28 Big Game Fishes 
ing their position beneath them, a huge fish 
being occasionally seen by the angler down 
through a funnel of sardines as the line sinks. 
In May or the latter part of April one or 
two large schools of sardines enter the bay of 
Avalon to spawn, and their numbers are so vast 
and so closely do they lie, that they form an 
almost solid mass. Into this I cast an empty 
hook, and when it is out of sight a slight jerk 
is sufficient to impale a sardine, which becomes 
the most active of lures. The sardines do not 
appear to notice the hook, but the struggles 
of the live bait alarm them so that they form 
a solid ring about it. Down it sinks until it 
reaches the lower stratum of the school, when 
it will be seized by the watchful bass that 
apparently cannot resist the struggling fish. 
The white sea-bass at Santa Catalina average 
about forty or fifty pounds, small ones being 
more or less rare. Specimens weighing eighty 
pounds have been caught with cast or hand 
lines; the rod record is fifty-six pounds. In 
the San Francisco market bass weighing sixty, 
seventy, and eighty pounds are not uncommon, 
and doubtless the fish attains a maximum weight 
of one hundred or more pounds, 
