Whales.
As you work out to seaward it becomes evident that you are in a fishy sea, for the foolish confidential little guillemots and razorbills (he that shooteth such knoweth not how to live nor the nature and object of things) are squeaking and croaking and ducking under water all round. And lo! close ahead appear two whales, not mere black fish (whatever they may be), but great fellows looking 40 feet long on a moderately calm computation, spouting and showing their black backs at intervals. You go as close to them as they will let you and watch with breathless fascination their oily movements so full of lazy strength and sensuous enjoyment; and you call them bottle-noses or finbacks or rorquals according to your individual taste and fancy; for the scientific classification of whales is in an extraordinarily imperfect state, and even the Encyclopædia, that settler of disputes and averter of quarrels that no yacht should ever be without, will give you but little assistance.
But you must tear yourself away from the whales, for half a mile to windward there you sight a cloud of birds fishing furiously, the gannets swooping and soaring, and then suddenly shutting their wings and dropping in quick succession, pop, pop, pop, like bullets into the sea; and a dense mass of gulls flying and swimming, screaming and squattering, and flapping their wings on the surface of the water. How a gull ever gets a living is a wonder; he seems so dainty and hesitating and afraid to commit himself. A gannet will soar, plunge, dive under water, and swallow half a dozen little fish while a gull is apparently making up his mind whether it is worth while to risk wetting his feet.
As soon as your boat will fetch, you go about and stand straight for the birds, overhauling meanwhile the 'whiffing' or 'railing' lines that are towing astern, to make sure that there is nothing foul, and that there is no seaweed on your silvery spinners. You are all keen, but not too sanguine, for there is never a certainty of catching fish like this. Sometimes you may sail backwards and forwards till you are sick of it through a mob of feeding seabirds, trying every sort of bait and never getting a ghost of a bite. Either it is herring that they are after, or else it is that the unknown big fish who are hunting up the small fry to the birds from below will not take a bait. You are close now, and there is a noise not unlike that of the parrot-house in the Zoological Gardens. Mackerel is what you hope for; gurnard you will put up with; pollack will not be caught in any numbers so far from the shore. You shake your sails to reduce your pace, and then, filling them again, stand straight in amongst the screaming gulls, and as they reluctantly rise from the water and the little guillemots squatter away and dive, you get a rapid vision of fish shooting about near the top of the water and little tiny silver things rippling its surface and hopping feebly above.
A moment more and the lines tauten: 'Mackerel it is, by Jingo!' and as soon as the lines are out again and no one feels another bite, round goes the boat again, and back through the school. So you go on, sometimes catching them slowly and singly, sometimes two at once as fast as the lines can be got out, until you have several dozen in the bottom of the boat. All of a sudden the fish cease to bite and the birds fly away. They gather again into a new cluster half a mile off, and away you go for it as fast as you can sail, and begin catching fish once more. Once more the fish stop biting, and the birds move off, and you can see no more of them fishing except a very few a long way to windward. It seems a sin to go home on such a day, and it is too early to try for pollack with so bright a sun. But your chart shows you a fishing-bank close to, and you have got a few herrings for bait; so you make for this place, and get the exact spot by the relative bearings of points and islands, and drop your anchor in twenty fathoms.
Hardly are the lines down before it becomes evident that you are in the right place. Whiting, haddock, and gurnard come up with rapidity, varied by an occasional cod, skate, or bream. You have caught quite a lot before the dog-fish set in. Then it is all over. First comes one, then another, and then nothing else. In vain you despatch them with knives and throw their bleeding corpses back into the sea to terrify the rest. Dogfish have no nerves that you can work upon in this way. The sight and smell of their murdered relations and friends only whet their appetites and make them the more greedy. You give it up in despair, haul your anchor up, and get under sail once more.
It is now late in the afternoon. The day has changed for the worse—weather changes quick in these latitudes—and looks rather wild and windy, with promise of more to come before long. But your port is to leeward, so you need not be anxious, and you make up your minds to fish for pollack round the headlands and the islands at the mouth of the bay; for just before sundown is the best time of all, especially if it is about half flood. You take a reef down in both sails to make the boat slower and easier to handle, for you do not want to have to devote all your attention to keeping her right side up when you are fishing for pollack close in to the rocks. The tack is triced up so as to let the steerer see under it; a crutch is shipped on each side of the boat, and a couple of oars are cleared and made ready for instant use if required. One man stands up in the bows to look out for rocks, and also to attend to the peak halliards when called upon; two others handle the lines on which a red or a white india-rubber sand-eel has been substituted for the spinners; while the steerer takes tiller in one hand and mainsheet in the other, and concentrates all his faculties on regulating the pace of the boat, and going as near as he can to the rocks without incurring shipwreck or fouling the lines.
