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A DUFFER'S LUCK WITH SPINNING TACKLE.

BY STEPHEN GWYNN.

MANY people think they can fish because they have learnt to use a wet fly on small rivers and mountainy lakes in Ireland or Scotland. That was my case till-well, the age does not matter, but more than old enough to know a vast deal better. Put it that I had been fishing for more than thirty years off and on in Donegal and similar places before I condescended to try spinning. Worms for muddy water I knew and disliked; once when I did slay a splendid great white trout this way I felt a criminal. It was not a much happier moment when I first got a salmon with a prawn at Galway. But, to begin with, it is no credit to anybody to catch a salmon in Galway: nothing under four or five there is worth mentioning: to go on with, fishing the prawn as they do it there is not spinning; it is a branch of the art by itself and, as the Lydon family practise it, probably the deadliest of all. I would not trust the most experienced salmon with Michael Lydon and a Galway "shrimp." "If there is any little run of water at all, they musht take it," he said to me once, and he evidently believed it. Faithcatching is a surer thing than faith-healing. I think that was the day when I met Michael

back from the Cork Blackwater, where some ill-judging person had let him and his employer loose in July on Carysville, after the river had been only fly-fished all summer. They got close on ninety in a fortnight, "routing them out of old holes," said Michael. But neither the Lydons nor anybody else could make me enjoy prawn-fishing on that high walk at Galway, where you get a crick in your back stooping out over the swift water far away below you, and where there are so many salmon that it is an insult if you are not getting one every half-hour. My conversion to bait-fishing dates from a weekend on the Test just above Romsey. My host, so accomplished with the dry-fly that he scarcely troubled to practise his art, went off with his other guest after trout, and confided me to his old keeper, no fly-fisher, but a great performer with the minnow. What he put up was a huge prawn rigged as a spinner; and with a stout cast and lavish provision of lead, I splashed my way down half a mile of that lovely river. The sky was blue, the sun shining bright, the water like crystal, and heaven was witness how clumsily I got the thing out, when it did get out for we fished

coiling the line, and twice out of three times it stuck in brambles or rushes at my feet, Nothing in all my life has surprised me so much as the pull when a fish took in mid-stream, on one of the occasions when I got the bait across. I suppose these Test salmon know that their existence is precarious, for trout-fishers hate to see them there; and they may decide to offer up a victim once in a while. That was a ten-pound salmon and next morning first thing I caught a beautiful nineteen-pounder, and went back to London believing that this duffer's luck was a triumph of skill. I had not then learnt even the beginnings of my own incompetence.

That came a couple of years later when I was acquiring the rudiments of drill at Kilworth, near Fermoy. H. B., most hospitable of anglers, had a long stretch of the Blackwater, and there I first met one whose name seems likely to become almost as famous as Jock Scott's. I think the Studley fly is known by now to all fishing-tackle shops, and certainly on a river which he never fished-the Slaney-it has been introduced since his death, and is said to kill more fish than any other. But none of those whom I found using it ever heard of its inventor. J. T. Studley was, as he described himself in a book of memoirs,

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good to look at, and with great charm, he was much more than a mere slayer of birds and fishes. H. B.'s garden was a delightful thing, and Studley helped to make it. Yet this flower-lover set his mark more notably elsewhere. The most beautiful thing in that most beautiful of rivers was a limestone cliff just below where the Awbeg (Spenser's Mola) tumbles into the Blackwater. Studley got seed of flowers, plastered it through pellets of wet earth, did them up in little glass balls which would break on impact, and shelled the cliff-face with them from a catapult: and so to this day April and May see a great cataract of white arabis streaming down the inaccessible places. He had charming ways with birds, too, and went about the garden attended by robins: it was no compliment when they perched on his shoulder: but he was very proud when a shy chaffinch would eat from his hand. I do not think he caught as many fish as H. B., chiefly because he lacked our host's deadly perseverance: but partly perhaps because he almost always fished his own fly and no other. It is a crude modernist piece of colour: strident yellow over a blatant blue. Pennell apparently always fished the same kind of atrocity: whereas all flies originally designed by gamekeepers or professional fishermen, from the Jock Scott down, conform to some scheme of colouring which you will

a sporting nomad," and one of the most accomplished of his type: tall, astonishingly find in bird - life - peacock,

pheasant, duck, grouse, or snipe. I believe that is why Harry Smyth, H. B.'s head-keeper, never really liked the Studley, though he owned it was good for clear water in small sizes. But as fishermen, Harry and Studley admired each other. Both were stylists. According to Studley, Harry threw the best line he had ever seen. Yet neither of them would be bothered to turn to in summer and go routing fish out of old holes with prawn-and still less with worm. Harry once confided to me that he would as soon see the angler with him kill a fish as kill it himself, provided he was throwing well : but if the line went out in lumps, he hated to see a fish taking it. Well, there were days when he approved my fly-fishing with a kind of complacency, because when I came there I had no notion whatever how to throw a long line; but as for the spinning, I have heard of the patience of Job, but it was nothing to what Harry needed. The worst tangle which a beginner can evolve out of three flies and a trout cast is simplicity compared to what even a Silex can do to your running line. Yet anyhow I spared Harry something, for I had not even duffer's luck on that river, where I think I have most enjoyed fishing, yet certainly have been least lucky. Except slats, the only salmon that I ever got there with a bait was on a lovely May day after the

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with Harry, and I went down with a new and most attractive boy called Timmy. The fly was no good, but I had got some Galway prawns, and Timmy knew no more than I about them. I tried one down a stream, and at the very head of it struck a fish where I looked for none, but missed him: fished on and got another triumphantly. It was all we got, but when we came back to lunch, the two great masters had touched nothing: and then for the first time Timmy lifted up his voice and wailed, "Wasn't it the pity now we didn't get the two."

