A BOOK OF FISHING STORIES 



and skilled salmon and trout fishers, that his boat was one of 

 thirty towed by a fighting tuna of nine hundred pounds weight. 



My first tuna fishing was begun in this very locality, in sight 

 of the Isles of Shoals, back in the 'seventies, when almost 

 every professional fisherman of Lynn had the crescent-shaped 

 tail of the tuna nailed to his roof. I attempted to take a 

 tuna or horse-mackerel with a rod, and spent many hours off 

 Boon Island, about ten miles off the New Hampshire coast, 

 in a dory, hoping to take one of the giants. But fortune did not 

 favour me, and it was not until 1888, at Santa Catalina, in the 

 Pacific, that I saw my 181 -pounder come sliding into the boat 

 on the gaff of my English boatman, Jim Gardner. 



My first impression of the tuna is a mass of silver, with the 

 turquoise sea of Santa Catalina beaten and churned into foam ; 

 of the air filled with those glistening insects of the sea, the big 

 flying fishes ; of the roar of waters in a dead calm, and of a 

 moving picture of thousands of leaping, cavorting, whirling 

 fishes, silver, purple and yellow. There is nothing quite like 

 this rush of a school of maddened tunas seized with the blood 

 lust. It is really beyond description in the peculiar excite- 

 ment it produces in the angler. 



No ; there is nothing just like it. It is as unfair to com- 

 pare it to river, brook, or lake fishing, as it would be to 

 compare the tiger or lion hunt to beagling. If not so 

 dangerous, it requires far more strength and staying power 

 than most of the sports I know. 



There is nothing quite like the onward sweep of this 

 magnificent fish, as when a school of thousands rushes like a 



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