After this came two or three bare hooks, and then a small halibut. Then half a dozen more codfish, one close after the other, and next only the skeleton of a fish with its bones picked as clean as though there had never been a particle of flesh on them. It astonished Breeze greatly, and he said,
“Well! I never knew before that a fish’s skeleton would take bait. How hungry it must have been! It does look rather thin and gaunt, for a fact,” he added, laughing.
“He was something a good deal better than a skeleton when he took that hook,” explained Wolfe, who had hauled trawls before. “The sand-fleas have made a meal off of him, and there must have been a pretty lot of them to go through him so quickly and completely.”
“Sand-fleas?” repeated Breeze, inquiringly.
“Yes, just such chaps as you may see almost any time hopping on a beach.”
A haddock bearing the teeth-marks of the halibut that had tried to swallow him after he was caught came next. Then followed cod, cod, cod, so fast that by the time the trawl was half hauled, dory No. 6 was deep in the water and her crew did not dare to put another fish into her.
They were in fine spirits over their good-luck, as they buoyed the trawl and pulled back to the schooner to get rid of their load before attempting to finish the haul. By this time a stiff northerly breeze was blowing, and the Vixen had swung with the change of wind, so that she now lay stern to them. This made their pull much shorter than it otherwise would have been. Owing to this they had the satisfaction of pitching the first fish of that cruise on the schooner’s deck. This greatly disappointed Hank Hoffer, who came up a minute later in dory No. 5, and who had fully expected to be able to claim the honor of “first fish.”
He began to make ugly remarks to the effect that if they had waited to get a full load they would not have been back so quickly. This time the skipper cut him short with, “Look to your own load, Hank. If you’d ’a’ waited to make it as big as the one these lads have brought in, you wouldn’t have come for half an hour yet.”
As soon as the fish had been unloaded from dory No. 6, and the two tubs of trawl already hauled had been lifted out, the boys returned for the rest of their catch. They had hardly got the buoy aboard, and were just beginning to haul in the remainder of the trawl, when suddenly the most surprising thing occurred.
The dory was at once, and without the slightest warning, lifted bodily several feet into the air, and both its occupants were flung down, Wolfe striking and breaking a thwart in his fall. Immediately afterwards the dory slid on its side, and apparently downhill, into the water. It was only by scrambling hastily to the upper gunwale that the boys kept it from capsizing. As it was, it was half full of water before they succeeded in righting it.