Florida "Grains"
Some of these were taken with rod and line, but other means were resorted to for the largest ones. Pent was an expert in the use of the "grains," a two-pronged spear much employed in Florida. It has a long and strong line attached to the spear, with a handle for throwing which becomes detached when a fish is struck. Standing in the bow of the dory, which I would paddle cautiously up to the fringe of bushes along the shore, Pent would hurl the grains twenty, thirty or even forty feet, and seldom failed to plant the barbs firmly in the back of a huge fish as it lay sunning itself under the mangroves—then there was something doing for ten or fifteen minutes.
U. S. Bureau of Fisheries.
Snook; Rovallia. (Centropomus undecimalis.)
Some Big Fish
The largest barracuda we captured measured six and one-half feet, the largest tarpon seven and one-quarter, an immense sawfish nineteen, and a man-eating shark fifteen feet. But the liveliest tussle we had was with a devil-fish of moderate dimensions, eight feet across the pectoral fins—I have seen them of twenty. Following the lead of Victor Hugo, the octopus is often called "devil-fish," but the name rightly belongs to this fish, the largest of the rays (Manta birostris).
Strenuous Fishing
The floundering and struggling of one of these aquatic giants, in shallow water, was something to be remembered, while the erratic pitching and lunging of the dory as it followed the lead of the finny motor was, to say the least, exciting. These large fishes were towed ashore, killed outright and dissected, in order to ascertain something in relation to their diet and time of spawning.
Porpoise Calves