THE GAME FISHES OF THE WOELD 



year it will sweep the seas. I have taken, with a friend, three in a 

 few hours, and we stopped because it was slaughter. The follow- 

 ing year a friend wrote me that the tunas were in Australia 

 ■ (they certainly were not in California). ;N"ow, as I write, they are 

 foaming not a mile from the Tuna Club, but no man can hook 

 one, and for a number of years the catch has been limited and 

 vacillating, but followed with unabated energy by the lovers 

 of sea angling everywhere. 



To row or motor over a vast school of tunas which scorn the 

 hook has resulted in some ingenious inventions. One, called the 

 ' tuna sled,' looks like a diminutive sled and is devised to push 

 the bait away from the boat that it is following and into an 

 undisturbed field, but the most spectacular scheme appeared 

 during the summer, and is shown in the accompanying photo- 

 graphs, taken for this volume by Peter V. Eeyes of Avalon, 

 California. 



Avalon, the town of Santa Catalina Island, in summer is an 

 angling community of six thousand or eight thousand persons, 

 a rendezvous for yachts, and this year even the old habitues of 

 the place were astonished to see anglers flying kites at sea. 

 Some were just plain kites, others hydroplanes, or plain box 

 affairs, but they ail went up into the air, first high above the 

 launch, then ahead or astern, as the case may be. It did not 

 take long for the progressive curiosity of the public to discover 

 what it meant, though every effort was made at first to conceal 

 it. The kites had nothing to do with kite flying as a sport. 

 They were ' tuna kites ' or ' tunaplanes,' intended to simulate 

 the action of a man in an aeroplane lifting his bait and making 

 it leap from wave to wave, in imitation of a living flying fish. 

 The idea originated in the mind of Captain George Farnsworth, 

 one of the island boatmen, who has gaffed and caught scores of 

 the largest fish of the region on tackle so light as to astonish the 

 layman. 



Two years ago when I returned from a ten days' trip with 

 Dr. Gifford Pinchot, to San Clemente, the large outside island 

 ii8 



