COARSE FISHING.*
THERE is room somewhere for a new magnum opus on fishing. For a quiet mind in these days there is too much talk of female olives. The science of the dry-fly fisherman, with all the accretions of dry-fly entomology, pages sesquipedalian with descriptions of ephetneridae, trichoptera, metamorphoses, imago and subimago, autopsies of defunct trout and grayling, stalks through the book-shelves like a cloud. Out of that science, doubtless, a great work may be made, perhaps has been made ; but it will be written for the disciple and the convert, not for men and anglers at large. A greater book will make a wider appeal ; and if it is to deal with fishing, it will not exclude from the author's purview all fish except grayling, trout, and salmon. It will begin where Walton began, with quiet streams, and rain and sunshine, and a plain-hearted man looking for sport where be can get it. It will begin, in fact, with what have come to be known as coarse fish, and it will deal with the best methods by which coarse fish have been caught, from Walton's day to the present time ; and it will give the reader, in addition, something of the pleasure which the author has found in angling for his fish in different places and different weathers. It will be a book which describes not merely the most scientific methods of approaching highly educated monsters and returning home at
• Coarse Fishing. By H. T. Sheringham. London: A. and C. Black. [3s. 6d. net.] night with an empty basket; but it will enlarge on the prospects which are before him who sees no humiliation in the names of roach, dace, carp, tench, perch, and pike, and who can get just as much pleasure out of a float and line and a grey river as out of the finest drawn gut and the clearest chalk stream.
In short, the great work, when it is written, will be conceived on something of the same scheme as Mr. H. T. Sheringham's book, Coarse Fishing, which has just been added by Messrs.
A. and C. Black to the well-known series of books on angling begun by the late W. Earl Hodgson. It will be of a somewhat larger scope, and it will be a product of much greater leisure, than Mr. Sheringham's, but the spirit running through it will be the same. Mr. Sheringham is one of the few authors of books on angling who writes as if he wished to deserve the name of a complete angler. He makes no apologies for his tastes. He knows much of trout and salmon,
as do certain of his friends, yet it is for another reason that he considers himself to be not perhaps a better angler, but at all events more an angler, than they. He finds more to fish for, he likes fishing for it, and he fishes in more ways and in more waters than they do. Fishing to him is still fishing, if the quarry be chub or bream; it is " the art of catching fish, and not only the art of deluding a three-pound trout with a dry fly, or of struggling with a fifteen-pound salmon in a roaring spring torrent." It is something larger and better ; it is still " the delightful medley of sensations that it was when Walton
took his eager way that fine fresh morning up Tottenham Hill."
And so, after that courageous opening, we turn over his pages to discover something of the medley as he sees it and feels it, and find ourselves on almost any page reading descrip- tions, hints, theories, and " tips " which are clearly the result of varied personal experience. Here, for instance, we come to a method which has proved successful with bream, shy feeders that are scared by the approach of a boat ; the way, their captor found, was to paddle quietly to a chosen pitch, throw in the ground bait as far as possible away from the boat, say twenty to twenty-five yards, and then wait for signs of feeding fish in the shape of small bubbles sent up by the bream nosing about in the mud. Then a lobworm under a big float with the necessary amount of lead was thrown to the right spot, " and it was strange if a bite did not soon follow." The line, you are warned, should be greased to make it float, or striking becomes a difficulty; some men possibly might find a difficulty in throwing a light bait twenty-five yards. But the beginner is given the descrip- tion of a particular personal experience; that is the important point. He comes to the same important knowledge with other fish caught by other methods. Spinning for perch with an inch-long aluminium minnow and a fly-rod is an attractive way of fishing " between whiles " on a day devoted in the main to chub. Experts talk much of traces, leads, and special rods, but there is no better gear, nor any more easily changed, than a minnow looped by the swivel to a fly cast. Nor is the actual spinning a long or complicated business. If there are no perch there, you will soon discover the fact, "because where perch are you will hardly fail to get one or more to follow a small spinning bait, though they may not take it." That is a short sentence with many days' fishing behind it. Here, again, we are looking at roach.
"Watch that shoal making up-stream. One large old fish leads. A dozen follow him in an uneasy troop ; then come three or four stragglers, then another troop, the main body this time, large and small in a bunch. All seem to be in an immense hurry to get somewhere. They are gone by, and behold three more, simply frantic at the idea of being left behind, and rushing for dear life after their fellows. In two minutes the shoal will return in the same manner."
Roach have been compared to sheep, and the comparison fits them fairly. Their habits are more easily studied than those of other fish—pike, for example. How often do big pike feed ? Not so often as small ones, Mr. Sheringham believes. Re thinks that when they do eat, they make a hearty meal and then digest it at leisure, like snakes. This would he at least a partial explanation of the fact that when a pike is hungry he will run at almost anything, and that when he is not be will be tempted by nothing that the angler can show him. But pike too, perhaps more than other fish, are affected by the weather. Mr. Sheringham's experience is that they
are peculiarly susceptible to atmospheric pressure ; he looks askance at a falling glass. This would seem to be contra• dictory to the theory accepted by more than one pike-fisher; that pike move well when there is thunder about. But pike arc ill fish to arg,ue about, and upset the most engaging theories.
There are few more attractive pages in this book than those on which Mr. Sheringham writes of fly-fishing, or of using a fly-rod, for the daintier or the bolder of " coarse " fish— dace, roach, chub, rudd. There is a zest which belongs only to the luck of angling in his account of an hour on one of the Broads at the head of the River Thurne, when he happened in paddling his boat to stop at the edge of a clear hole about six feet deep, and noticed that there were some large rudd cruising in and out of the weeds quite close to him. He picked up his fly-rod, put on a roach hook instead of the fly, and began to fish for them with paste. Within an hour he "bad in all five splendid battles, and the best five rudd I ever got in Norfolk at one time, from one and a half to two pounds." The rudd is one of our handsomest fish. "I shall never forget the gleam of the morning sun on their golden scales as they turned in the water and, later, lay on the floor of the boat."
Another scene from many memories is the capture of a large chub—a fish which has the meritorious habit of sailing about his pool and taking the bait in full view of the fisherman. "The fascination of stalking a big fish and watching the whole process as he takes your fly or frog is almost unmatched in the thrills of fishing. You get it sometimes in dry-fly fishing for chalk-stream trout, but in no other kind of fishing that I know, and the fact that the chub gives it you in full measure is enough to fix him for ever in your affection and esteem." Is not that the right enthusiasm ? But the greatest day of all—or as great, at least, as any—is the day of the big carp. Big carp are not to be fished for hopefully. A week, a month of solemn preparation is seemly when attempting the capture of big carp ; at the end of that time the fish, duly hooked at last, breaks the line, " and so home." But Mr. Sheringham caught his great one without preparation. It was in Cheshunt Reservoir, it weighed sixteen pounds, and the telling of the tale occupies ten pages. They are, perhaps, the best in a book which suggests a further field for the author's energies. It is a distant field, and it might take some time to come through to it. But there is a great book waiting to be written, and there are pages in Coarse Fishing which suggest, perhaps a little hastily and shadowily, the matter and the manner of the writing.
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