Note 76 — PART I

For a full description of this method, see Sport on Land and Water, by F. G. Griswold, privately printed (New York, 1916), and The Game Fishes of the World, by C. F. Holder (London, 1913). To the kite, which is of the ordinary 28-inch type, is allowed 700 feet of old fishing line from off a reel; the fisherman’s line is tied to the kite about 20 feet from the bait with a piece of cotton twine. When a Tuna fish takes the bait the cotton line breaks, and the kite is either reeled in or falls into the sea. The Santa Catalina fishing, with its records of enormous Tuna, of Sword fish (the largest 463 lbs.), sometimes fighting for 14 hours, sounding 48 times, and leading the launch for a distance of 29 miles, and of Giant Bass weighing 493 lbs., fills a British angler with envious despair, a despair which is heightened when one reads that the regulation tackle prescribed by the Tuna Club is, or was not long ago, a sixteen ounce Rod and a line not over No. 24! In Mr. Zane Grey’s enthralling volume (Tales of Fishes (London, 1919), p. 39) we read of a swordfish, that “when he sounded, he had pulled thirteen hundred feet off my reel, although we were chasing him (in a motor boat) full speed all the time”!