As much as I’d love to chase fish or fur, I don’t think I want to tip my toe in the water. My family is pretty damn supportive of my addictions so I think this will all be about family time.
It’s honestly best to keep them separate unless you just don’t care about throwing money away. A few years ago I wanted to book a fishing charter on the big island I had the boat captain on speaker phone and when he told me the price for a day of fishing I saw the look on my wife’s face change. She started asking questions and the captain smoothly mentioned that since she was more into snorkeling we could do both, snorkeling and fishing….sounds great. I paid like 1500.00.
The day we got there the two guys working on the boat were sort of being weird. As it turns out, there just isn’t as many large fish there as there used to be and it’s nearly impossible to catch anything during a 7 hour trip when 4 of those hours are spent driving to the the snorkeling area.
In the end, we caught zero fish because by the time we got to the snorkeling area and out to where we could fish, there was only a few hours left. We basically tripled out to a snorkeling spot then trolled back.
Lesson learned that if I ever go on a fishing boat there again, there will be no side trips to snorkel, just straight up fishing. They did give us a bunch of fish to take but I still wanted to hook into a big marlin or wahoo or something.
If you and up in kuaui though, take a 5wt fly rod with some wooly buggers. There’s an arboretum there with a tiger than runs through the jungle. That river is full of bass and even rainbow trout, you can make a hike/swimming/fishing day out of it.
In oahu you can fly fish for bonefish all along the reef from the beach parks by koko head. You probably need a guide to fish the triangle unless you have a kayak or something that’s something you could also sneak in for a few hours without wrecking a family trip.
If you’re on the big island, I think the best places I found to snorkel were two step and captain cook monument, I found another place out west of the airport, it was like a locals spot but there were tons of fish, seemed like an old boat launch are or something.