NMYdSZVZZ YXVSaZI 7 JO 7 I 
A Trip to Aransas Bay.—III. 
Having had my fill of sport with the gun and 
having sampled about every kind of shooting 
the bay afforded, I told Armstrong that I would 
shoot no more and would confine myself to the 
fishing. So we set sail from the island early 
the next morning and held our course down 
the bay toward the pass. 
As we were bowling along close to the shore 
we saw two men hauling a seine in about three 
feet of water, and as we got abreast of them 
we saw a great commotion in the ring of water 
inclosed by their net. 
“Let us go and see what they have got,” cried 
Armstrong. “Please stand by to lower the sail, 
Mr. Post, and you, Delmonico, have the anchor 
ready to let go when I bring her up into the 
wind.” Soon we were riding quietly at anchor, 
and Armstrong and I put off in the sharpie to¬ 
ward the scene of excitement. 
The two men were overboard in water up to 
their waists and were having a hard time to 
haul the net. We could see the wake and splash 
of some great fish as he darted first to one side 
of the net and then to the other in vain attempts 
to break through, and now and then he showed 
half of his body as he turned in a cloud of 
spray for another rush. We made the painter 
of our sharpie fast to the stern of their boat 
and jumped overboard to go to their aid. 
“What is it?” I asked; “a porpoise!” 
“No, th^nk heaven, it is a big jewfish,” one 
of the men replied. “If it were a porpoise he 
would tear the net all to pieces. Pull easy now 
and let him tire himself out before we draw 
the net too tight around him.” 
Several times the big fish struck the net with 
such force as to jerk us all off our feet, but we 
held on and gradually drew the circle smaller. 
Soon the fish began to tire and we hauled in 
more rapidly, finally crowding him into the litt'e 
pocket in the middle of the net. Once in there 
he was practically helpless, and we drew him 
to the sharpie and made the net fast to her stern. 
We towed our prize to a dock which ran out 
a little way from the shore, and there after a 
great struggle we managed to slip a rope noose 
around his head just back of the enormous gills 
and made him fast to one of the piles. 
With Armstrong’s help I hauled him up until 
half his great body was out of water, and then 
I wished, oh so hard, that I had him safely 
hooked at the end of 200 yards of line. 
The men all agreed that he weighed 350 
pounds, but to my excited eyes he looked as if 
he would go a thousand. As I gazed down into 
his enormous mouth it seemed almost as if I 
was dreaming; as if a little sea bass had sud¬ 
denly grown into a giant and was about to de¬ 
vour me. His mouth was large enough to take 
my head and shoulders in, and if he had had 
the teeth with which to bite me in two he could 
have easily swallowed that much of me. The 
fishermen were delighted with their catch and 
told me that they would get six cents a pound 
for him. 
We received a nice mess of small fish from 
our friends in return for our help, and board¬ 
ing the sloop, continued on our way down the 
bay. When we reached the island opposite the 
mouth of the pass we skirted around to the west¬ 
ward and sailed through a canal which had been 
dredged out through the shoal water by the 
Government to afford a means of getting from 
Aransas Bay into Corpus Christi Bay. As we 
sailed through this channel we passed within 
fifty yards of a small island, about two acres 
in extent, which was a favorite nesting place 
for the great blue heron. Armstrong picked up 
my rifle and fired a shot to get them up, and I 
wish you could have seen the countless herons 
rising from their nests and hovering in the air 
like a black cloud. The air was full of the long- 
MR. POST AND HIS BLUE-RIBBON TARPON. 
legged and ungainly birds, and the din they made 
with their peculiar dog-like bark was really deaf¬ 
ening. How I wished then that some fairy would 
turn my gun into a suitable camera. 
We followed the canal until we came into 
Corpus Christi Bay proper and then turnfed back, 
passing around the north end of the island and 
to the east of the lighthouse and landed just in¬ 
side the sandy point which bounds the pass on 
the south. 
On the shore of this cove there is the life¬ 
saving station, some few fishermen’s houses and 
the Tarpon Inn, known as The Club. This is 
a very nice hotel where anyone can stop all 
through the season and enjoy the fishing at 
moderate cost. Here we found three men from 
New York, all brothers, who were this early 
upon the ground in order to have a chance at 
the “Blue ribbon of Texas,” for such is the 
highly prized trophy called which is given to 
the lucky sportsman \yhp patches the first tar¬ 
pon of the year, 
When I told them that I did not intend to 
stay for more than ten days longer I saw that 
they gave up all concern that I might be a com¬ 
petitor for the blue ribbon, because it was then 
only the 4th of March and tarpon were scarcely 
expected before the end of the month. It means 
a great deal to this little community when the 
first silver king is caught, because they send the 
news out by wire to all the cities in the West 
and this starts the stream of visiting fishermen 
who give employment to the tarpon pullers. 
That afternoon Armstrong and I set out 
across the point to have a try at the redfish in 
the surf, each carrying a coil of line with lead 
sinkers fastened above the hook. We baited 
our hooks with pieces of mullet, walked out 
into the surf as far as we could without getting 
over the tops of our boots, whirled the line 
around our heads and cast it out over the surf. 
My best attempts to cast a distance were mighty 
poor compared to what Armstrong could do, 
and I cut my hands in several places before I 
got the hang of it all. He caught three nice 
fish, averaging about four pounds each, but I 
was a hopeless novice and caught none at all. 
When we returned to the sloop I found a 
visitor on board who was staring at the silver 
fittings in my traveling valise which was open 
in the cabin. He proved to be the son of my 
friend Delmonico and lived in one of the little 
houses on the cove. He was so interested in 
the contents of my valise that I let him examine 
it, explaining what each thing was for, and when 
I told him that all the things were made of 
silver so that they could not be broken, his 
mouth and eyes opened wide and he said: “Gee! 
Real silver? You must be made o’ money!” 
I laughed heartily at this sally, and then a 
brilliant idea came to me. “Sonny,” I said, “take 
that bucket and bring me a pail of fiddler crabs. 
I will pay you a silver quarter for them.” 
He was off like a shot and returned at sun¬ 
down with the bucket full of the restless little 
fellows. 
Beginning about a quarter of a mile from the 
shore on the gulf side of the pass, the Govern¬ 
ment has built a great breakwater running out 
into the gulf for more than a mile, and this 
winds in a curve like the letter S. The engi¬ 
neer who designed it had the brilliant idea that 
this curvature would tend to keep the waters 
continually deepening the channel, as they moved 
in and out with the tide. But the sand that is 
swept out of the channel with one tide and de¬ 
posited on the other side of the breakwater 
comes back with the returning tide, and all the 
labor and money have been expended in vain. 
The breakwater is built of huge granite blocks 
twenty feet long and eight feet square, is some 
twenty feet wide on top and four feet above the 
level of the water, the broken stone at the base 
affording a favorite feeding ground for all kinds 
of fish. 
The next morning we took our fiddler crabs 
and rowed out to the breakwater, moored our 
sharpie to one of the rocks and walked out to¬ 
ward the seaward end. We saw countless sheeps- 
