A Handbook of Angling - Teaching Fly-Fishing, Trolling, Bottom-Fishing and Salmon-Fishing

CHAPTER I.

ANGLING DEFINED—DIVIDED INTO THREE BRANCHES—EACH BRIEFLY DESCRIBED—THE SUPERIORITY AND MERITS OF FLY-FISHING.

ANGLING—the art of taking fish with rod, line, and hook, or with line and hook only—is one of the oldest of out-door amusements and occupations in every country. At first the modes of practising it were exceedingly rude, and they still remain so amongst uncivilised nations. There are tribes in existence that now, as heretofore, fashion the human jaw-bones into fish-hooks. Even unto this day angling implements, amongst many of the politest people of Europe, their amusements, unfortunately for themselves, being chiefly in-door ones, are manufactured with imperfect roughness. The inhabitants of the British Isles alone, with their colonial descendants cultivate all matters pertaining to rural sports, of whatsoever kind they may be, but particularly hunting, shooting, and angling, with that persevering ardour, comprising passionate study and active practice, which leads to perfection. In their efforts to acquire the surest, most amusing, most health-giving, and, I may say, most elegant modes of pursuing and capturing their game, be it the produce of field or flood, they call to their aid several ancillary studies, amongst which stands prominent one of the pleasantest of all, viz. that of the natural history of animals, and of other living things ranking not so high in the scale of creation. The hunter studies the habits of horse and dog, and of the ferœ naturœ he pursues with them, the fowler of the birds of the air, and the fisherman of the fish of the water. The general sportsman, a practical naturalist, if I may use the epithet, studies the habits of all. Hence knowledge, skill, and success; hence the accomplished sportsman, rarely found except amongst the best types of Englishmen, whether of high or low degree.

Though angling has been jeered at more than any other sporting practice, still no other subject connected with field-sports has been more-minutely and extensively written upon. No sporting writer is so generally known as Izaak Walton, and his ‘Complete Angler’ has earned for him an immortality which will last until the art of printing our language shall be forgotten. Angling, then, cannot be a theme unworthy of a modern pen; but the pen perchance may be unworthy of it, and so cause me to fail in my design, which is to write upon angling in a plain, connected, businesslike way, teaching its modern theory and practice, together with the useful discoveries, inventions, and improvements that have been recently made in relation to it.

The art of angling is divided into three main branches, the general principles of which being understood, an acquaintance with minute detail will follow gradually as a matter of course.

The first branch embraces angling at the surface of the water, and comprehends fly-fishing with natural or artificial insects, the latter being of more general use. The second embraces angling at mid-water, or thereabouts, and includes trolling or spinning with a live, a dead, or an artificial bait—with a small fish generally, or its representative. The third includes bottom-fishing, that is, angling at or near the bottom of the water with worms, gentles, and many sorts of inanimate baits. Bottom-fishing is the most primitive, the commonest, and easiest mode of anglings, the first learnt and the last forgot; trolling is less common and more difficult; fly-fishing is the most difficult and amusing of all, and though less commonly practised than bottom-fishing in England, is more generally so than trolling, more particularly in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

Although in teaching an art it would be more regular to commence with the easiest branches of it, I begin, for several reasons, with fly-fishing, acknowledging it, however, to be that division of the art of angling which is learned the least easily. I shall only give one reason for my irregularity, viz. that he who has learned the practice of fly-fishing will readily learn the two other branches of angling. He will learn them more readily than if he began with either; for he who has begun with fly-fishing and succeeded must have attained quickness of eye and lightness of hand. If the reader should desire to be more methodical than I am, he has the power of being so, by reading this handbook as if it were written in Hebrew. He will then find the last first, and the first almost last. If he wishes for slow, but sure advancement, let him reverse the order of reading, moving from nearly the back rank to the centre, and so on to the front.

The long-continued, unbroken chain of ignorance that runs, in many instances, through the world is almost incomprehensible to the active mind. It is a miracle of visible darkness amidst the intelligence that surrounds us. ‘The dictionary-making pensioner,’ as Cobbett used to call Dr. Samuel Johnson, defined angling, as a silly thing, practised by a fool at one end of a rod and line, with a worm at the other. Many stupid people still adhere to this very stupid definition. With the practice of angling they associate nothing beyond worms, punts, patience, cold and wet, a nibble and tittle-bat sport. A salmon caught by angling—with a diminutive artificial fly, a thin silkworm gut line, and a rod of pieces lighter and more limber than a lady’s riding wand! No —no such prodigy in their opinion ever occurred. Believe me—yes, the largest salmon that have ever stemmed the deep rapids of the Shannon have succumbed to the cunning hand deftly manipulating such frail gear.

