Big Game at Sea 



of gray, yellow, purple and brown that ravish the 

 eye and senses in the Southern California summer. 



The oceanic wanderers, the pelagic fishes that had 

 winter and summer homes, were coming in out of the 

 west to the spawning grounds of their choice. They 

 were leaving the banks of Tanner and Cortez the 

 offshore plateaus where the tops of island moun- 

 tains are ever rising under the slow accretion of 

 oceanic debris, and in big schools were ravishing the 

 seas, starting along the surface, menaces to life and 

 fin of the smallest fry. 



There were scattered bands of yellowtail in splen- 

 did vestments of silver and gold ; great concourses of 

 white sea bass whose heads gleamed with all the tints 

 of a Spanish opal; tribes of bonitos in dazzling blues, 

 iridescent armies of albacore with long wing-like 

 fins and staring hypnotic eyes, indeed, this sea of Bal- 

 boa, this Black Current of Japan as it laved the 

 shores of the Southern California islands was a high- 

 way of the fishes. Later than all the rest, larger, 

 more portentious of possible havoc and alarm, came 

 the tunas from where, how, or exactly when, no one 

 knows, but when they appeared there was no mis- 

 take, no confusing them with something else. Ex- 

 actly the direction from which they swam no one 

 could possibly tell, but it was a fancy that they came 

 from the south, from some distant and mysterious 

 region beneath the sea. This spring the anglers had 

 been watching for them for several weeks, the small 



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