352 CHANNEL ISLANDS OF CALIFORNIA 



and I have seen columns of white sea bass, averaging 

 fifty pounds, swim so near that I have touched them 

 with an oar. I have seen, from a glass-bottomed 

 boat, a diver in armor who went down in Avalon Bay, 

 sitting on the bottom, feeding fish with broken echini 

 which he held in his hands. 



The whales one sees when crossing the channel are 

 indifferent to vessels, and will sometimes swim along- 

 side. The orcas, fifteen or twenty feet long, seem 

 indifferent to human beings, and swim along within 

 twenty or thirty feet of the boat or pass under it. The 

 great sunfish has permitted me to rush alongside and 

 grasp it by its fin. But if the angler desires to see 

 really tame fishes he should go out a mile or so from 

 Avalon some warm still day and have his boatman 

 "chum" up long-finned tunas or albacores and boni- 

 tos. Wlien hungry they will almost take food from 

 one's hand. I have caught them by placing a sardine 

 on the point of the gaff, and as the tuna, a forty- 

 pounder, snatched the lure, not two feet from my 

 hand, I would jerk the hook into it and land the fish. 

 This seems almost impossible; but I think, could I 

 have reached down farther under water, I could have 

 fed these radiantly colored fishes out of my hand, as 

 many persons have fed wild birds. 



