About This Time One Begins
To Worry Over The Line, And To Wish That He Had Had Nine Hundred
Feet On The Reel Originally Instead Of Six Hundred.
With careful
playing the line can be saved, and after an hour of keen excitement
the fish can be brought to gaff.
One such dolphin I landed on the
Snark measured four feet and seven inches.
Hermann caught dolphins more prosaically. A hand-line and a chunk
of shark-meat were all he needed. His hand-line was very thick, but
on more than one occasion it parted and lost the fish. One day a
dolphin got away with a lure of Hermann's manufacture, to which were
lashed four O'Shaughnessy hooks. Within an hour the same dolphin
was landed with the rod, and on dissecting him the four hooks were
recovered. The dolphins, which remained with us over a month,
deserted us north of the line, and not one was seen during the
remainder of the traverse.
So the days passed. There was so much to be done that time never
dragged. Had there been little to do, time could not have dragged
with such wonderful seascapes and cloudscapes - dawns that were like
burning imperial cities under rainbows that arched nearly to the
zenith; sunsets that bathed the purple sea in rivers of rose-
coloured light, flowing from a sun whose diverging, heaven-climbing
rays were of the purest blue. Overside, in the heat of the day, the
sea was an azure satiny fabric, in the depths of which the sunshine
focussed in funnels of light.
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