The Tarpon 239 
the big reel, overhauling the line, paying out, 
ze-ze-ze-ze / until perhaps twenty-five or even thirty 
feet have gone. This is the method of many 
successful tarpon anglers, but not my own. By 
this time you fancy that the tarpon has bolted 
the bait, and you give it the butt as the line 
comes taut, forcing the hook into its big throat. 
Up into the air it rises, looking so big, shaking 
so fiercely, that you wonder if such a monster 
can be caught. At such a moment a tarpon 
has tossed the baited hook yards away, dropped 
to the water with a crash and leaped, wild 
with fear, pain, or astonishment, still believing 
itself hooked. A tarpon in such a frenzy has 
been seen to throw itself an estimated thirty feet 
along the water. Sometimes it rises near the 
boat, again fairly alongside. But your fish is 
headed away, and as your boatman has hauled up 
the anchor, you are off behind this silvery king. 
Now it threatens to take you out into the surf in 
its wild rush for the Gulf — now it is in the air, 
a splendid glittering object, the type of activity. 
Two or three hundred feet of line have been 
taken in the succession of rushes, and despite 
your utmost exertion, your pumping and fighting, 
the tarpon holds its own, is still king; but in the 