Let us after this see what fly-fishing is—whether it is a fool at one end of a rod and a worm at the other. The greatest names in arms, science, literature, and art—heroes, divines, mathematicians, poets, painters, sculptors—have been devoted to fly-fishing. Nelson’s ‘dear, dear Merton,’ with its Wandle wandering by, offered him an attraction which he constantly revelled in, viz. fly-fishing. Sir H. Davy, Archdeacon Paley, Sir Francis Chantry, Sir Walter Scott, General Sir Charles Dalbiac, were enthusiastic fly-fishers. The Dukes of Argyle, Newcastle, Sir Hyde Packer, Mr. Sydney Herbert, Earl Grosvenor, Viscount Anson, and many other great names, connected with the pulpit, the bar, bench, studio, and the stage, that I could mention, are constant and consummate practitioners of the pleasing sport. Even whilst I wrote (Sept. 1847), Her Majesty, the royal Consort, the eldest of their royal offspring, and a princely party, were indulging in the pursuit with rod and line of salmon and salmonidæ in the waters of North Scotland. Had the lexicographic pensioner been alive to witness this, how rapidly he would dele that definition of angling of his, which purblindness dictated! Other field-sports may be more exciting than artificial fly-fishing, but there is not one requiring more skill, or calling into exercise more intelligence and adroitness of mind and limb. A quick eye, a ready and delicate hand, an apprehensive brain, delicacy in the senses of touch and hearing, activity of limb, physical endurance, persevering control over impatience, vigilant watchfulness, are qualifications necessary to form the fly-fisher. His amusing and chanceful struggles, teeming with varying excitement, are with the strongest, the most active, the most courageous, the most beautiful and most valuable of river-fish, and his instruments of victory are formed of materials so slight, and, some of them, so frail—they are beautiful as well—that all the delicacy and cunning resources of art are requisite to enable feebleness to overcome force. The large, vigorous, nervous salmon, of amazing strength and wonderful agility—the rapid trout of darting velocity, hardy, active, untiring, whose dying flurry shows almost indomitable resistance, are hooked, held in, wearied out, by the skilful and delicate management of tackle that would, if rudely handled, be warped by the strength and weight of a dace or roach. ’Tis wonderful to see hooks of Lilliputian largeness, gut finer than hair, and a rod, some of whose wooden joints are little thicker than a crow’s quill, employed in the capture of the very strongest of river-fish. The marvel lies in the triumph of art over brute force. If the sporting gear of the fly-fisher were not managed with art—on the mathematical principle of leverage—he could not by its means lift from the ground more than a minute fraction of the weight of that living, bounding, rushing fish he tires unto death—nay, drowns in its own element. The overcoming of difficulties by the suaviter in modo forms one of the greatest charms of fly-fishing, and to my fancy is the pleasantest element of success that can be used in any pursuit. Persuade, but never drive.

The baits of the pure fly-fisher are imitations of insects in one or other of their forms. He fishes with imitations of the fly, the beetle, the grub, the caterpillar, and moth. These imitations are made of divers materials, the chief whereof are feathers, fur, mohair, wool, silk, and tinsel. They are affixed upon hooks of various sizes, and by a process requiring the most skilful and delicate manipulation. The fly-dresser is a modeller of no mean attributes. He has to represent, by means of the most delicate substances of varied tissue and colour, insects, often complete atomies, and of changeable shapes and hues. Extreme neatness characterises all the paraphernalia of the fly-fisher. His sport requires the handling of nothing that will soil the best-bred hand. The composition of his bait extracts pain from no living thing. To know positively that his baits are good, he must to a certain extent be a naturalist. He must be acquainted with the outward appearance of several sorts of insects; he must know the divisions of the seasons in which they live and cease to be; he must know the climates and localities peculiar or otherwise to each species; he must know their names, and be able to classify them, if not scientifically, at least piscatorially; he must know those that prove the most attractive food for each kind of fish he angles for: in fact, he must possess a fund of knowledge that will cause him to be considered an accomplished man by the members of every rational society.

