| | 1 | Author: | Lang, Andrew | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Angling Sketches  | | | | Published: | 2001 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | These papers do not boast of great sport. They are truthful, not like the tales
some fishers tell. They should appeal to many sympathies. There is no false
modesty in the confidence with which I esteem myself a duffer, at fishing. Some
men are born duffers; others, unlike persons of genius, become so by an infinite
capacity for not taking pains. Others,
again, among whom I would rank myself, combine both these elements of
incompetence. Nature, that made me enthusiastically fond of fishing, gave me
thumbs for fingers, short-sighted eyes, indolence, carelessness, and a temper
which (usually sweet and angelic) is goaded to madness by the laws of matter and
of gravitation. For example: when another man is caught up in a branch he
disengages his fly; I jerk at it till something breaks. As for carelessness, in
boyhood I fished, by preference, with doubtful gut and knots ill-tied; it made
the risk greater, and increased the excitement if one did hook a trout. I can't
keep a fly-book. I stuff the flies into my pockets at random, or stick them into
the leaves of a novel, or bestow them in the lining of my hat or the case of my
rods. Never, till 1890, in all my days did I possess a landing-net. If I can
drag a fish up a bank, or over the gravel, well; if not, he goes on his way
rejoicing. On the Test I thought it seemly to carry a landing- net. It had a
hinge, and doubled up. I put the handle through a button- hole of my coat: I saw
a big fish rising, I put a dry fly over
him; the idiot took it. Up stream he ran, then down stream, then he yielded to
the rod and came near me. I tried to unship my landing-net from my button-hole.
Vain labour! I twisted and turned the handle, it would not budge. Finally, I
stooped, and attempted to ladle the trout out with the short net; but he broke
the gut, and went off. A landing-net is a tedious thing to carry, so is a creel,
and a creel is, to me, a superfluity. There is never anything to put in it. If I
do catch a trout, I lay him under a big stone, cover him with leaves, and never
find him again. I often break my top joint; so, as I never carry string, I
splice it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot be
troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife. When a phantom minnow sticks
in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on another, so that when I reach home
I look as if a shoal of fierce minnows had attacked me and hung on like leeches.
When a boy, I was--once or twice--a bait-fisher, but I never carried worms in
box or bag. I found them under big stones, or in the fields, wherever I had the luck. I
never tie nor otherwise fasten the joints of my rod; they often slip out of the
sockets and splash into the water. Mr. Hardy, however, has invented a
joint-fastening which never slips. On the other hand, by letting the joint rust,
you may find it difficult to take down your rod. When I see a trout rising, I
always cast so as to get hung up, and I frighten him as I disengage my hook. I
invariably fall in and get half-drowned when I wade, there being an
insufficiency of nails in the soles of my brogues. My waders let in water, too,
and when I go out to fish I usually leave either my reel, or my flies, or my
rod, at home. Perhaps no other man's average of lost flies in proportion to
taken trout was ever so great as mine. I lose plenty, by striking furiously,
after a series of short rises, and breaking the gut, with which the fish swims
away. As to dressing a fly, one would sooner think of dressing a dinner. The
result of the fly-dressing would resemble a small blacking-brush, perhaps, but
nothing entomological. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
|
