Kona's billfish tournament canceled for 2026, future uncertain

Kona’s billfish tournament will sit out 2026, a blow that reaches far beyond the marina and into the visitor economy that has long depended on the event’s draw. The Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament, founded in 1959 and built around five 8-hour fishing days from Upolu to Kalae Point, has been one of Kona’s signature sporting traditions for decades. Organizers said the cost and logistics of bringing it back became too difficult as international travel patterns shifted, operational expenses climbed and transportation costs kept rising.

That makes the cancellation more than a one-year pause. HIBT has long been sold as a cornerstone of Kona’s charter-boat fleet, and its value has always extended into hotels, restaurants, fuel docks and other marine-related businesses that count on visiting anglers. Teams from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Palau and the U.S. mainland have traditionally filled the field, turning the tournament into a small but significant international marketplace for Kailua-Kona. In a county where visitor spending flows through direct, indirect and induced effects, the loss of one globally recognized event leaves a real hole in the summer calendar.

The tournament’s history is tightly tied to Kona’s identity as a big-game fishing capital. Peter Fithian, who moved to Kona in 1955 after a career at Augusta National Golf Club, founded the event in 1959 with local anglers including Henry Chee. The tournament launched two days after Hawaii became a state and was modeled in part on the Masters in Augusta, a borrowed sense of prestige that helped turn a local fishing contest into an international institution.

Bobbie Fithian, who took over as director after Peter Fithian died in 2025, said she still hopes to bring the tournament back. That hope is rooted as much in family history as in economics. IGFA’s memorial for Peter Fithian says he gathered local anglers in 1958 to create the tournament and helped make HIBT a model for other long-running events. The tournament did return in 2023 after a three-year hiatus, when 13 teams came back to Kailua-Kona from across the globe.

Veteran participant Rick Gaffney framed the cancellation as a warning, not a routine scheduling gap. That is the pressure now hanging over Kona: whether the tournament’s absence is a one-year setback or evidence that the costs of staging legacy events on Hawaii Island are rising faster than the visitor traffic they are built to capture.