming an All-American swimmer and earning a scholarship to Washington State University. He aimed for a career in medicine, but college life in dreary Washington didn't suit him, so he returned to his family and the Islands, working at restaurants before becoming a firefighter. Justin doused fires for eight years, hunting and spearfishing during his downtime. "I loved the fire department," he says, "but I don't miss responding to our neighbors having the worst days of their lives."
Lee relaxes at sixty feet in between drops at Hannibal Bank, a seamount off Panama.
Justin placed well in cutthroat local team tournaments, but in order to bring his spearfishing wins to the next level, to compete nationally and globally, he needed to compete on his own. To qualify for the World Underwater Spearfishing Championship, Justin had to first qualify for Team USA by placing well in two national events. Winning such events requires not just spearfishing skill but a strategic understanding of the scoring system; Justin was disqualified during the Florida nationals because a triggerfish he shot was five-eighths of an inch too small. He made up the loss in ranking by shooting the largest carp during the next event at Lake Powell. What's it like spearfishing in a freshwater reservoir? "Cold. Visibility is not so much, but it's shallow and there's a bunch of big, dumb fish," he says. In five hours he made 177 drops, barely cracking 25 feet. His strong showing at Lake Powell put him on Team USA for the 2018 World Championship in Portugal.
A fish assassin of Justin's standing does not wing it. For three weeks leading up to the event, he scouted the reefs of Portugal. He swam off the beaten path and found a flat patch of reef at seventy-five feet with a couple of deep crags and seemingly limitless schools of prize fish. "I had it all planned," he says. "I would dive, shoot, reload and dive again, every six minutes." With that arithmetic, he knew he would be the likely winner. But the day before competition, a storm from the south changed the current. The fish were nowhere to be found, but he dived with everything he had nevertheless. Later, the observer told him in broken English that he'd never seen anyone dive so hard for so little. "I think he meant it as a kind of compliment," Justin says. He kept at it for hours with nothing to show. "I couldn't buy a fish," he moans. The next day, though, his luck improved at another spot, and Justin placed twenty-fourth out of seventy-five of the world's elite spearos. His earlier performance in the 2016 world championship in Greece was even more impressive: He took fish from depths between 150 and 195 feet and placed ninth in the world.
But neither Portugal nor Greece is as challenging as his home turf. There are few sandy beaches on the Hamakua coast-it's mostly cliffs. Justin gets to his fishing grounds courtesy of borrowed extension ladders, and his sidekick-his dog Dennis-leads him back to the exit point by barking from it. That partnership works out most of the time, but Justin has more "I almost got rescued by the Coast Guard" stories than he cares to discuss, he says.
Lee and Werner celebrate after landing a big ahi in Panama. To spear a fish of such size and power, one has to "understand animal nature," says Lee. He applies that same understanding on land when bowhunting for invasive pigs and sheep, which devastate agricultural lands and native forest.
We're bounding along in an ATV down a firebreak at Haloa Aina, the 2,780-acre sandalwood forestry operation his father, Wade, started in 2010. Back at the ranch house, Justin had shown me a photo of what the land had looked like ten years before: a volcanic moonscape spangled with twiggy eucalyptus trees. Now there's a low scrub of native sandalwood saplings growing on either side of the firebreak. "I don't fault the people who came before us," Justin says, referring to the ranchers who long ago cut down the native forest and seeded grasses from Africa to graze cattle. "They were doing what they thought was right at the time to support themselves."
Sitting between us, Justin's daughter Elle announces her intent to pick daisies. He stops, but not for daisies. "Ram, right there. Take 'em." I dig out his scoped rifle and let the crosshairs stabilize between the curled horns of the mature male half-Mouflon sheep, another destructive invasive species, guarding four ewes. I fire and the ewes scatter. I reload for a follow-up shot. "No need. You dropped him." "That was loud," Elle says, then jumps out of the ATV to pick daisies. Like pig sows, rams are a good target for population control, Justin explains. "A ram is ready to mate year-round, but the ewes have maybe two babies per pregnancy. It's best to eliminate the ram."
We drive on and Justin stops again and points. "Another ram. Brown coat, right in the middle of the pack, black face." This time the pack scatters. I get out and stalk to where I last spotted them. Justin makes guttural noises and then motors up the path. Minutes pass. "Come to this tree and kneel," he says, pointing. "You'll see him." He's right. I fire hastily; the ewes flee. "Dropped 'em again!" Justin exclaims. Turns out this was all strategic: Sheep are wary when an ATV stops, but when it motors on, they figure it's just the forestry workers going about their business. Justin's eerily realistic mating call and ATV misdirection put the sheep at ease. I'm doing the easy part; I'm just the trigger man.
