with silvery locks that hung gracefully down upon his shoulders. His
method of fishing was fascinating to watch. Standing erect in his boat,
the commodore would paddle from the outlet of the lake to some inviting
patch of weeds, and there, in quite shallow water, noiselessly drop his
anchor. Then, wielding a rod nearly twenty feet in length, he would
"skip" his tempting bait--generally the side of a small perch--with
amazing vigor and marvellous dexterity, oftentimes taking fifteen or
twenty pickerel in less than an hour. To see him strike, manipulate and
land a fish weighing three or four pounds, his pliant rod bending nearly
to a semicircle, was a spectacle not to be forgotten.[121]

In 1850 Peter P. Cooper brought from the Lake Ontario a little schooner,
and became so famous as a boatman and fisherman that he was regarded as
the successor of Admiral Hassy and Commodore Boden. Capt. Cooper
established a boat livery which included five sailboats and twenty
rowboats. He developed the fisheries of Otsego Lake on a big scale,
having introduced the gill net as a means of catching bass. In the
spring of 1851 there were taken from the lake 25,000 bass. The gill net
which Capt. Cooper introduced is made of the best kind of linen thread,
with meshes from two to two and a half inches square. The net is about
three feet wide, having leads attached to one edge, and corks fastened
to the other. The leaded edge is carried to the bottom of the lake,
while the other is buoyed up by the corks, making a complete fence
across the lake at its bottom, even where it is very deep. The fish swim
against the fence, which at once yields to their force, but as it
yields, forms a sack whose meshes gather about their fins and tail,
making it impossible to back out or otherwise escape. Their efforts
serve only to entangle the fish more deeply in the net. Elihu Phinney,
the most expert amateur fisherman of the period, denounced Capt.
Cooper's gill net as the "most deadly and abominable of all devices."

The Otsego bass never exceed about six pounds in weight, the average
being much smaller. Occasionally a lake trout of larger size is caught.
With hook and line trout of great size are not often taken. On Friday,
August 21, 1908, Alexander S. Phinney caught with hook and line, near
Kingfisher Tower, a trout thirty-six inches long and weighing twenty
pounds. He tussled with this trout for an hour, with six hundred feet of
line, before he succeeded in