Big Game at Sea 



angler is always taking a chance, as the fish is so 

 uncertain and irrationable that it is just as liable to 

 leap into your boat as anywhere else, and if all the 

 stories and experiences of the tarpon anglers could 

 be collected, an interesting showing of great chances 

 taken would be made. I have seen a tarpon wreck a 

 boat, hurling chairs, tackle, oars into the air. A 

 tarpon has been known to come down and go through 

 the bottom of a boat as though it was made of paper. 

 A boat was found drifting in Galveston Bay some 

 years ago containing a dead tarpon and a dead angler. 

 The fish had broken the man's back. 



A friend of mine was fishing when a compan- 

 ion one hundred feet away had a strike, and the 

 fish came aboard my friend's boat, struck his chair, 

 knocking it overboard. In a past season a tarpon 

 in Florida came into a boat and knocked the angler 

 overboard, sending the oarsman over onto his back. 

 When the latter picked himself up he found his 

 patron gone; looking over the side he saw him sink- 

 ing and with the boat hook brought him up. He was 

 stunned, and later examination showed that two ribs 

 were broken. Between tiger hunting and tarpon 

 fishing as a steady occupation, the former might be 

 chosen as the safer pastime. 



There is not so much danger when one is fishing 

 in the open water, but when ten or twenty boats are 

 following one another out a narrow pass, every boat 

 is menaced by the fish that is hooked by the angler 



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