"So—you want me to tell the story of my fishing years, do you? Do you realize what you're asking? Do you know that to do it I would have to go back over forty years—me that never kept a diary or a log in my life? I don't believe it can be done! I'll try it—since you seem to think you've got to have it—but it's a big order—too big, I'm afraid!

"Why—I'll have to go away back into the '90s, when I first went over to Catalina—and a mighty different sort of place as compared to the Avalon of today. There was the old Metropole Hotel—it was a barn once! There was the new tent city they were so proud of—just a flock of white tents set up among some young eucalyptus trees no higher than a good sized man. There were a few boat stands strung along the beach, half a dozen or so cottages, and the stubby little wharf where the tugboats they used to call 'steamers' landed their daily handful of passengers. That was about all. Now look at the place with its fine hotels, its big casino out where Sugar Loaf used to be, its bird farm, its big steamers chain-ganging like ferry boats across the channel and carrying a thousand or more passengers each trip, its sight seeing busses, its clubs, its restaurants! Why, man, in the old days, to go to Catalina Island was to take a regular ocean voyage, and after you got there you just camped out! Just the same—I liked it then, better than I do now. The trouble with this country is that we've got too many people here! That's the reason we haven't the hunting and fishing that we used to have!

"Unless you had been there in those days, you just can't realize what the fishing was like. All you had to do was to throw a line out from beach most anywhere and you'd hook a yellowtail before you knew it. White sea bass and yellowtail used to drive the little bait clear out of the water and on to the beach, then thresh around in the surf as they gobbled it up! The place fairly crawled with fish!

"Tackle? Humph—that's something else again! There wasn't any! At least not as we know tackle today. There were HANDLINES of course—but that was about all.

"But the tuna! You can't conceive of them, unless you saw them with your own eyes. There were miles and miles of them—the channels were full of them—but nobody with the nerve to go after them! Why man—I've seen them go rolling up the channels in schools that you couldn't believe were fish, there were so many of them. You've seen plenty of tuna yourself—but I'll bet you never saw some of the sights that I've seen.

"Why aren't there as many fish now as there were then, you ask? For a lot of reasons, and I'll tell about that in its proper place, but not right now.

"Well, as I said, none of us had the nerve to go out after tuna—contenting ourselves with fishing for yellowtail and other shore fish. Market fishermen used to come in with stories about the millions of tuna fish. We used to see them breaking and feeding just outside Avalon Bay—but they were too big and too tough for us to tackle, or we thought so.

"Then the first one was brought in on rod and reel! What a commotion that kicked up! Incidentally, the man who took that first fish never got the credit for it. But there's no use bringing that up. Everybody concerned is dead and gone and there's nothing gained by digging into the dead past.

"With the successful landing of that first one, the show started—and we've been hard at it ever since. Lord—but the outfits we used! Three-piece, jointed rods made of wood. Straight handled reels with only a thumbstall for brake! Lines that you wouldn't use on barracuda today! And with it all, they took tuna! But they paid for it! Paid with broken fingers and mangled hands, hit by flying reel handles. They used to have what they called the Tuna Hospital! To hook on to a hundred pound tuna meant hours and hours of hard work with most of the cards stacked against you. Do you know that, up to about 1920, the average weight of tuna caught was 122 1/2 pounds and the average time, 3 1/2 hours? To my mind, the only reason why any fish were caught at all, with that kind of gear, was because we fished out of rowboats! If we had used the launches of today, we wouldn't have had a chance—not with that tackle! With a rowboat, though, it was different. You hooked your fish, then let him drag you and the line around until he wore himself out—or something broke. Then you either pulled the exhausted fish over to the boat, or the boat to him, or a little of both, and gaffed him. Try pulling a launch around, even with the lines of today! Dragging that line didn't help the fish any, either. Just to show you what the friction of a line is when it's in the water, and straight behind you, mind you, without any big bag or bow in it, I've let out 500 feet, on top of the water, and without even a knot in it. Then, on a government measured course, where I could tell the speed of the boat to a fraction of a knot, I've run my boat six miles an hour, dragging the line behind. At that six miles an hour, by actual test, the friction had developed a breaking strain equal to the 48-pound breaking strain of an ordinary 24-thread line! That shows you what water friction is—one of the reasons why lines break.

"That's the way they fish in England for tunny—the horse mackerel of the Atlantic. They still-fish out of row­boats. In my opinion that's how they get fish weighing seven and eight hundred pounds—that, plus their extra heavy lines, fifty-four thread and even larger, and the shallow water they fish in. There's all the difference in the world fighting a big fish out of a rowboat, than fighting one out of a heavy launch. There used to be an angler over at Catalina who always hooked his fish from the launch, then got into a dory to fight him!