could lead him somewhat. This made me begin to work hard. Yet,
notwithstanding, I had no hope of capturing the fish. It was only
experience.

Captain Dan kept saying: "Well, you wanted to hook up with a broadbill!
Now how do you like it?" He had no idea I would ever land him. Several
times I asked him to give an opinion as to the size of the swordfish,
but he would not venture that until he had gotten a good close view of
him.

At four o'clock I made the alarming discovery that the great B-Ocean
reel was freezing, just as my other one had frozen on my first swordfish
the year previous. Captain Dan used language. He threw up his hands. He
gave up. But I did not.

"Dan, see here," I said. "We'll run up on him, throw off a lot of slack
line, then cut it and tie it to another reel!"

"We might do that. But it'll disqualify the fish," he replied.

Captain Dan, like all the boatmen at Avalon, has fixed ideas about the
Tuna Club and its records and requirements. It is all right, I suppose,
for a club to have rules, and not count or credit an angler who breaks a
rod or is driven to the expedient I had proposed. But I do not fish for
clubs or records. I fish for the fun, the excitement, the thrill of the
game, and I would rather let my fish go than not. So I said:

"We'll certainly lose the fish if we don't change reels. I am using the
regulation tackle, and to my mind the more tackle we use, provided we
land the fish, the more credit is due us. It is not an easy matter to
change reels or lines or rods with a big fish working all the time."

Captain Dan acquiesced, but told me to try fighting him a while with the
light drag and the thumb-brake. So far only the heavy drag had frozen. I
tried Dan's idea, to my exceeding discomfort; and the result was that
the swordfish drew far away from us. Presently the reel froze solid. The
handle would not turn. But with the drag off the spool ran free.

Then we ran away from the fish, circling and letting out slack line.
When we came to the end of the line we turned back a little, and with a
big slack we took the risk of cutting the line and tying it on the other
reel. We had just got this done when the line straightened tight! I
wound in about twelve hundred feet of line and was tired and wet when I
had gotten in all I could pull. This brought us to within a couple of
hundred feet of our quarry. Also it brought us to five o'clock. Five
hours!... I began to have queer sensations--ache