228 Fish Stories 



regardless of the launch and the men and women looking 

 at them, waving at them, "shooing " them from the bait, that 

 they could have been taken by impaling a sardine on a gaff 

 and gaffing them as they attempted to take it ; indeed I saw 

 this done, and I think I could have fed these large fishes by 

 hand. 



The albacores, or long-finned tunas, looked like giant 

 brown mice dashing to and fro, holding their long side fins 

 out at an angle of forty-five degrees, or from a bird's-eye 

 view like penguins. Some I noticed had a vivid blue streak 

 along the median line, and when they tipped upward, dash- 

 ing at my bait, I saw a blaze of silver and a flash of a big 

 black eye. 



The skipjack swam twice as fast as the long-fin — a hum- 

 ming-bird of the sea, a beautiful scintillating flash of blue; 

 radiant creatures, which shot up from profound depths like 

 a bunch of sapphires, with a peculiar wriggling motion of 

 the tail. They were altogether too swift for the others, 

 reached the bait before them ; yet the big hulking albacores, 

 weighing from thirty to forty pounds, did not object. When 

 the bait was eaten, the fish disappeared suddenly, then when 

 a handful was tossed over I could see the sapphires rise 

 from far below, and like beams of tourmaline dash along 

 the surface. 



I held my bait just at the surface, and repeatedly had to 

 jerk it away, as I was saving it for the wary tuna, and sud- 

 denly he came. 



" There he is ! " cried Neal, the boatman. " See him! " 



A shower of blue skipjacks darted along, the bodyguard 

 of this prince, a dignified, staid fish, twice as large as 

 the albacore, of a delicate greenish hue, its median line a 

 dazzling blue, its finlets lemon-yellow ; a radiant creature, 

 the yellowfin tuna, the finest of the game fishes of Santa 

 Catalina ; a fish doubtless ranging up to one hundred pounds, 

 but more commonly found at about forty. There were now 

 fifty or more of these three kinds of fishes in sight all about 



