We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Top: Camera on outrigger. Center: The chip "Kathryn" on the way to the banks, with bait net drying. Lower: Carl Gibson (left) and Carlo, the rook (right).
and took turns on lookout. The boat cruised back and forth across the banks, ninety to two-hundred miles from the mainland; sometimes as many as twenty boats would be together, other times no other boat but ours showed on the ocean. When the lookout cried "Tuna!" every man rushed to his station: the racks, slatted steel platforms, with shin-high pipe guards in front, were lowered into position outside the rail; fishing poles grabbed and tested, then over the side into the racks. The men played the squid back and forth. The squid, jerked through the water, appears to the tuna to be a sardine or anchovy.
The squid, so called because of the squidskin covering, is a strange assortment of articles; a lead loaded brass tube, to which is attached a plain steel hook, bent at a forty-five degree angle. The whole thing is covered with white chicken feathers and over this is wrapped the squid-skin, sheep parchment or cat skin. The fishermen highly prize the cat-skin, which is imported from Japan, where they have stock farms that raise nothing but cats for the skin and gut. Imagine a cat ranch — silly, isn't it?
Well, the chummer, the man at the bait tank, throws handfuls of sardines over the side to entice the tuna closer to the waiting men in the racks. The men stand tense, dipping the poles up and down in the water; suddenly, one man has a strike, then another and another, till all the men have strikes and the air is full of flying fish, the deck starting to fill with a great flapping and shower of spray; the men shouting encouragement to each other and to themselves, like a bunch of baseball players. After awhile the fishing seems to slack off, and the Captain, who is the chummer, orders the men to get the hook poles. On these hooks, plain steel, with no barbs, attached to the poles the same as the squid with an eight-foot piano wire leader and a swivel, the men hook the chum, or bait. After days of swimming around in circles close to the surface of tanks, the sardines even though hooked on the end of the line, still swim in the circle, though close to the surface. The men again wait for the strike. Some Icthyologist I Fish student, to you) figured that the tuna strikes at a speed of fifty-five miles an hour. The fishermen are so practised, that thev utilize this speed to land it. flipping the pole while the fish is in mid-air, overhead, releasing the fish to continue its trip to the deck alone. I tried this one time. Result: a wet director and a pole disappearing astern, zig-zagging like a snake.
The men work so fast that by the time the fish is on the deck, they have the hook baited and are swinging the pole overside. There is a constant shout of "Bait . . . Bait . . ." from the men in the racks.
The chummer hands small nets full of sardines down to each of the men who dump them into little receptacles built into the rail and fed with a trickle of water pumped in through pipes from the salt