To render the pleasures attendant on his pursuit complete, he is invited, if he seeks for superlative success, to practise it amongst the most picturesque panorama designed by nature. The swift stream that dashes along the hill’s side, the brook that runs through the valley, the mountain waterfalls—the currents foaming between moss-grown rocks, or brawling over a pebbly bottom, are the scenes of the fly-fisher’s triumphs. Salmon and salmonidæ, happily the most frequent prizes of the fly-fisher’s skill, are not to be found in the sluggish, turbid waters that flow through flats and fens, but breed in, and inhabit, in due season, those delightful streams that play through table-lands. Their favourite food is not the offal of slime or mud, but the insects that disport on the surface of clear water. There the bounding salmon tribe seek them, and in that search they encounter the fatal artificial insect of the fly-fisher, and all the deadly resources of his craft. The shape, the colour, the flavour of the fly-fisher’s fish, do not mis-beseem the beauties that surround salmon, trout, and grayling streams. As the plain, nutritious sheep thrives well upon Leicester and similar pasturage lands, so in their waters breed prolifically the heavy carp, chub, and tench. On the contrary, the heather of the Highlands is the haunt of the dainty doe and wild stag; and the crystal waters of their inland cliffs produce the aristocracy of the finny race. The concordances of life, society, nature, are admirable, unerring, and tally in delightful diversity. The smooth waters of lowland rivers and. ponds afford the placid bottom-fisher his sport. The mountain torrents and lakes hold the quarry the active fly-fisher is ambitious of capturing. The broad, straight, even thoroughfares of the world afford comfort and competence, acquired bit by bit by efforts, slightly but sufficiently stimulating to fresh and repeated exertion. The narrow, precipitous paths of life lead to fame, high honours, and high rank; and the ascent, rendered enchanting by the allurements of ambitious hope, is gained by daring activity, which never flags but for breath to bound onward more and more bravely. The accessible streams that meander soothingly through soil for the sickle and scythe, yield to the industrious bottom-fisher a full pannier by a slowly and pleasantly accumulating process. The fly-fisher, with haply a few casts of his artificial baits, surcharges his capacious creel with salmon or trout, whose retreat in waters rushing by crag and fell he has attained by paths which none, save the sportsman intent on high game, would choose to tread.

I have now run rapidly through the salient merits of fly-fishing. With less precipitation, I will explain the practice of it.

CHAPTER II.

THROWING THE LINE AND FLIES—HUMOURING THEM—FISHING A STREAM—STRIKING, HOOKING, PLAYING, AND LANDING A FISH.

OUR LANGUAGE contains many pretty, pithy, and largely expressive figures of speech. One man says of another, ‘he is the best whip in England.’ We understand by this little phrase that he is vaunted to be the best driver and manager of horses in harness in the kingdom. So when we say ‘he throws a line or a fly better than any man we know,’ we mean to assert that he is the best fly-fisher of our acquaintance. The possession of the one power commonly, not always, implies the possession of all the other necessary ones. Throwing well the line is an indispensable fly-fishing qualification, the first to be learned, always called into play, and without which other attributes are nearly valueless. You may hook a fish well, play a fish well, land a fish well, but you will not often have an opportunity of doing so unless you throw a line well. We judge of a fly-fisher by the manner in which he casts his line. If he does so with ease and elegance, and efficiently, we set him down as an adept in all the minutiæ of the art; if he does not, we conclude that he is a tyro. We confess our conclusions may be frequently wrong. That, reader, you may not long remain in the category of novices, let there be, during the fly-fishing season, for you, nulla dies sine lineâ.

I can see no wonderful difficulty in throwing a line well. Many certainly do not cast well, by reason, chiefly, of having adopted a bad method at the outset. It is better to have no fly-fishing habitude at all, than to have a bad one. Commence on the proper principle; persevere, and you must become a proficient.

HOW TO THROW THE LlNE AND FLIES.—You are a beginner, I presume, and have never handled a rod before. Let the rod for your novitiate be ten or eleven feet long; its play inclining rather to faulty stiffness than to over-pliancy. Put the joints or pieces together, the rings standing in a straight line the one to the other, that your line may run evenly between them without any tortuous impediment. Affix your winch or reel with its handle towards the left side, and draw out your line through the rings, until there be about four yards of it uncoiled beyond the last ring of the top joint. You have now quite sufficient line out to commence the practice of casting with it. Let your winch and the rings of your rod be on the under side of it when you practise casting.*

You are now ready to begin. Grasp your rod, in your right hand, a little above the winch, but not tightly. Your hand must not close firmly with the thumb turned over your knuckles, as if you were about to strike a blow. Your fingers must simply entwine the rod, not squeeze it, and your thumb must lie straight with your arm on the upper part of the butt, the first joint being very slightly bent, and the fleshy or flat fore-part pressing on the rod. Hold your rod up almost perpendicularly, and pointing rather to the left side. Take the tip of the line between the forefinger and thumb of your left hand. Poise your rod loosely and easily, and see that it balances freely in your right hand. Be devoid of that fear which begets awkwardness. What injury can you do? You are not going to explode a mine. You are merely going to throw a thin line with a slight limber rod upon the water. What if you fracture one or both in the attempt? The damage can be remedied.

