“Well, if you could have seen yourself when that tuna struck you’d have laughed,” replied he.
While Dan steered the boat R. C. got out on the bow and gaffed the kite. I watched the tuna tails standing like half-simitars out of the smooth, colored water. The sun was setting in a golden haze spotted by pink clouds. The wind, if anything, was softer than ever; in fact, we could not feel it unless we headed the boat into it. The fellow below us was drifting off farther, still plugging at his tuna.
Captain Dan put the wet kite on the deck to dry and got out another silk one. It soared aloft so easily that I imagined our luck was changing. Vain fisherman’s delusion! Nothing could do that. There were thousands of tons—actually thousands of tons of tuna in that three-mile stretch of ruffled water, but I could not catch one. It was a settled conviction. I was reminded of what Enos, the Portuguese boatman, complained to an angler he had out, “You mos’ unluck’ fisherman I ever see!”
We tried a shorter kite-line and a shorter length of my line, and we ran down upon that mess of tuna once more. It was strange—and foolish—how we stuck to that school of biggest fish. This time Dan headed right into the thick of them. Out of the corners of my eyes I seemed to see tuna settling down all around. Suddenly my brother yelled.
Zam! That was a huge loud splash back of my bait. The tuna missed. R. C. yelled again. Captain Dan followed suit:
“He’s after it!... Oh, he’s the biggest yet!”
Then I saw a huge tuna wallowing in a surge round my bait. He heaved up, round and big as a barrel, flashing a wide bar of blue-green, and he got the hook. If he had been strangely slow he was now unbelievably swift. His size gave me panic. I never moved, and he hooked himself. Straight down he shot and the line broke.
My brother’s sympathy now was as sincere as Captain Dan’s misery. I asked R. C. to take the rod and see if he could do better.
“Not much!” he replied. “When you get one, then I’ll try. Stay with ’em, now!”
Not improbably I would have stayed out until the tuna quit if that had taken all night. Three more times we put up the kite—three more flying-fish we wired on the double hooks—three more runs we made through that tantalizing school of tuna that grew huger and swifter and more impossible—three more smashing wide breaks of water on the strike—and quicker than a flash three more broken lines!