Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 1528
We had seen several swordfish tails cutting the swells off Sydney Heads, from three to ten miles out, and we were satisfied that we could catch some Marlin if only we had some good weather. But out of three weeks at Watson’s Bay we had only a few days when we could fish. And it so happened that the day I caught a five-hundred-and-forty-pound whaler shark and an eight-hundred-and-five-pound tiger was the one on which Bowen snagged the coveted prize of the first Marlin for Sydney.
He deserved credit for it, too. The sea was rough out wide, as the Australians call offshore, and he followed my pet method of running the wheels off the boat. Fishing out of Bullen’s boat, with the genial Erroll as companion, Bowen ran along the cliffs, catching bait as far down as Bondi, then struck out to sea. Twelve miles or so out they hit into that warm blue south-bound current I have mentioned so often, and trolled to and fro, up and down, from ten until three without a rise.
About three, however, Bowen saw a blue streak shooting in toward bait and teasers. He yelled lustily. Bullen then saw the fish and swiftly reeled in his bait. It was an even break for the anglers, both baits abreast, with fame for the lucky one. Bullen’s action would be incredible under ordinary circumstances, but considering that he had started the big-game fishing at Sydney, and had been three years trying and learning under many handicaps, this sporting deed, this generous sacrifice, was one of singular and extraordinary self-effacement and sportsmanship. I have done this trick a few times in my life, mostly for my brother R.C., but I doubt that I could have done it in this peculiar case.
The Marlin was ravenous, and gobbling Bowen’s bait he was off to the races. Bowen said he had never been so keen, so tense to hook a fish, and that he had the thrill of his life when he came up on the weight of the Marlin. This Marlin was one of the wild ones and ran and jumped all over the ocean. In due course Ed whipped this fish and Bullen gaffed it. With the beautiful purple-striped specimen on board they headed for Sydney Harbor, and ran in to Watson’s Bay just before sunset. The fish was weighed in before a record crowd, and registered one hundred and seventy-two pounds. The size, however, had nothing to do with the importance of the event. Telephones began to buzz and in an hour all the reporters in Sydney were on the job. The feat was heralded as it deserved. Before eight o’clock every vestige of that Marlin, except the backbone, was gone, for souvenirs and morsels of meat to cook.
Even before the capture of this game species of sporting fish, I had already envisioned Watson’s Bay, Sydney, as one of the great fishing resorts of the world. I can see a fine hotel and cottages go up in that delightful bay, and many high-powered fast launches with capable boatmen to take care of the anglers from overseas.
Australians, with few exceptions, will go slowly for this new sport. They have not been born to it. Nothing has been known of the swordfish, and the great sharks were considered as vermin, hardly worth the use of a hand line. But the overseas anglers will change all this. Their experience, their reputation, their fishing-gear, and their incredible passion for the game will intrigue the hundreds of rich sportsmen in Australia, and excite in them a spirit of rivalry. “Here,” they will say, “what’s all this about? All this expense and persistence. What are we missing?”
The big sharks will interest the overseas fishermen. Every last one of them will want to capture a huge tiger shark. Personally, I don’t see anything lacking in this tiger to make him a prize. He is a strong, heavy, mean fighter. He is full of surprises. He is huge and frightful, beautiful and savage in the water, and terrible out of it. If, in any particular case, there is something lacking in this tiger shark, it is more than made up for by the nature of the beast, by the fact that he is a killer and will eat you. In my mind that is a feature formidable and magnificent.
For myself the catching of some tiger sharks was an outstanding achievement, and that of my record tiger something never to be forgotten. The sensations this fish roused in me during the strike and battle, and especially my first sight of him, and then when he was hauled up on the sand, stand out in my memory as marvelous and indescribable.
I have written elsewhere about the wonderful setting Sydney Heads and the harbor and Sydney provide for the appreciative angler. Big sharks, big black Marlin, and his smaller cousin, the striped Marlin, will make a growing appeal to all anglers in the world who love the big rod-and-reel game, and who will take the time and spend the money to obtain it. The fact is it is not a game that can be had cheaply, although Sydney, like Avalon, California, will afford angling within the means of most sportsmen. The thing is to have them realize its greatness. Time alone can prove that. Here’s to the Sydney of the future generations of anglers!
