A BOOK OF FISHING STORIES 



Mr. E. L. Doran, who held the record of seventeen tunas in a 

 season, was present. 



As an illustration of the power of this fish, I was sitting in 

 a skiff one day with Mr. Doran, behind the launch, purposing 

 to take the oars if he had a strike. The latter came, and the 

 angler, possibly the most powerful man in the Club, could not 

 stop the fish until it had taken nearly six hundred feet of line 

 in a vertical plunge that made it smoke. I have seen lines 

 ignite. When Mr. Doran finally stopped the fish and held it, 

 the stern of the flat-bottomed boat sank lower and lower until 

 it was within an inch of going under. Then the line, a twenty- 

 one thread, broke. If the line had been the rope by which 

 Mr. Edmunds' tuna above referred to towed thirty boats, I 

 have no doubt but that the tuna would have hauled the boat 

 under water. In fact, there is no limit, apparently, to their 

 strength. The fish in the finest condition, either never give 

 up, or else suddenly die of heart failure, and the gaffing of a 

 lusty tuna of one hundred and eighty or more pounds is a 

 strenuous piece of work. One fish I recall nearly pounded 

 the bottom out of my slight boat with its terrific bounds. 

 Tunas have towed anglers all night ; ten, twenty, even thirty 

 miles have been covered by the tunas towing a boat by a line 

 so delicate that had the act not been witnessed, one might well 

 be pardoned for thinking himself the victim of some weird 

 fish-story. 



The tuna is a world-wide fish, ranging nearly all waters not 

 purely tropical. The Mediterranean is a famous locality for 

 it in Europe, and Nova Scotia is the summer home of the giants 



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