INTERVIEW: Gordon Ramsay dives into world of spearfishing with Kimi Werner
Photo: Gordon Ramsay meets chef and world-class freediver, Kimi Werner. Photo courtesy of Humble Pie Rights Limited / Justin Mandel / Provided by Nat Geo press site with permission.
Anglers worth their salt usually have a good fish tale to tell. Kimi Werner can probably beat all of them because her love and mastery of spearfishing is essentially her life story.
Werner will share some of her adventures in the waters of Hawaii on the upcoming episode of Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, airing Sunday, Aug. 11 at 10 p.m. on Nat Geo.
Ramsay, perhaps the most famous celebrity chef in the world, has crafted this new TV show as an exploration series that finds him traveling to the far reaches of the world to learn about local customs and practices. The Aug. 11 episode finds him in Hawaii, learning from Werner about spearfishing and others about hunting deer with a bow, growing Hawaiian taro and surviving a trip on the Road to Hana in the torrential rain.
“Basically I just got a phone call, and when I heard that it was National Geographic wanting me to show spearfishing and whatnot and film underwater I thought it was a really good opportunity,” Werner said in a recent phone interview. “For me, personally, spearfishing is so much more than a sport. It’s a special thing for me. I got involved in it when I was about 5 years old. That’s how my dad put food on the table, and so it is something that has been very close to my heart, that my family did out of necessity back in the old days. It was our favorite way of spending time together, and also it’s what taught me my values growing up.”
Because spearfishing means so much to Werner, she wanted to make sure any TV series would respect the ancient cultural practice and how it has shaped her life. The hunting technique finds anglers descending to the depths of the ocean or the shallows of a reef to send a spear through the midsection of an unsuspecting fish. Sometimes a speargun is used; other times, the fisher utilizes the old-fashioned polespear.
Because Werner has worked with National Geographic before, she knew she was in good hands.
“I just knew that’s a name I can trust,” she said. “I was able to showcase this passion in a way where I could show what it means to me, where it’s not overdramatized or sensationalized, but it’s really about these are the values that it’s taught me over the years. It’s a good message to put out there into the world, so that’s kind of how it all came about. And then when I found out that Gordon Ramsay was who I would be taking out, I definitely had some second thoughts because I wasn’t sure what I was getting into or how his personality would be because I just had this image of him being this dominating personality that gets mad a lot. But I gave it a shot anyway, and I’m so glad I did because he ended up just being the most respectful, humble and really one of the best students I’ve had yet.”
Werner grew up in the little town of Haiku on the island of Maui, Hawaii. It’s a paradisiacal setting, for sure, but in her youngest years, Werner’s family didn’t have much. And this poverty drove her father to spearfish for the evening’s supper.
Werner would follow her father and watch as he essentially went grocery shopping in the ocean. He had a spear in his hand and the sun at his back, and when he returned to the water’s surface, he often had a fish in hand.
“You definitely are seeking out what you want to eat for the day and putting yourself in the environment that would most likely have that fish, and so if you’re in shallow reef water, you’re basically going to be looking for just the smaller fish,” Werner said of the variety of fish in Hawaii. “Even then, there’s a huge diversity of the different species that you might be going for, and so it’s kind of like going to the grocery store. You want to go there with a list in mind, with what you are trying to target, so you know what you’re looking for. Sometimes you definitely can come across a fish you weren’t expecting.”
When TV viewers watch Ramsay and Werner ply the waters off Hawaii’s Hana Coast, it might come across as an easy activity; however, Werner cautioned viewers to understand that few people come away with a fish the first they go spearfishing.
“Usually it takes a lot of practice,” she said. “I think it’s a tall order to expect to get a fish on your first time out. That’s something that I really explained to the production company and Gordon. That’s normally not the way I would ever teach someone is just putting a spear in their hand on their first day, showing them the ropes and expecting them to get a fish. I tend to like to go more slowly, really get someone to understand the whole ecosystem and then to get really comfortable in the water. That’s the first thing. I want them to be able to make sure that they can equalize their ears at depth, that they can conserve their oxygen and lower their heart rate.”