Only one thing I fear that might interfere in some degree with my prediction. And that is the weather. All I saw off Sydney Heads, except for a few days, was wind. It can blow there. This, however, would only bother the overseas anglers. Australians like Bullen will fish when the weather is good. It is always irksome for anglers to come a long way and fall upon evil days, gales and rough seas. Only the persistent and passionate angler can prevail in spite of these. I do not see, however, that any really great fishing anywhere can be had without hard work, incredible patience and endurance.
During an early hour of Bowen’s red-letter day with the first Marlin for Sydney Heads, I hooked a mean shark that felt like the bottom of the ocean.
It did not convince me it was a tiger, for which reason I was loath to let the boatmen pull up anchor. I fought this fish tooth and nail, and never gave it a foot of line that I could hold. All the same it kept taking yard after yard until there was a long line out. Over five hundred yards! Which is too many when there are other anchored boats around. One great feature of the Kovalovsky reel was that with five hundred yards of line out you still had a full spool left. With a long line, however, you need gradually to loosen your drag. Finally we had to up anchor and go after this mean devil.
I decided that he was a whaler shark. He worked in a manner I had learned to associate with this species. He resembled a submarine going places. But we soon caught up with him and I got most of my line back. Then I had it out with him and stopped him in a little short of an hour. Nevertheless, hauling him up to the boat was a different proposition. Peter does not often indulge in remarks at my expense, but he mildly observed that I always liked to have a fish on for a good few hours. That English crack— “a good few hours” — nettled me, although I had to laugh. Wherefore, instead of enjoying myself I settled down to grim business. I might as well have done this in the first place.
On a heavy fish deep down, the method of procedure is a short strong lift of the rod and a quick wind of the reel. You don’t get in many inches each time. For a little while this is okay, but it grows to be monotonous, then tiresome, and at length painful. Of course, I had the whaler coming and he did not recover a single foot of line I gained. While I was doing this he swam inshore and obligingly returned to the neighborhood of the spot where he had made the fatal mistake of taking my bait. There, at the end of two hours and something, I heaved that whaler up to the waiting boatmen. They treated him pretty rough, I was bound to admit, and they added insult to injury by cutting a strip of meat out of him for my next bait.
This whaler was one of the bronze-backed kind, about which Dr. Stead had talked at length. It was rather rare, and a harder fighter than the black or ordinary whaler. I could corroborate that, as it had given me as hard a fight as the eight-hundred-and-ninety-pound whaler I had caught at Bateman Bay.
Presently we were anchored again and I was fishing with a long line out and a float which buoyed my bait somewhat near the surface. Peter was boiling the billy and Love was puttering around, setting the lunch table. As I seldom ate any lunch while fishing, this procedure meant little to me, except to amuse me. I hoped to hook a fish before they sat down to tea, as I had done so many times with Peter in New Zealand. Usually we drifted while the lunch process was under way. I hooked and caught the first broadbill swordfish ever landed in New Zealand at this hour. It required several hours, to be exact, and for one monumental occasion Peter Williams forgot all about the boiling billy.
Off Sydney Heads this day my evil wishes were frustrated by fate, however, and the boys had eaten and drunk, and cleaned up their table, before I did get a strike. All of a sudden, while I was watching my bobbing cork, my daydreams were dispelled by a big gray fin cutting the water out there above my bait. But suddenly, when my cork shot under, I realized that fin belonged to a tiger shark which already had my bait. He had come up to take a look at the cork, and perhaps to bite my line. Mako often do that to floating tackle. This gray tiger, a good big one, flashed at my cork as he dragged it under. Before he could cut the line, however, I struck the hook into him hard and deep. He sheered away, plowed along the surface, then disappeared and went down deep. While he took line, Love frantically hauled up the anchor and Peter got the boat in motion.
