They got the Heart before the wind, which had died down to a three-knot breeze, Blood steering and Harman forward, on the lookout.
Harman was right, the sea round these coasts is a fish circus, to give it no better name.
The San Lucas Islands and Santa Catalina seem the rendezvous of most of the big fish inhabiting the Pacific. Beginning with San Miguel, the islands run almost parallel to the California coast in a sou’westerly direction, and, seen now from the schooner’s deck, they might have been likened to vast ships under press of sail, so tall were they above the sea shimmer and so white in the sunshine their fog-filled cañons.
Away south, miles and miles away across the blue water, the peaks of Santa Catalina Island showed a dream of vague rose and gold.
It was for Santa Catalina that Harman was making now.
To tell the whole truth, bravely as he had talked of his knowledge of these waters, he was not at all sure in his mind as to their shark-bearing capacity. He did not know that for a boat whose business was shark-liver oil, this bit of sea was not the happiest hunting ground.
Nothing is more mysterious than the way fish make streets in the sea and keep to them; make cities, so to say, and inhabit them at certain seasons; make playgrounds, and play in them.
Off the north of Santa Catalina Island you will find Yellow Fin. Cruise down on the seaward side and you will find a spot where the Yellow Fin vanish and the Yellow Tail take their place; farther south you strike the street of the White Sea Bass, which opens on to Halibut Square, which, in turn, gives upon a vast area, where the Black Sea Bass, the Swordfish, the Albacore, and the Whitefish are at home.
Steer round the south of the island and you hit the suburbs of the great fish city of the Santa Catalina Channel. The Grouper Banks are its purlieus, and the Sunfish keeps guard of its southern gate. You pass Barracuda Street and Bonito Street, till the roar of the Sea Lions from their rocks tells you that you are approaching the Washington Square of undersea things—the great Tuna grounds.
Skirting the Tuna grounds, and right down the Santa Catalina Channel, runs a Broadway which is also a Wall Street, where much business is done in the way of locomotion and destruction. Here are the Killer Whales and the Sulphur-bottom Whales and the Grey Whales, and the Porpoises, Dolphins, Skipjacks, and Sand Dabs.