The Beach Angler 215 



actions of the game. I soon knew that my fish was aware 

 that the shark was on its trail ; the quickening rushes, the 

 pecuHar nervous thrill which came down the line told the 

 story. 



I saw the fin of the shark lashing, cutting the water like a 

 knife ; now disappearing behind a curling, foaming wave that 

 brought it nearer and nearer, and again saw its grim shape 

 against the face of an amber sea. 



The race was parallel to the beach, and I was constantly 

 gaining; presently I reached the dry hard sand, the beach 

 here being very wide at ebb tide, and stopping, I slipped the 

 butt into my leather waist cap and reeled rapidly, forcing 

 my catch around in a great arc of a circle towards the beach. 

 In doing this I had lost sight of the shark, but when I waded 

 out, knee-deep, that I might reach the leader and land my 

 game, I saw it again. Either by chance, or by some sense of 

 smell, the shark saw that the game was coming in and fell 

 upon my fish not one hundred feet from me, and on the 

 crest of a big roller, in a mass of foam, rose and literally 

 shook the game in my face, then disappeared. I reeled as 

 fast as I could, and for one second held it, then the rod bent 

 and the line broke. 



The shark was ten feet in length, if my eyes did not de- 

 ceive me, and he rode the seas like a dory and paid no atten- 

 tion to them. Later I hooked and landed several six- and 

 seven-foot sharks here in the surf, and many channel bass, 

 and with the faith that comes to anglers as a special gift, 

 have always thought that that shark robbed me of a sixty- 

 or seventy-pound channel bass. Such a shark once seized 

 the cutwater of my boat after I had played it for an hour 

 or more, crushed the soft wood, actually pushing the boat 

 up a foot or two, almost capsizing her, before I could beat 

 it off. The actual situation is well shown in the accompany- 

 ing colored illustration. 



