Pitcher's Tuna

In the cosy little port of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, people know lanky young Alfred Kenney not only as the village photographer but as the star pitcher of Shelburne's baseball team. Lately he pitched a no-hit, no-run game against Lockeport. Last week Alfred Kenney gained greater kudos. All summer he had been hearing about the sport--only a few years old in Nova Scotia--of catching giant bluefin tuna ("horse mackerel" to old salts) on rod & reel. Up the coast at Liverpool a Cuban team had just won this year's international tuna matches from a U. S. and a British team, in a tournament that fizzled sadly when some killer whales hanging off that harbor scared the big tuna away (or so Liverpudlians claimed) and only a few small school tuna were caught by all the elegant sportsmen with fancy tackle and theories.

Alf Kenney had never tried killing tuna. Most of the visiting sportsmen having left for the season, Alf got his friend, Charlie Nickerson, to take him out. Captain Nickerson is one of many young commercial fishermen whom the Government has encouraged to equip themselves to guide visiting game fishermen. Alf Kenney marveled at the huge 16-0 reel and the 54-thread line, which scarcely looked hefty enough to hold a fish like the 860-pounder which Churchill Bower had brought into Shelburne few days before, taken with a keg and handline.

Off bleak Gull Rock, at the Shelburne harbor mouth, Alf Kenney had cause to marvel more. A monster tuna took his bait and for 4 1/2 hr. he learned what it is like to be attached to an animated submarine. Back aching, arms numb, slim Alf Kenney stuck it out, killed his fish and when it tipped official scales at 864 lb., received congratulations on a new world record--13 lb. heavier than the North Sea tuna caught in 1933 by Mitchell Henry of England.

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