I suppose you now on a bank above some river’s surface, all ready for your first cast. Move your right wrist and fore-arm round to the right, letting go, just as it begins to get taut, the tip of the line in your left fingers, and bring round from left to right over your right shoulder the upper part of your rod, describing with the point of it an irregular—a horse-shoe—circle, and then cast forward with a flinging motion of the wrist and fore-arm. The motion of the wrist must predominate over that of the fore-arm and elbow-joint. If you follow the above motions exactly and with freedom, from four to five feet of your line, supposing you to have between three and four yards of it out, must fall lightly upon the water. If that length does not so fall, you are wrong, and you must go on casting and casting, practising and practising, until you are right.

At first you will find, unless you are very handy and a very apt scholar indeed, that nearly all your line will fall upon the water, and that the top of your rod will come in contaet, or nearly so, with the surface of it. These are the greatest drawbacks to throwing a line well, and if not overcome, the learner must never expect to become an expert fly-fisher. With might and main he must struggle to vanquish them. They are caused by letting the fore-arm fall too low whilst casting, and bending the body forward in unison with the downward motion of the arm.

Here is the remedy. When you have made your casting movement—brought round your rod and line over the shoulder, and propelled them forwards, the motion of the wrist and elbow-joint must be gradually checked the instant the line is straightening itself in its onward course. The body must be upright, the chest held rather back, and the bust must not assume any marked forward or stooping position. You will find, if you hold your rod properly, that the end of it nearest to you, the part between your hand and the spear or spike, will come in contact with the under part of your fore-arm just as your line is approaching the water. This contact will prevent the point of your rod following the line so low as to cause a great part of the latter to roll on to the water. Stand with your left foot a little forward, and flat on the ground, with a firm purchase; the right foot a little behind, the toes turned out, and the ball of the foot touching the ground with a slight springy pressure. Your left upper arm must hang loosely by your side; the fore part curbed from the elbow-joint will bring your left hand over and opposite to the outer ends of the right lower ribs. Your position, the limbs, &c. arranged in the above way, will be easy and graceful, allowing free play to all the muscles required to be brought into action.

I deem you now sufficiently skilled by practice to throw four or five yards of line well, and with satisfactory ease. Double, then, the length of your line out. The right-arm motion must be no longer limited to the wrist, fore-arm, and elbow joint, but must extend to the upper and shoulder joint. The os humeri and deltoid muscle must be called into requisition with fine free vigour, but not with so much of the latter as if you were about to strike a knock-down blow. The whole of the arm must be brought round to the right with an easy, large sweep, and the line thrown forward well from the shoulder. There must be no coachman-like jerk with the wrist backwards, as the front portion of the line is descending to the water, but the hand must follow the rod, and stop by a well-timed degree of suddenness, so that the line will fall on the water with a somewhat quick—not plashing—rather than a lazy floating motion.

As soon as you can throw from eight to ten yards of your reel-line with the power of making not more than a yard or two of the front portion of it fall lightly on the water, and in whatsoever direction you may chcose, add to it what is called the ‘foot’ or ‘casting-line’ of moderately thick silkworm gut, in length about two yards. You will now have ten yards of line, more or less, to throw with, and you must practise until you can cause the gut-line to fall upon the water before any part of the reel-line touches it. Do not be in a hurry to put on flies and fish. When you have succeeded in throwing your gut-line with freedom, with the ability of making it alight first upon the water—when you can prevent the top of your rod from descending too low—when you can hinder any part of your reel-line from making a more rapid descent than your casting-line,—you may begin to throw from left to right, with a backward twist or slight sweep of the wist and arm. Hitherto you have been throwing from right to left, and that is the proper and most common way. But circumstances will arise, caused by the direction of the wind, your position with regard to the water, and obstructions on and in it, in