Adventures with the Biggest Bass 



bass. The majority of those taken are females with 

 egg masses weighing many pounds, but in twenty 

 years' fishing I have never seen a young fish, though 

 I understand several as small as eight pounds have 

 been caught; but even in nets no very small fishes 

 have been taken, and in all probability they are 

 hatched inshore in August or September, and soon 

 go out into deep water. The rocky shores and kelp 

 forests of these islands of Southern California are 

 their home, and where deep water cuts in near the 

 mainland, as at Redondo, they are found in summer; 

 but in winter they doubtless school and retire to the 

 offshore plateaus, as Cortez and Tanner's banks, or 

 enter deep water that mysterious realm where sar- 

 dines and small fry take up their home in the alleged 

 cold months of winter. 



Many confuse the black sea bass of Southern Cali- 

 fornia with the Florida jewfish, an entirely different 

 fish, a fish I have taken in Florida, and which is com- 

 mon all along the Gulf, large specimens being taken 

 at Aransas Pass. 



Our camp was on a key where, it was alleged, a 

 lighthouse keeper had taken twenty thousand dollars 

 in gold from an old wreck, and the pieces of this same 

 vessel served us as firewood, according to Scope, and 

 Scope was authority for everything on East Key in 

 those days. The key was perhaps twenty acres in 

 extent, covered with bay cedar and prickly pear, and 

 over it hovered a cloud of gulls that could be seen 



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