230 Fish Stories 



years of accumulated angling wisdom, said that a skipjack 

 could not put up such a fight, in which I readily agreed, as 

 the ordinary catch — indeed, the largest I had seen in twenty 

 years — did not weigh over ten pounds. Still the reel was 

 shrieking, and the lady losing line as fast as she gained it 

 by reeling, and at times the fish seemed to be seized with a 

 frenzy and darted away so suddenly that both line and rod 

 were threatened. 



Yet so cleverly did the angler play it that the expected did 

 not happen, and the fight went on. Time and again the 

 game creature made a two-hundred- foot circle of the launch, 

 sweeping around, boiling at the surface, too far away to be 

 seen ; then it would dash downward, plunge into the depths, 

 always to come upward, with the strange thrill of the skip- 

 jack. Yet who ever heard of a skipjack making such a 

 fight as this? It pulled the launch about, and more than 

 once the lady cried that she could not move the fish, nor 

 stop it from taking all the line. But she always rallied at 

 the last moment, and after half an hour or more, began to 

 gain the ascendency, and was reeling the game in, which was 

 now always at the surface, in direct contrast to the albacore 

 and tuna, which, with the yellowtail, plunge into the deep 

 sea and sulk like a salmon. 



This habit of surfacing marks the skipjack as one of the 

 best fighting sea fishes ; yet I could not believe that a mere 

 skipjack could battle so long, and when it made a sudden 

 rise from deep water I was convinced that it was a shark, 

 as all the sharks I had taken with a rod made this rising play 

 so uniformly that it was characteristic. I thought that the 

 fisherwoman had hooked a skipjack which had been seized 

 by a shark which she was now playing. The expression of 

 my opinion resulted in an avalanche of stories of sharks. 

 The boatman had taken in a whitefish which was seized by a 

 shark, and he was holding it off with his gaff when the fish, 

 a fierce bonito shark, surged forward and attempted to seize 

 his arm, just missing it but tearing his shirt-sleeve into 



