FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 



was no amusement whatever in this lamentable waste of two hours during 

 which tarpon were biting well, and only the remembrance that I had not 

 another spare line with me prevented my cutting the brute loose. The 

 only much larger shark than this that I ever saw at close quarters suddenly 

 rose from the depths alongside my steamer at Cairns, in Queensland, one 

 evening many years earlier. It measured over nineteen feet, in fact only 

 three inches short of twenty, as we were able to estimate from the fact 

 that its head and tail lay opposite the companion and cook's galley. What 

 it came for, so close to a ship, we could not guess. What it got was first 

 my big shark hook, which it first took into its enormous mouth and then 

 blew out as a roach blows out a pellet of paste, and then a stream of lead 

 from a magazine rifle, which did not even frighten it, as it just sank very 

 slowly out of sight absolutely unhurt. It was a tiger shark, and I managed 

 to catch a couple of the pilot-fish that were swimming round its head. 

 But of the shark itself we saw no more. 



Sharks swarm along the whole length of the Australian coast. When 

 fishing for snapper off Sydney Heads, we used to be plagued with them 

 at times, and a considerable number of those hooked proved to be females 

 with living young inside them. A man employed in connexion with the 

 submarine mines at the Heads used in those days to earn pocket money 

 in the form of the reward paid by the New South Wales Government 

 for killing large sharks. He had an ingenious arrangement by which 

 a dynamite fuse could be hidden in a joint of pork and fired from a 

 battery ashore. The shark did the rest after the man had pressed the 

 button, and he was generally able to recover sufficient of it to claim his 

 reward. 



Great rays and skate were also plentiful in those seas. I once hooked an 

 enormous stingray off the old " Oceana " that is no more. We were 

 anchored off the Semaphore, in Largs Bay, for the night, and I had the 

 ray on for some hours, at the end of which, just when I had it exhausted 

 on the surface, the ship's butcher obligingly came to my assistance with 

 one of his knives and, being a little over zealous, cut through my line 

 while trying to stab the fish in the head. Some of the largest rays I ever 

 set eyes on were in Florida, but these never take a hook, the only way 

 of catching them being with a harpoon. Both Mr Dimock and Mr Turner 

 Turner have enjoyed this sport, and Mr Conn, who is well known at Santa 

 Catalina, has, I think, harpooned the record ray in Mexican waters, though 

 what it weighed I do not remember hearing. 

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