334 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[May 26, 1906. 



WHERE WE HAD 
mullet; makes a long cast, leaving the bait on 
the bottom, and pulls off about thirty feet of 
line, which he coils in the bottom of the boat, 
hands you the rod, and you sit and wait. Pres- 
ently the line begins to run out; at first slowly, 
the tarpon, feeding near the bottom, has picked 
up the bait just as a black bass does, but has not 
yet swallowed it; then he stops and swallows the 
bait; you still keep on doing nothing. The 
moment he feels the hook, he jumps, and as he 
hits the water, you smash him hard. It is the 
most certain, sure and easiest way of catching 
a tarpon; but after the strenuous method of 
deep trolling, I personally don’t care about it— 
too easy. 
The moment you are fast to the fish, the guide 
picks up his anchor and follows the fish. It is 
the proper way for women to fish, as it has all 
. the excitement without the hard work of ‘the 
other methods. The leader used here is not the 
wire one, but is made of soft linen protected 
with fine wire. 
Of the two ways of trolling, the deep trolling 
is the hardest, on account both of the depth of 
water and the strong tide and rough water you 
fish in. It was while fishing by this method that 
I caught my fish, so I shall describe it in detail: 
March 20 found us anchored in Pelican Bayou, 
a beautiful little cove on the northeast end of 
La Costa Island. This cove is about four hun- 
dred yards across, and defended from the main 
bay, called Charlotte Harbor, by a sandbar with 
a narrow channel through it, and on the south 
by a small island, between which and La Costa 
was a small channel leading into a still smaller 
bayou, called Curlew Bayou, near Slaughter 
Point, past which lay Sheepshead Bight, another 
opening into Charlotte Harbor. We had about 
sixteen people on the old boat, including serv- 
ants and guides; always two and, at times, three 
launches, partly for towing and partly for side 
trips about the various bays and bayous. In 
the matter of guides we were fortunate, having 
excellent men, two of whom were with Turner 
when he made his devil-fish and tarpon records. 
They are the men pictured in his book, and were 
all that tarpon guides should be. This is the 
way we fish: 
About sunrise, at times before (it depends 
upon the tide), Julius would appear in his boat 
and tap on the door of my stateroom, which 
generally produced an immediate response, and 
after a plunge overboard (until the weather be- 
came warm and we had seen a few black fins of 
sharks cutting the water, when we substituted 
a few buckets of cold salt water as a bath), fol- 
lowed by coffee and delicious oranges, we each 
entered our respective rowboats with our guide 
and, hooking on in a long line to one of the 
launches, were towed out to Boca Grande Pass, 
about two miles from our anchorage, where we 
cast off from the launch and started fishing. 
SAFE ANCHORAGE, 
This pass is about one mile wide, and has 
a deep channel running through it about the 
center. In places the water is close to fifty feet 
and the tide is like a mill race. When the wind 
and tide disagree, you can get up a lovely sea 
on short notice, and a tarpon hooked in the 
midst of this will keep you very busy. The fish- 
ing is mostly on the north or Gasparilla side, 
and a long bar runs out to sea, over which the 
flood tide pours the difference in the depths 
of water, it being sharply marked in color. On 
the edge of this bar and in the channel near all 
the various fish feed at slack water and during 
the first of each tide, and here was our fishing 
ground. Having cast off the launch, you start 
trolling, the bait being a piece of mullet about 
one inch wide and six inches long, those pieces 
having a piece of the mullet’s tail being best to 
my way of thinking; but this may be only an 
idea of mine. Your line has a small piece of 
white string tied to it at the proper depth, and 
you keep this just out of the water as you slowly 
go along; this makes the line nearly up and 
down and increases the chance of a smashed 
tip if you have the automatic on and strike bot- 
tom or a jewfish. 
Julius carefully baits the hook, throws it over 
and starts rowing slowly, while I let out line till 
the white string touches the water, thus keeping 
the hook just off the bottom. The automatic is 
on, and also the small click—the former because 
few men can strike hard enough to hook a tarpon 
without it, the latter to tell Julius that a fish has 
struck, so that he can give two or three quick 

strokes, thus getting the fish away from the boat. 
Should it be a grouper of fair size, say, 8 pounds, 
their bite will remind you of a large blackfish of 
our Northern waters, and the fish will make a 
short run, even with the automatic on, but only 
a short one, and the line will not rise. Then I 
cut off the automatic and reel him in, Julius tak- 
ing the hook out so as not to hurt our small 
‘friend and carefully returns him to the water; or, 
if- you need him to eat, knocks him on the head 
and puts him away in the shade of the seat. 
Again we bait and start slowly trolling, and 
presently comes a quick bite, heavier than the 
grouper, and immediately followed by a hard run, 
say, of 50 or 150 feet, but not followed by the 
quick rising of the line, which comes when the 
king has called upon you. Kingfish this time, and 
again the automatic is cut off, partly because I 
hardly think it fair to use on the plucky fellow, 
and partly because, when close to the boat, he has 
a way of diving to the bottom, and, should the 
rod hit the boat with the automatic on, a smashed 
tip is the result, This is what happened with my’ 
first kingfish. I had got him quite close to the 
boat and forgot to take off the automatic. Sud- 
denly, like lightning, he dove, the tip hit the boat 
in spite of all I could do, and I had the butt in 
my hands, the tip breaking into three pieces and 
some of the splinters going over my head. 
I regret to have to say it, but angry at the 
breaking of the tip, I hand-lined that unfortunate 
fish home, and Julius tapped him on the head 
with the “‘killer.”’ Although he tasted deliciously 
that night baked and served with brown sauce, yet 
I regret he did not escape. 
Again we bait up and fish, maybe for an hour, 
catching nothing but the same fish, or maybe a 
hard pull followed by a heavy fighting fish and 
we are fast to a channel bass or redfish. The 
largest I personally caught weighed 24 pounds, 
and, properly baked, they are very good. Having 
five boats fishing, it soon became a problem what 
to do with our fish. I regret to say it is the cus- 
tom of the guides to kill every fish caught. I do 
not think they mean to be cruel, but it is because 
they are thoughtless and nobody has taught them 
better. Our party were shocked when the differ- 
ent boats met on the beach daily to compare notes 
to see these beautiful fish thrown out of the boats 
dead; and we promptly stopped our guides killing 
them, insisting that they be carefully unhooked 
and turned loose to grow. Even under this rule 
we had too many fish, because some would swal- 
low the bait, and the kindest thing to do was to 
kill them. 
Fortunately the Atlantic Coast Line was build- 
ing an extension and had a large force of men 
camped on the south end of Gasparilla Island; 
and a personal visit to their camp brought the 
good news that their men being too busy to fish 
were fish hungry and would be glad to get them. 
So an arrangement was made whereby they sent 
a man down to the dock daily and we loaded him 
CAMP OF THE GUIDES ON LA COSTA ISLAND. 
