The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-08-14
AMILE LONG LINE.
One Of Its Largest Catches Was Ton or
 More of Jcwflsli.


 One of Its Largest Catches Was Ton or
 More of Jowhsl,.
 From tic San Francisco Chroniclc.l
 The beach at Laguna is fine one for walking and bathing. The rocks are cut and worn into arches. caves and huge platforms. with great spout holes into which the water pours. bursting upward In natural fountains. making the adjacent rocks quiver and shake.
 Crawling over rocks that hid count less anemones under richly colored sea- weeds, came to little cave where the fishermen make their headquarters. A great bluff formed the shelter, and as deep water came inshore a harbor was made for landing the dories. A little shanty on the high sand, dozen boats, a pile of crawhsh straps, the tails of several sharks told the story, and as a centerpiece a grizzly old fel- low, the generallsslmo. He was wait ing for the baiters. for the line he used needed not one man. but a dozen or more, to bait 1t. AS we stood there they began to come in from over the hills and over the beach from out the hooks and corners. The tackle used was fishline mile in length. On each end was an anchor and buoy in the shape of a soldered up oil can, and at every three feet or so of this line for Single line. The Inc was laid out In coils, and the men, sitting around, baited the hooks, replaced them when necessary, and coiled the line as they baited.
 "Yes," said the social old fisherman, this is a pretty sure way of fishing. You see, we cover a mile of ground at a time, and every fish that's swimming down that territory is pretty sure to strike one of the 600 hooks. They hook themselves, you see; they swal- low the bait. then run off with it, CT try to, and the weight of the line brings them, up with round turn. Now we mostly take rock cod, but fish change as the season docs. We set the trawl at three o'clock in the morning. The line is coiled in the stern of the boat and when we get in the right spot, clear of the kelp, the anchor is lowered, taking the end of the line down with it. When we strike bottom we toss ov- CT the buoy and row away. paying out slowly till the end comes, when the other anchor is tossed over and buoy; then we have the line stretched over a mile of bottom with 8 bait every two or three feet. Mighty few fish pass it. This we let stay several hours and then we haul in, from both ends. Luck var ies; I've taken in that line when we almost filled the boat; every hook would have something. Then again, luck changes.
 "One day we pulled out to the line, but not can was in sight. There wasn't any mistake, as we had our bearings exact, so the only thing to do was to conclude that something had happened. We pulled up and down the coast, then cut to sea, and just as we we're about giving it up we saw one of the cans bob up and then disappear. We managed to hook it up, and when we began to take in thought we had a whale; but the first fish that hove in sight was a shark about six feet long; then came a stretch of twenty hooks gone. then . shark, then sharks by the dozen in fact, there must have been twenty or thirty sharks on the line, not to speak of those that had been on. We cut them loose the best we could, and figured up our losses in fishhooks, line, and bait at about $5O You see. 8 school of half-starved shov- el-nosed sharks had dropped in time and had taken the fish that had been hooked, and so got, hooked in turn. Another time we lost the line for day, and flnally found 1t foul to a kelp bed, and when we got it, up 1t was next to impossible to get 1t in. I thought we had whale that time but 1t was jewfish; there were seven or. eight hooked and their combined weight wasn't less than 8 ton. Some we took, and the rest we. cut loose. There isn't much call for boneless cod just now" said the old man, with wink.
 "Once or twice,r he continued, q have lost the whole outfit. Once big basking shark wound it up so that we never could clear it, and another time a whale walked off with the whole thing. Sharks are the worst; and when fish gets hooked they come along and bite it off, leaving the head; then another shark comes along and takes the head, and the hook. We get curious things. Sometimes eels get hooked, then sting rays. Once a big octopus got on, and when it climbed in- to the boat we got ready to go over board. but knock on the head settled him." @iiW
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