Any one wishing to catch a sawfish on the rod must seek such weird game in the isolated deep holes in the lagoons and shallows. The average depth will not be more than three or four feet, but every now and then the lead will go down into a much deeper hole, and there lie the sawfish. A well-known American angler caught one weighing 700 lb. in this way. The chief food of the sawfish is said to consist of horseshoe crabs, but it also in all probability slashes round with its great saw and stuns sufficient fish for a meal. I have seen young sawfish out there with the scales of smaller fish impaled on the teeth of their saws. Evidently these teeth must grow blunt with age, for piercing a fish scale is a feat that would certainly be beyond the saw-teeth in all the larger specimens that have come under my notice.
On an earlier page I have given the portrait of a baby hammerhead shark, drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that the “hammer” was not yet developed. This difference in two stages of growth may be appreciated by a comparison with the subject of the accompanying photograph, in which the curious hammer, with an eye at either end, is plainly seen. The hammerhead shark (Sphyrna zygaena) is a voracious species, yet when swimming after a ship it has all the graceful, undulating movement of the family.
I do not profess to know these vermin severally by name, but two or three pictures of some that were captured during my stay may be of interest. The subject of the first was, like most of the tribe, a cannibal, for it took another shark (though I do not know that it was of the same species) that had been hooked, and the two were secured by the coloured “gentleman” in the picture.
This incident of its swallowing a fish already hooked reminds me of another. An angler had to return to England rather suddenly, but he was anxious to complete his catch of 100 tarpon for the season. He had already caught 99, and but half an hour remained before his boat left. He hooked the hundredth, luckily enough, but it was promptly seized by a shark, and it still looked as if his century would not be completed, when he very cleverly landed shark and all, with a few minutes to spare, and thus made up his total of tarpon.
The end of May is the time when sharks most plague the tarpon fisher, and is consequently the time for shark fishing. The best way is to bait a large hook with a whole split fish made fast to a long stout line. Then you fling this well out from the Lighthouse Jetty, leave a good coil of slack, and make the end fast. Before very long, the slack line begins to creep out, then rushes, and you must, if the shark is a large one, call all the help you can muster, for the fight will be a good one. All hands play him from the beach, and, with a little give and take, he generally comes in with a run, a nasty-looking brute perhaps
EXTRACTING A FIRMLY EMBEDDED HOOK FROM A SHARK.