FEB. 24, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 

The California. Yellowtail 
Tue California yellowtail, while not by any 
means the gamiest of west coast fishes, com- 
bines in one the best food fish of its size to be 
had in the South Pacific, and a fighter of no 
light ability—one, in short, that not alone re- 
pays for the trouble.of catching him by his ex- 
cellent appearance at the board, but who puts 
up a long and ingenious struggle for his liberty 
from the time the barb takes hold upon his jaw 
until the gaff is buried in his green-gold side. 
Alive in the water, the yellowtail is among the 
most active of fish, its long green back being 
the only part visible to the fisherman in the 
boat above, it seems to move without the use of 
tail or fins, but in fact, most of this fish’s swim- 
ming is done by means of the tail, the fins add- 
ing little to the propelling power. As may be 
judged from the name, the tail is of a trans- 
parent golden color, and the skin of the lower 
parts seems to have much of the same tinge, 
causing the appearance of a sort of amber halo 
surrounding the fish as it swims rapidly. 
The yellowtail attains to a length of three 
feet, and extreme weights of fifty-two pounds 
have been known, though by far the greater 
number of fish taken are of half that weight. 
When obtainable, small yellowtail of a three or 
four pound size are best for table use; but these 
run rarely off the southern California coast, 
though many are caught annually by lower Cali- 
fornia fishermen. Now and then a school be- 
comes entangled in a net, and as a result they 
are offered for sale next day in the Los Angeles 
markets. One should not, however, confuse this 
fish with the “yellowtail” of the extreme south- 
eastern coast of the United States, which is a 
uniformly smaller fish—seldom attaining -a 
weight of more than ten or twelve pounds, and 
having few of the gamy qualities of the Cali- 
fornia fish. Of the family to which the yellow- 
tail belongs there are some two hundred varie- 
ties, divided, if my school days’ memory still 
serves me, into some twenty-five or thirty gen- 
era, and nearly all of which are of use as food 
fishes in some part of the world. To it belong 
the rapacious wolves of inshore waters known 
as the jacks, and the luscious pompanos, of 
which more later. Most of them are “surface” 
fish, i. e., their food demands and their general 
habits keep them within a few feet of the surface 
for the greater part of the time, though this is 
no indication that they are found most plenti- 
fully in shallow water; on the contrary, the 
yellowtail is distinctively a fish of the deepest 
of inshore waters, though I have no reason to 
believe that they are frequenters of the deep sea 
or that they ever wander more than a hundred 
miles or so from land. They are fish of ex- 
tremely limited distribution, being recorded, so 
far as I am able to learn, only from the southern 
tip of Baja, California, to the more northerly of 
the islands which dot the Santa Barbara Chan- 
nel. Sportsmen who frequent either Coronado 
or Avalon (Catalina Island) will have unrivalled 
opportunities for making the intimate acquaint- 
ance of this famous fish, and, if their exper:- 
ence is the same as mine, will find it the peer 
of any game fish in the world when taken from 
a small boat on a light rod and reel. Other 
methods are those of the hog everywhere, and 
in all lines of sport, so that the handline manipu- 
lator and the man who fishes with a telegraph 
pole and a bit of cable have come to be placed 
in about the same class at either of the resorts 
mentioned, as well as at other fishing points 
along this coast. 

Frequently—and this is especially the case at 
Catalina—these fish run in great schools, but 
far the greater number of them appear by ones 
and twos, coming in from the large bands, in 
which they have come up from their spawning 
grounds. Such schools are frequently met with 
by market fishermen, and considerable has been 
written concerning them; but so far this is all 
that is known for a surety about their habits 
during the spawning season; even the place to 
which they retire for the production of the 
young is unknown, though their food and gen- 
eral inshore habits are quite an open book. In 
fact they are the most commonly seen of tour- 


| FLYING FISH OF CALIFORNIA 
ists and other casual visitors to southern Cali- 
fornia beaches, for the reason that they are for: 
ever in evidence, either on the end of some: 
one’s line or hanging in the market. Being the 
beautiful and symmetrical fish which they are, 
comparable only with the salmon in my mind, they 
attract universal attention wherever seen, and 
constitute one of the strongest attractions to 
inshore fishermen and women of all the finned 
game along the coast. : 

