TRAVELING IN STYLE : LAST STOP : THE LONE ANGLER AND THE FISH-HOGS : Wiborn Was the Most Successful Fisherman on Catalina Island--but He Rarely Brought Home Any Fish

Though Zane Grey (1872-1939) is best known for his definitive Western genre novels (“Riders of the Purple Sage,” “The Last of the Plainsmen,” etc.), he was also an avid fisherman and a prolific writer on fishing, penning at least nine books on piscatorial themes. Born in Zanesville, Ohio (a town founded by his great-great-grandfather), Grey spent much of his later life in Southern California--both in a home in Altadena and in a summer house he bought in 1924 in Avalon, on Catalina Island. As is evident in this edited excerpt from one of his books, “Tales of Fishes” (1919), he not only loved his island hideaway but also feared for the future of its waters. He might even be called an early ecologist.

Eight Zane Grey books on fishing have recently been reprinted in a deluxe leather-bound edition, together with two related volumes, one each by Grey’s son, Dr. Loren Grey, and his nephew, R.C. Grey. Otherwise out of print, the books are available as a complete set only from Derrydale Press, P.O. Drawer 411, Lyon, Miss. 38645, telephone (800) 443-6753. The price is $400, postage included. A few copies of individual volumes may be available later this year.

Avalon, the beautiful! Somehow even the fire that destroyed half of Avalon did not greatly mar its beauty. At a distance, the bay and the grove of eucalyptus trees, the green-and-gold slopes, look as they always looked. Avalon has a singular charm outside of its sport of fishing. It is the most delightful and comfortable place I ever visited. The nights are cool. You sleep under blankets even when over in Los Angeles people are suffocating with the heat. At dawn, the hills are obscured in fog, and sometimes this fog is chilly. But early or late in the morning, it breaks up and rolls away. The sun shines. It is the kind of sunshine that dazzles the eye, elevates the spirit and warms the back. And out there rolls the vast blue Pacific--calm, slowly heaving, beautiful and mysterious.

If you are a fisherman of any degree, and if you aspire to some wonderful experiences with the great and vanishing game fish of the Pacific, and if you would love to associate with these adventures some dazzling white-hot days and unforgettable cool nights where your eyelids get glued with sleep, if you savor the fragrant salt breath of the sea, its music and motion and color and mystery and beauty--then go to Avalon before it is too late.

At Long Key (Florida) last winter, I met two self-styled sportsmen. They were eager to convert me to what they claimed was the dry-fly class angling of the sea--jabbing harpoons and spears into porpoises and manatee and sawfish and being dragged about in their boat. The height of their achievements that winter had been the harpooning of several sawfish, each of which gave birth to a little one while being fought on the harpoon! Ye gods! It would never do to record my utterances.

I record this fact only in the hope of opening the eyes of anglers. Let every angler who loves to fish think what it would mean to him to find the fish were gone. The mackerel are gone, the bluefish are going, every year the amberjack and kingfish grow smaller and fewer. We must find ways and means to save our game fish of the sea.

Wiborn, the Lone Angler, is in a class by himself. To my mind, Wiborn is the ideal angler of the sea. He goes out alone. He operates his motor launch, rigs his tackle and bait and teasers, finds the fish, fights the one he hooks and gaffs and hauls it aboard or releases it, all by himself. Anyone who has had the slightest experience in Pacific angling can appreciate this hazardous, complicated and laborsome job. But Wiborn goes out day by day alone, and he has brought in big tuna and swordfish. Not many! He is too fine a sportsman to bring in many fish.

And herein is the point I want to drive home. No one can say how many fish he catches. He never tells. Always he has a fine, wonderful, beautiful day on the water. It matters not to him, the bringing home of fish to exhibit. This aroused my admiration, and also my suspicion. I got to believing that the Lone Angler caught many more fish than he ever brought home.

So I spied on him. Whenever chance afforded, I watched him through my powerful binoculars. He was always busy. His swift boat roamed the seas. Always he appeared a white dot on the blue horizon, like the flash of a gull. I have seen his boat stop and stand still; I have seen sheeted splashes of water near him, and more than once I have seen him leaning back with bent rod, working and pumping hard. But when he came into Avalon on these specific occasions, he brought no tuna, no swordfish--nothing but a cheerful, enigmatic smile and a hopeful question as to the good luck of his friends.

“But I saw you hauling away on a fish,” I ventured to say once.

“Oh, that was an old shark,” he replied, laughing.

Well, it might have been, but I had my doubts. And at the close of 1918 I believed, though I could not prove, that Lone Angler let most of his fish go free. Hail to Lone Angler! If a man must roam the salt sea in search of health and peace and in a manly, red-blooded exercise--here is the ideal. I have not seen its equal.

The long, heaving swells, the windy lanes, the flight of the shearwater and the uplifted flukes of the whale, the white wall of tuna on the horizon, the leap of the dolphin, the sweet, soft scent that breathes from off the sea, the beauty and mystery and color and movement of the deep--these are Lone Angler’s alone, and he is as rich as if he had found the sands of the Pacific to be pearls, the waters nectar and the rocks pure gold.