The Leaping Tuna 67 
was killed with a delicate jointed greenheart rod, 
built and intended for yellowtail. Even Walton 
assumed an apologetic air when he approached 
a big fish story. “Because you say you love 
such discourses as these, of rivers, and fish, and 
fishing, I love you the better, and love the more 
to impart them to you. Nevertheless, scholar, 
if I should begin to name the several sorts of 
strange fish that run into the sea, I might beget 
wonder in you, or unbelief, or both, and yet I 
will venture to tell you a real truth.” 
So with the leaping tuna. If I should relate 
the experiences I have been witness to, I should 
surely “beget wonder” in the reader, if not 
“unbelief,” so extraordinary are they, so seem- 
ingly impossible; and it is perhaps fortunate for 
this truthful history that there are forty or fifty 
“blue button members” of the Tuna Club who 
have survived their initiative, the taking of a 
one-hundred-pound fish, all of whom have had 
experiences equally remarkable, which make up 
the chronicles of this organization devoted to 
sea angling and the protection of game fishes. 
The tuna moves north and south, in or out, 
with more or less regularity. It is due at Santa 
Catalina from the 15th of May to the 15th of 