Methods of taking them are legion, but the 
one productive of the most sport, and which 
at the same time results in the capture of goodly 
“bags” of these great trout of the sea, is with a 
light pole and line, about a four-foot leader and 
either a live smelt for bait, or, if trolling, a bone 
jig. If the yellowtail are not biting, which is 
frequently the case, even when they are to be 
seen in numbers all about the boat, there is little 
use to cast out for them, and still less will re- 
sult from attempts to lure other fish within 
reach of the gaff, for a band of yellowtail keep 
the waters in their immediate vicinity pretty 
well cleaned up of all smaller fish. I remember 
very well one September afternoon off New- 
port (a small village on the mainland coast of 
southern California), in which the habits and 
gaminess of these yellow fellows were amply 
demonstrated. Mackerel of a large size had 
been running close inshore for several days, and 
a boatman with whom I was on friendly terms 
proposed that we go out and catch a few of the 
cornfeds with flies. This may sound somewhat 
unusual to those not used to the habits of the 
mackerel or who have seen it taken with huge 
gobs of clam or with bits of the flesh of its own 
kind—which latter is far and away the best bait 
ever devised for these fish—and so, in a later 
paper, I will describe the method employed in 
catching these salt-water swimmers with a fly. 
However, to return to our boatman, we soon 
had the little launch puffing away from the buoy 
and headed directly toward the dark bulk of one 
of the coastwise islands looming up on the west- 
ern horizon thirty miles away. But we were 
not bound on any such long journey as this. 
Two miles out we threw over the drag in forty 
fathoms of water, and got out the light poles 
for the mackerel. When we put over the lead 
and iron combination that was to hold us fast 
to this one position, there were schools of the 
fish we sought, passing and repassing in leis- 
urely wandering beneath the boat, and I had 
scarcely drawn my fly in half the length of the 
cast, when a three-pounder took it with a rush, 
and after a brief fight, was landed in the boat. 
WATERS. 
The boatman, who had been attending his en 
gine, did not get out as soon as I, and when he 
did, not a mackerel was in the sea, nor did we 
catch any more, though we fished in the same 
manner for fully an hour longer. 
By this time we were pretty well out of 
patience, and both of us took a look over the 
side of the boat, getting down as close to the 
water as possible in the hope of seeing what was 
going on below. And we saw. Down about 
thirty feet, possibly less, was the cause of the 
sudden disappearance of our game. In solid 
ranks they swam, and they were yellowtail, some 
of them huge fellows of a length of three feet 
and more, with thick green backs and driving 
amber tails. They were headed north, and there 
were millions of them, judging by all compart- 
sons of the size of their individual bodies and 
the area covered by the moving mass. The 
width of the stream, as far as we could tell by 
moving the boat over them, was some hundred 
yards or more; in the center were gathered the 
small fish, and on every side swam solitary in- 
dividuals whose purpose must have been as 
scouts warning the main body of such dangers 
as sharks, shoal water, etc., and always main- 
taining a considerable distance to right or leit 
of the oncoming school. To all kinds of bait, 
from tempting foot-long smelt to a dancing 
Wilson spoon, they turned tail, not even deign- 
ing to look at it, and the youngsters did ex- 
actly as the larger fish, so there was nothing to 
be gained by angling for them, though they 
would have been infinitely preferable, both for 
my table and for the boatman’s customers, had 
we been able to take them. Nor, so long as we 
stayed in this one spot, which was until sunset, 
did this running of the yellowtail cease and the 
smaller fish come back to the feeding ground 
they had so plentifully overrun when we first 
went out. Within the night, however, the run 
was finished, and when we went out the next day 
there was not a yellowtail in the open sea, but 
over near the kelp beds, always the best place 
for yellowtail fishing, they were taking the bait 
as if nothing had happened, and we took home 
a nice catch. Inside of three or four days the 
report came in from all the up-coast beaches 
that “the yellowtail had come,” and there was a 
corresponding migration of local anglers to the 
nearest wharves and rocky points in search of 
this, California’s greatest and most popular 
game fish. Harry H. DuNN. 

“Yes,” remarked the professor, “I rather pride myself 
on the discovery of another hypothesis.” 
“Indeed,” replied Mrs. Cumrox, a little doubtfully. 
“T had an idea they were quite extinct.” 
