His empty boat, Bingo Too, washed ashore at Turtle Bay with the large, battered marlin attached to the side. The motor was still running.

Although no one knows for certain how Shiroma met his fate, his friends and relatives say they are sure he died doing what he loved.

"Hana pa'a!" his daughter Stephanie wrote in an obituary. "I just got da big one! One marlin, way over 200 pounds! I wen earn my chirping rights!"

Ernie Choy, owner of The Deli on He'eia Pier, talked fishing and politics each Thursday over Shiroma's breakfast of pork links, three scrambled eggs and rice. He likened his friend's manner of death to a fantasy.

"To be able to leave by hooking up a big fish — having the fish on the back of the boat?" he said. "It would be like dying in bed with a beautiful woman. Same thing, to a fisherman."

"Except," said Shiroma's wife, Sandra, "I don't think he would have wanted to go so quickly."

Sandra Shiroma said her husband retired as a director of sales at GTE in 1998, when he was 55.

His first action as a retiree was to buy a dog, which his granddaughter, Kara Billington, named Bingo.

Shiroma, a stocky, dark man who grew even more tan as retirement offered more time in the sun, walked the dog twice a day and got to know the neighbors.

"People I've never even seen are coming to the door to tell me how much they liked him," she said.

His next step was to buy a boat, which he named after the dog.

"To a fisherman," Sandra Shiroma said, "the boat is a second wife."

He was regular among the retiree fishermen who had coffee and breakfast at He'eia Pier.

"They called themselves the Old Futs' Club," his wife said. "They bragged about all the fish they caught. They called it chirping. They all wanted to earn their chirping rights."

Shiroma made it an art.

On Wednesday, he radioed his friend Warren Onaga that he had caught a marlin, "over 200 pounds."

Marks on Shiroma's boat indicate a fish more than twice that size, Sandra Shiroma said. She thinks her husband deliberately underestimated the fish's size to make his arrival on shore more dramatic for Onaga and the other fishermen.

Shiroma stayed active in his community after retirement, working with Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council on regulation issues, and participating in the Nishihara Okinawan Club and Democratic campaigns.

But when it was time to fish, his wife said, it was time.

"He'd say, 'If anyone calls, tell them I'm off island,' " she said.

The loss has been difficult for her, for Shiroma's daughters and grandchildren, and for his 81-year-old mother, Daisy, who keeps telling the rest of the family they need to go pick him up.

Like her mother-in-law, Sandra Shiroma said she has a tough time thinking of her husband as dead.

"I just think of him as being off island," she said.

In addition to his wife, daughter Stephanie, granddaughter Kara and mother Daisy, Shiroma's survivors include daughter Suzanne Billington; grandchildren John Billington and Noelani Cairns; brother Lawrence; and sisters Sharon Nishino and Ruth Haitsuka.

The memorial service will be 10 a.m. Friday at the Hawai'i Okinawan Center, 94-587 Ukee St. in Waipi'o.