INCIDENTS IN TUNA FISHING 51 



The fishing-ground this genial Mexican opened up 

 to me was a delight; in my mind's eye I saw the thou- 

 sands who later would come to enjoy it, and I have 

 lived to see Avalon, on the bay where I cast from the 

 beach, with no spectators except the pelicans, the 

 gulls, and the ravens, with a summer population of eight 

 thousand or more, the hills dotted with cottages and 

 hotels of all sizes and conditions. If the fishing had 

 been in streams it would long ago have been exhausted, 

 but the big game fish are still here, the mild, delicious 

 air, the tender blue of the sky; and, while modernized, 

 Santa Catalina is still the angler's paradise, where 

 one may meet in a season or a year one hundred and 

 fifty thousand persons, among them many English- 

 men. Of these, some have made the trip to land a 

 yellowtail, a tuna, or a black sea bass. While Santa 

 Catalina is seemingly several thousand miles from 

 anywhere, it is really not so far from New York and 

 London, and one can decide to-day to go a-fishing 

 there, and from twelve to fourteen days later from 

 London be on the grounds in the midst of the sport, 

 or in five days from New York reach it with equal 

 ease. So much for ocean greyhounds and special 

 cross-continent express trains. Again, the grounds are 

 but a two and a half hours' sail from Los Angeles, a 

 city of 350,000 inhabitants. 



Of all the game taken on these splendid fishing- 

 grounds, the tuna is the best known, and some anglers 

 go thousands of miles every season to take it. The 

 tarpon has been caught twenty-five years or more 

 with a rod in Florida, while the capture of the leaping 

 tuna is a recent gift of the gods. It has been my 

 good fortune to have taken many of the big game 



