Priorities: Fishing or Fishing?

I am going into Naha this Friday for a junior high English story contest, which I’ve been training two students to compete in. I make trips to Naha infrequently and try to revolve them around events requiring my presence.

I’ve decided that when I have to go to Naha I am also going to try and schedule a chartered fishing trip, since those boats leave from the mainland. So that’s what I did – write to my list of potential JETs about putting together a trip for Saturday. And I had about 4-5 confirmed with some probable non-JETs to fill out the boat.

Then I was walking past a closed dive shop in Zamami and I looked in the window and saw the corner of a piece of paper buried in a stack. It had a picture of a marlin and appeared to be an advertisement for a fishing tournament this weekend. I confirmed this a few hours later and a few hours after that had a surprise invitation in my email inbox.

So the dilemma became: chartered fishing trip I’d organized or marlin tournament? Fortunately marlin fishing trumps pretty much everything so the answer was pretty clear. I wrote a 'I know I'm not a good person, but..' email to the JETs and asked to reschedule in July.

A bonus of the marlin tournament is that it leaves from just north of Naha, which is where I will already be on Friday. We will fish all day Saturday, spend the night on Zamami (and heavily ice any fish we may have caught), then fish Sunday and return to the mainland, where I have to be Monday morning for a half-day education conference. I love it when things fall into place!