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 landing him in the boat. In the next season the same fisherman caught a trout weighing eighteen pounds. So far as authentic records go, these two trout are the largest fish ever caught in the lake with hook and line.