Lee shoots targets at Haloa Aina, his family's sandalwood agriforest, while daughter Elle evaluates his precision.
This isn't sport. It's work and sustainable forestry. Justin tells me, "It's a wetter season so there's lots of green grass now. But when it gets dry, the sheep eat the tender tree saplings or any branches that droop low. And rams rub their horns against mature trees," breaking the bark and exposing the tender xylem to insects and fungi. The best thing one can do for a fragile native forest in a single day, he says, is to drop a couple of rams.
As a sandalwood forestry operation, Haloa Aina focuses on planting and protecting growing saplings; responsible culling of old trees creates the revenue needed for the reforestation effort. The operation selects only dead or dying sandalwood trees, each sixty years old and about fourteen inches around at the trunk. "During the reign of King Kamehameha I, every man, woman and child was told to gather about one hundred pounds of sandalwood," he says. It was the kingdom's first international export, sold mainly to China for incense and perfumes. Demand for sandalwood accelerated deforestation in the Islands, and the resource didn't last: By the middle of the nineteenth century, there was so little sandalwood left that the industry collapsed. Haloa Aina is five thousand feet above the town of Captain Cook, so some sandalwood on this land was spared, and Justin's family sustainably harvests and replenishes it.
In the processing facility, distillery-style stainless-steel tanks and wood shredding equipment are housed in two metal Quonset huts. The distillation process is labor intensive but worth it. The trunks and root balls are shredded into sawdust and steam distilled to extract oil and hydrosol. A ton of sandalwood yields about ten kilograms of oil and gallons of fragrant hydrosol. At retail the oil sells for $105 per five-milliliter bottle. Unlike the days of old, when commoners slaved to haul sandalwood down the mountain for the king, "this supports our family and the families of our thirteen workers," Justin says.
When Elle was born, Wade invited his son to help with Haloa Aina-a safer line of work for a new father. So Justin left the fire department and started hunting even more. He maintains his ties to the firefighting community and has created water reservoirs at Haloa Aina for fire department helicopters to fill their drop buckets when fighting brush fires.
When Lee wants to fish with family, he'll go from land. Above, Lee with his wife Sonnaly and daughter Elle on the beach at Waipio, Hawaii Island.
The next day, I bring my attempt at ram stew to a local-style barbecue at Wade's place. There are a lot of kids and dogs under the command of Justin's mother, Lillian. All of the meat dishes are the fruit of recent hunts (Justin's sow has provided the kalua pork). He credits his family, Wade especially, for his hunting prowess and every other success in his life. Wade, 64, chases his ten grandkids around with an awkward gait due to a spinal injury he suffered from decompression sickness while scuba diving. That didn't stop him from joining the National Guard and becoming a nuclear, biological and chemical defense specialist. "Real superheroes don't wear capes," Justin says, "and my superhero drags his toes when he walks." Wade in turn credits his bowhunting ability to his father and grandfather, who made their own arrows from cedar dowels fletched with turkey feathers.
Wade praises my ram stew as "tender," which has me grinning. Wild meat tends to be tougher than pastured meat. Justin eats sparingly and drinks a gallon of water. He's constantly vigilant about his weight-a long time has passed since his college years, when he was ripped enough to be a dancer in Thunder Down Under in Las Vegas. "I made all the other dancers feel bad about their bodies," he jokes. But there's another reason he holds back. "When I was an infant, I was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma," he says. "When they brought him in for surgery," Wade remembers, "he was as big around as he was tall." The surgery removed the cancer, but it also took a kidney, half his liver and most of his adrenal glands. It took years for Justin to recover, but by the time he was four, "he was playing baseball with his older brother, Brandon," says Wade. Decades later, Justin met his surgeons on a guided hunt. They couldn't believe it was the same boy whose life they'd saved. "I showed them my scars from where they took skin from my legs to graft my stomach back together," he says smiling. "They had told my parents I had a 5 percent chance of survival." These days he eats his quarry in moderation, he says, to prevent gout.
Justin lets his sleepy son Paakai crawl up on his lap. He looks down at his son and lays a last bit of advice on us both: "Check your gear, every screw and fastener. If you break it down, life is all about getting dinner."
