228 Recreations of a Sportsman 



seven fishes ranging up to forty pounds, and 

 none less than twenty-five, the time of playing 

 being from thirty minutes to an hour or more. 

 Of strikes there were innumerable, and of losses 

 there w r ere many on some days, few on others; 

 and when the yacht got up steam, about July 

 20th, hoisted the launches aboard, and saluted 

 Chinetti, every angler felt as though he had put 

 in two weeks, of ten hours a day, at club swing- 

 ing. So much for rod fishing as an exercise 

 aside from pure sport. 



The largest nine-ounce rod catch was a two- 

 hundred-and-fifty-pound black sea-bass, 1 and 

 there were rock bass, barracuda, long-finned 

 tuna, and others. But the big cousins of the 

 Florida amber-jacks, that had possession of the 

 fishes' highway, so completely filled the eye and 

 imagination, that the anglers, half of whom had 

 travelled six thousand miles to go a-fishing, de- 

 voted themselves to them exclusively. The 

 largest yellowtails taken by our party ran up to 

 forty pounds; my own was a thirty-eight- 

 pounder. In drifting in clear water where we 

 could see, often several fishes would dash for 

 the bait at once, and it was the consensus of 

 opinion that the smallest fish, the twenty-five 

 pounders, reached it first. Once when it so hap- 

 pened I had my eye on my eighteen-inch flying- 

 fish bait, I saw a thirty-pound fish seize it; 



1 Taken by Mr. Gifford Pinchot. 



