The Rise of Don Antonio 245 



weighing from one hundred to three hundred and fifty 

 pounds, with a hand-line, to have lost many with the 

 rod, and once to have been fairly beaten in a short-rod 

 trial of twenty-two minutes. Taking the fish on the 

 hand-line (though I would not be understood as com- 

 mending it) is not without its excitement, as my capture 

 of a three hundred and forty-seven pound specimen off 

 the rocks may illustrate. We rowed around the south 

 end of the island, passing the long Pebble Beach, by 

 the sea-lion rookery, whose inmates stared at us lazily, 

 roaring and barking hoarsely, by the Sphinx's head that 

 gazes eternally into the west, where 



Tempestuous Corus rears his dreadful head, 



then turned to the north-west and, over the long ground- 

 swells, moved up the island to the restless kelp beds, 

 the home of the bass. The shore here is precipitous 

 and wild, beaten by the winds of centuries, and coloured 

 with all the tints that mark the sunsets of this isle of 

 summer. There is no shore line in rough weather ; the 

 pitiless sea piles in, buffeting the very base of the 

 mountains, and is tossed high in the air in white floccu- 

 lent masses amid the booming and crash of contact with 

 seen and unseen rocks. 



Directly back of Avalon, a half-mile offshore, in 

 sixty or seventy feet of water, lies a vast submarine 

 forest of kelp, for which the bass invariably make when 

 hooked inshore. Within one hundred feet of the beach 

 is another kelp bed, whose leaves lie along the surface 



