INCIDENTS IN TUNA FISHING 57 



Bif, hang, zeeee-zeee, zeee! Do you know the lan- 

 guage of reels? — the song, the laughter, the cry of 

 victory from the brass or silver throat? Then you 

 know what this means. Two rods have been jerked 

 down fiercely in a radius of five feet, two reels have 

 cried out suddenly, so loudly that a fellow-angler in 

 the distance raises his hat and cheers for our good 

 luck. The boatman has stopped the engine, and the 

 boat is backing before the fish gets a hundred feet of 

 line, while the thumbs are pressing on the line grinding 

 off bits of leather in a dark red shower. 



The song of the reels increases — zeee-zeee! Then 

 one stops; the rod straightens, and my companion 

 expresses himself — his fish is off. This left me the 

 field and made possible my big catch, though I have 

 several times seen both fishes landed — a rare and 

 difficult operation, as they have the trick of joining 

 forces and fouling the lines. I had hooked many 

 tunas, but never before had failed to stop the first 

 rush in less than three hundred and fifty feet, but this 

 fish kept up the music, ze-e-e-e, tearing off the 

 line despite my efforts, until the conviction was forced 

 into my mind that here was a force that nothing could 

 stop, that was surely taking all the line. 



The fish had plunged down into the azure of the 

 channel's heart. There was possibly a thousand feet 

 below us gradually sinking away to the depths of the 

 mighty canon known as the Santa Catalina Channel, 

 an abyss so deep that it falls under the popular head 

 of "no bottom," among the alongshore men and toilers 

 of the sea. I followed the thread of a line down into 

 these deeps, saw the beauty of its color, its vivid inten- 

 sity, caught the tracery of a myriad delicate forms, 