In a few moments we were all set for battle and getting away from the other boats. I had hung, as we call it, another big fish. That for which every big-game fisherman fishes had come to pass.
During the succeeding hour and more I gave this tiger what we American fishermen slangily call the works. I whipped him thoroughly, but something happened that hindered me from completing the job. There came a queer jerky giving of my tight line, accompanied by peculiar motions of the rod tip. Usually this thing is caused by the gradual tearing of the hook from its firm hold. Many a fish I had lost after a few of these happenings.
In this case, however, nothing happened. I did not lose my fish. But the jerky slackings in my line continued, until suddenly I realized that they were caused by the shark rolling up in my leader. He would roll up a few feet, then the leader would slip or loosen, with the consequent vibrations. This was almost as bad as the tearing out of the hook. For almost any kind of a shark will roll up in the leader until he comes to the line, and then he will bite through that.
I told Peter my suspicions and he said he had arrived at the same conclusion. “Lam into him now or you’ll be losing him,” he added.
A violent and persistent lamming, as Peter called it, brought that tiger shark to the surface. He came up belly first, white and wide and long, and the middle and upper part of his body was so tightly wound up in my wire leader that it cut into him. There was no coil around his gills and the last one circled his head just below his jaw. But he could open his mouth. Believe me he gaped those wide fanged jaws and shut them with the sound of a steel trap. In fact he was a trapped tiger and as mad as a hornet. He threshed his long tail and curdled the water white. But he did not appear to be able to turn over or swim. He just surged and wagged.
My swivel was scarcely two feet from those jaws. So he had thirty-three feet of wire leader wrapped around him.
“Hold hard, sir!” shouted Peter, as he leaned down with big gloved hand extended. “Just in time. A few more minutes and he’d bitten off...Billy, stand by with the gaff...Wow!!!”
When Love stuck the gaff into that shark it leaped out, half of its glistening wet body in the air, and frightfully close to the boat. The gaff did not hold. But Peter did. There was a tremendous tussle and splash. The tiger was hog-tied in my leader, but nevertheless he gave the men a bad few minutes before he was securely gaffed and roped. Even after we started to tow him ashore he kept snapping at the wire noose which had proved his undoing.
Resting from my exertions and watching this shark while I seriously recounted the actions of gaffing and tying up to the boat, I pondered over the hazard and the difficulty of this necessary sporting procedure.
I did not blame Bullen and these other shark fishermen for shooting sharks at close quarters out of a small boat, in some cases smaller than the shark. An attempt to gaff them would be foolhardy. I will go on record by saying it is better to catch a tiger shark or any great shark on a hand line, and shoot or harpoon him when he comes up to the boat, than not to catch him at all. For it is a fine thing to kill these brutes.
All the same, that is not the great, wonderful, sporting way to catch your big shark. The more risks you run, the harder and longer your fight with him, the stronger and finer rod and reel and line you can afford, the more creditable your achievement. There are many reasons to prove my contention, some of which I have mentioned heretofore, and one I will here repeat.
Many sharks, particularly the mako and tiger, often swim up to the boat before they are in the least whipped. In case of the mako, perhaps also the tiger, too, he comes up to see what is wrong and to do you harm. If you shoot him or harpoon him, then you destroy in one fell stroke aft the commendable and manly reason for fishing for him at all, except the one of killing him.
I have never known an angler who, having once had the thrill of bringing his great fish to gaff and seeing it gaffed, ever went back to the more primitive method outlined above. Bullen himself gaffed Bowen’s eight-hundred-and-eighty-nine-pound tiger shark, and his boatman later gaffed a five-hundred-pound white shark. He assures me he will never shoot another. This is the nucleus of the idea I would like to inculcate in all Australian anglers. The sport is greater than they have realized. I venture to hope that the great man-eating sharks will some day have the honor accorded to lions and elephants.
CHAPTER X
BY MAY 1ST we had finished our south coast fishing and packed to sail on the 5th for Hayman Island of the Great Barrier Reef.