The lucid period when fishing in Ireland was still possible lasted till the spring of 1920, when I was down at Limerick and forgathered with a friend who said that he had leave to fish the Doonass water at Castleconnell, and would I come? I would indeed! "What about now?" he said. he said. We had an early lunch and drove to the lower end of the water, then in high flood. The boatmen put the cot about a third of the way across the river, where a group of rocks parts the stream and the water spreads in a long narrow fan-shaped race. They got the cot head up to where the rocks were though no rock showed, only the boil over them,—and the man with a pole up-stream held her while the one with a paddle in the stern kept her nose steady as she was gradually worked downstream. I stood up, gripping a thwart between my legs, for

it was not easy to keep balance the water made through the on that dancing water, and bushes. We began to fish, and fished out across the stream as the stream was less rapid with a heavy Devon. After here than it looked, I stuck in twenty minutes I was in a the bottom. Two casts later, salmon, and a fine one. They to my disgust, I had stuck poled the cot inshore at once, again, and said so, but the and kept telling me to hold man in the stern grinned. Fish him harder than I had ever it was, but not a fish that I seen a fish held : but the could get a move out of. He Japanese gut was nearly as swung heavily down-stream tostrong as a tennis racket's, and wards the island, and I picplainly if a salmon once got his tured him getting away down head in that welter of water, one of the little three-feet it would be impossible to stop gullies between the tangle of him. It took about ten min- thorn, and so I headed him utes to kill him, and he was towards the shore, little thinkthe biggest I had ever got ing-and not having been told twenty-three pounds: but the Colonel had promised that I should kill big fish, and insisted that it was not what he called big, and I must try again. We left "the Frenchman,” as that throw is called, and walked up-stream perhaps half a mile to the next fishing, where an island of some size breaks the river: about twothirds of the water goes roaring down a wide shallow beyond the island, but a deep swift rapid races in by the Clare bank. Between the two, above the island, is about half an acre of relatively calm water, where fish lie in a flood. the rapid, the waves were running fully two feet high, and the water's pace was tremendous: I did not know exactly how they got the cot across it, but they did. Meanwhile I had been instructed if I hooked a fish on no account to let him near the island, or he would go down one of the cuts which

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that the way to gaff him would be to get round the island on the outer side. At all events, there he hung in the water that poured down towards the rapid with growing momentum, and I held as hard as I could-but the rod was a treasure of a rod, split cane and beautiful, and not mine; and I could not risk breaking it. "You may let him down," said the headkeeper. I eased the strain a fraction, and then with an instant rush he was off into the rapid, and holding was impossible. We tried to follow, but it was too late: the end came when he broke the running line, which looked strong enough to hang a man. So went west the biggest bit of duffer's luck ever likely to come to me. The Colonel took the rod then, and below the island he hooked and in about five minutes killed a fish just under thirty pounds. We had

several days more clear in front of us to fish that water, and of course thought we should do great deeds. But in three days steady fishing neither of us, so far as I remember, got a pull with either fly or minnow. But faith had been wakened in me, and I was staying on the very edge of the Shannon just above the lax-weir which spans the top of the tideway, indicating by its name that the Danes established the salmon-trap when they founded and held the city of Limerick eleven centuries ago. It is free water here, and the bank is lined with trout anglers, but nobody tries for salmon except the snapnet fishers and the harlers in their cots. Yet I saw fish fish break within throwing distance, and tried a couple of times. Once again I saw one and ran for the rod and a small Devon. It was not easy fishing, for the place was full of rocks, and I had to get out perhaps fifty yards-not very hopefully. Then, blessed day, the line checked and the pull came. I "let a roar," and my sister came rushing down from the front of her little bungalow dwelling. My Younger Generation, then an invalid, could not rush, but sat up in her bathchair taking notice: while the gardener, a quiet God-fearing man, suddenly went berserk. He dashed across the lawn, with two dogs wildly careering and barking, and before I could say a word, tore the gaff off my shoulder. I had been hold

ing hard and the fish was now close in, actually over the flooded bank: a small one, and quite possibly a slat, so I called to this volunteer that he should wait. But with one wild swoop he struck at the shoulder which was showing, missed it, but caught the line in his swing and tore the minnow clean out. I suppose I said things, but the salmon was still floundering in a few inches of flood-water, and a second swoop was more successful: with a wild screech, he flung it far up the bank. Fishing regulations used to be drastically enforced on the Shannon, and I was greatly relieved when it turned out to be a clean little ten-pounder. After that, I decided to buy a spinning reel, for I had visions of myself coming down and throwing half across the Shannon and catching not ten but forty-pounders in that free water. There was no Silex to be had at that moment, and I was overpersuaded into buying something else. It looked all right, and next February I produced it for Harry Smyth's opinion on H. B.'s water. He suggested that I should try a few casts with it in the field, before risking complications in the river-bed. Results justified his scepticism. "It's a good reel," he said, "but you would need to be very knacky to fish with it." I was not knacky, let alone very knacky; and when I started to fish, the first cast went badly wrong. I was get

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