Werner’s instruction is all about having a person feel comfortable swimming down to the bottom of the ocean, using scuba gear, snorkeling or simply freediving.
She knows what she’s talking about, too. Today, she’s a United States National Spearfishing Champion who has amassed a host of sponsorships, including Patagonia, Kona Brewing Co. and Yeti, among others.
“All of those steps can take a lot of practice and a lot of conditioning before people feel comfortable or get it right, so he’s really lucky, to tell you the truth, because Gordon was a natural,” Werner reported on her experience with the TV host. “He definitely impressed me with his ability in the water and even more than that. It was his ability to take instruction because I was really on him a lot because we had such limited time, and it felt like an impossible mission and tall order. Any time he came up, I wasn’t worried about how to talk to him or whether or not I was discouraging him. I had to tell him everything he was doing wrong, everything he had to do to correct it and make him go try again, and I think a lot of people would have gotten discouraged or given up. But he was so determined that he just listened so well. He never questioned. He just listened, and he was able to get a fish. But I wouldn’t say that’s what most beginners should ever expect.”
Werner’s journey to competitive spearfishing has some interesting twists and turns. She was introduced to the practice at the young age of 5 thanks to her father’s skills and her family’s necessity for food on the table. That story doesn’t necessarily produce a world champion.
“By the time I was about 8 years old, my life changed pretty dramatically because both of my parents started making more money,” she said. “When my mom was 41, she was able to go to a community college for the first time. They had finally saved up enough money to put her in school, and a couple of years later, she graduated top of her class and became a nurse in the emergency room.”
At the same time, her father’s construction company started flourishing, so by the age of 8, her family left Haiku (“the boonies of nature and that little shack”), and they moved into a subdivision that saw her parents working all the time. She transitioned her food intake as well. She started eating ingredients purchased at the local grocery store, and the speared fish were no longer a weekly staple on the table.
“And it was a typical civilized life after that, and spearfishing was no longer a part of it,” she said. “I grew up and moved to the island of Oahu and lived in the city of Honolulu, got my degree in culinary arts and was working in the restaurant business, and I just felt this feeling of not feeling satisfied just creeping through my life. It just became heavier and heavier, and I just realized that I didn’t have enough feeling in my life. If this was it for the rest of my life, it wasn’t good enough for me. Even though everything looked good on paper, and I had a good job, I wasn’t happy. I was working with all of these ingredients that I had no connection to, no story to, basically just frozen filets of fish or whatever ingredients that were flown from afar, being imported, and I just wasn’t happy about it.”
To remedy the situation, she thought back to those days when she was 5 years old, following her father into the waters to spear fish. That was a time in her life when she could appreciate the source of her family’s dinner. She had a clear connection to the food on the table.
“I just remembered those days of being 5, 6 years old and really having this appreciation of knowing where my food came from, being able to tag along with my dad in the water as a little girl and even then putting in my orders for my favorite dinners and watch him go down and get them for me, and all the value that my mom taught me of being able to not waste a single morsel of these fish, how to eat them whole, how to use the bones, even the guts and scales to bury them underneath the same plants that fed us,” Werner said. “It was just such a beautiful harmonious lifestyle. It really hit me that those days of being poor actually felt like the richest of my life.”
At 24 years old, Werner tried to rejoin the ranks of spearfishing. She purchased a spear (not a speargun, just a basic polespear), and she went into the ocean — feeling a little scared and little freaked out.
“I felt like I don’t know what I’m doing, but I kept swimming and eventually came across this little reef and looked down,” said Werner, who can hold her breath underwater for up to 5 minutes. “Through a lot of trial and error that day, I was able to come out with five fish, and when I took them home, cleaned them and cooked them the way I remember, everything that I had been waiting for had been validated. I felt like it surpassed any meal I made in my whole culinary career — from the taste, the satisfaction, to that great feeling of knowing that I provided for myself — and in was in that moment that I really got into it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, featuring Kimi Werner, airs Sunday, Aug. 11 at 10 p.m. on Nat Geo. Click here for more information.