Four months, at least half of which was unfishable on account of high winds and rough seas! I hesitate to state what number of fish we might have caught had we had a normal season of warm weather. But it always blows great guns when I go fishing, and otherwise handicaps me with obstacles.
Altogether we caught sixty-seven big fish, weighing over twenty-one thousand pounds, nearly ten tons. This seems incredible, but it is true, and really is nothing compared with what we might have done under favorable conditions. Two-thirds of this number fell to my rod. Bowen and his camera men, and mine, caught the rest.
My catches of a green thresher Fox shark, the first ever known to be caught, and the ninety-one-pound yellow-fin tuna, also the first ever taken in Australian waters, were surely the high lights of my good fortune. To repeat, however, no one can guess what I might have taken had the weather given us a break. Perhaps one of those giant white-death sharks! Or surely a broadbill swordfish, that old gladiator and king of the Seven Seas.
No doubt a few words about tackle or gear in this summary will not be amiss.
I used three big tackles, favoring the Coxe, Hardy-Zane Grey and Kovalovsky reels, carrying a thousand and more yards of thirty-nine-thread Swastika lines. I really did not need fifteen hundred yards of line as I had on the big Kovalovsky, but as I was always expecting an unheard-of and monster fish, I wanted to be ready for any kind of a run.
My outfit on the camera boat had half a dozen tackles with reels not so large as mine, carrying thirty-six and thirty-nine-thread lines. Needless to say, they ruined all these tackles, but the fun I had watching them fight fish was worth the sacrifice. I could hardly ask them to follow me around, running all over the ocean for four months without fishing.
For Marlin we used fifteen-foot leaders or traces, on which were mounted 13° Pflueger swordfish hooks. These traces were made out of nineteen-thread airplane cable wire and were not suitable for big sharks. We lost many leaders on hammerheads and other sharks. I had an eleven-foot mako bite one of these leaders through and escape, after leaping prodigiously.
We used hickory rods and some dualwoods made of black palm and hickory. These were the best obtainable in the United States. I will not recommend them here because toward the end of my stay in Australia I found that Australian big-game rods are superior to ours. Bullen’s Atlanta rod made by Southam is the most wonderful rod I have used. It is built of split cane in six pieces. Beyond doubt it is the most beautifully made and finished, the strongest and springiest, the most enduring rod I have ever bent upon a big fish.
The saffron-heart rod runs it a close second. As a matter of fact I am not perfectly sure which is the better. But I have not given the saffron-heart rod the same test that I gave the other.
Also it is no longer needful for Australian anglers to use American or English reels. The two new hand-made big-game-fishing reels, built for Fagan and Bullen, are just about as good as any reels I own. Upon my return to Australia I shall try out one of these.
But I have found fault with Australian traces and hooks, and especially Australian lines. These must be improved to compete with the hand-made Swastika lines.
It seems hardly necessary to say much about methods of fishing for swordfish. Most anglers have already learned that trolling with a revolving bait far back of the boat, and weighted at that, is just wasting time. Of course a starved Marlin would bite on anything; and it means little that a few fish have been caught by such methods.
Teasers trolled far back is another mistake. They should be close to the stern of the boat, around thirty feet, so that you can see the Marlin come, and pull them away from him.
There is no set time after the strike to hook your fish. That is something which has to do with the feel of the strike. In any event you cannot hook all of the Marlin that strike, nor catch all you hook! The great thing to learn is to find them — to run the wheels off your boat until you do find them, and that takes patience, endurance, and eyesight. I attribute my success more to the last than to anything else.
I had intended to include in this book all my data on man-eating sharks, and a chronicle of my three-and-a-half months among the islands of the Great Barrier Reef. But including photographs, this would make too large a volume. Besides, I aim to go back to the Barrier. It is a most fascinating and remarkable place — fifteen thousand square miles of waters and reefs, which have not been fished and which have incredible possibilities. I was able to identify, if not classify, three new kinds of spearfish that have never yet been taken on a rod. One is what was called a baby swordfish, from three to four feet long, which is really a matured fish. In shape it resembles a black Marlin.
