FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 

 the victim and then to set it free to recover its breath. There is, no doubt, 

 the risk of an untimely shark giving it premature burial before it has got 

 its wind, but this risk is preferable at any rate to certain death on shore. 

 The tarpon would say so, anyway, if its opinion could be canvassed. 



The method of trolling is perfectly simple. The tackle and bait have 

 already been described. When the hook is baited and the skiff is in the 

 tideway, the angler, seated in an armchair, with his back to the guide 

 and with his feet planted squarely against a sandbag, which gives him 

 firm purchase when fighting his fish, the brakes are taken off the reel 

 and the lead is allowed to run down through thirty -eight feet of water, 

 which (allowing for the length of the leader, etc.) puts the bait about 

 forty-five feet deep. The requisite amount of line to let run off the reel 

 is indicated by a mark. Then all the brakes are put on, a turn of the line 

 is taken round the butt and held in place with the thumb of the left hand, 

 while that of the right presses the aforementioned leather pad against 

 the line on the barrel of the reel. While waiting for a bite, the angler 

 holds the tip of the rod out over the gunwale of the skiff, not straight over 

 the stern, but either to right or to left of him, so that the guide can watch 

 it, for his skilled eye reads from its behaviour the movements of the fish 

 below. A sudden slight twitch, no more than at home would betoken a 

 mackerel, is followed by another, and now is the moment to strike the hook 

 home, jerking up the rod again and again till the reel goes fiying round, for 

 all its brakes, and a maddened tarpon, one splendid bar of silver sheen, 

 flies high in the air perhaps a hundred yards distant and falls back on the 

 water with a splash that would be heard a mile off. The leap of a tarpon is 

 like nothing else in the angler's world-wide experience. He may have seen 

 salmon and trout leap, but theirs is poor frolic beside the magnificent dis- 

 play of a tarpon fighting for its liberty. Meanwhile the angler has slipped the 

 butt end of the rod inside the leather rest on the seat and at the first check 

 he begins to reel in line, raising and lowering the rod as if it were the 

 handle of a pump, a lever to which the leather rest acts as fulcrum. Each 

 time the rod top is lowered the slack line is reeled in, though the second 

 charge of the desperate fish is often more effectual than even the first, 

 and it takes matters its own way, carrying out more line than ever. Up in 

 the air it goes again, perhaps two or three times more. Then may come 

 the most critical moment of all, when the great fish doubles on its tracks 

 and comes straight for the boat, faster than the angler can wind in the 

 line, and even passes under the keel, much as a mackerel would. The man 

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