MORNING.
Hal.—Well met, my friends! It is a fine warm morning, there is a fresh breeze, the river is in excellent order for fishing, and I trust our good behaviour yesterday will ensure us sport to-day. There must be a great many fresh run fish in the pool; and after twenty-four hours’ rest, some of those that were indisposed to take on Saturday evening, may have acquired appetite. Prepare your tackle, and begin: but whilst you are preparing, I will mention a circumstance which every accomplished fly fisher ought to know. You changed your flies on Saturday with the change of weather, putting the dark flies on for the bright gleams of the sun, and the gaudy flies when the dark clouds appeared: now, I will tell you of another principle, which it is as necessary to know as the change of flies for change of weather; I allude to the different kinds of fly to be used in particular pools, and even for particular parts of pools. You have fished in this deep pool; and if you were to change it for a shallower one, such as that above, it would be proper to use smaller flies of the same colour; and in a pool still deeper, larger flies; likewise in the rough rapid at the top, a larger fly may be used than below at the tail of the water: and in the Tweed or Tay, I have often changed my fly thrice in the same pool, and sometimes with success—using three different flies for the top, middle, and bottom. I remember, that when I first saw Lord Somerville adopt this fashion, I thought there was fancy in it; but experience soon proved to me how accomplished a salmon fisher was my excellent and lamented friend, and I adopted the lesson he taught me, and with good results, in all bright waters.
Poiet.—I will try the correctness of your principle. Look at the fly now on my line; where would you recommend me to cast it?
Hal.—It is a large gaudy fly, and is fit for no part of this pool, except the extremely rough head of the torrent: there I dare say it will take in this state of the waters.
Poiet.—Good, I hooked a large fish, but alas! he is off: Yet I thought he was fairly caught.
Hal.—The hook, I think, turned round at the moment you struck, and carried off some scales from the outside of his mouth.
Poiet.—You are right: see, the scales are on the hook. I cannot raise another fish: I have tried almost all over the pool. I thought I saw a fish rise at the tail of the rapid.
Hal.—You did: he refused the fly. Now put on a fly one third of the size and of the same colour, and I think you will hook that fish.
Poiet.—I have done so—and he is fast; and a fine fish; I think a salmon.
Hal.—It is a salmon, and one above 10lbs. Play him with care, and do not let him run into the rough part of the stream, where the large stones are.
Poiet.—It is, I think, the most active fish I have yet played with. See how high he leaps! He is making for the sea.
Hal.—Hold him tight, or you will lose him.
Poiet.—Fear me not. I trust, in spite of his strength, I shall turn him. You see, I show him the but of the rod, and his force is counterpoised by a very long lever.
Hal.—You do well. But he has made a violent spring, and, I fear, is off.
Poiet.—He is!—but not, I think, by any fault of mine: he has carried off something.
Hal.—You played that fish so well, that I am angry at his loss: either the hook, link, or line, failed you.
Poiet.—It is the hook, which you see is broken, and not merely at the barb, but likewise in the shank. What a fool I was ever to use one of these London or Birmingham made hooks.
Hal.—The thing has happened to me often. I now never use any hooks for salmon fishing, except those which I am sure have been made by O’Shaughnessy, of Limerick; for even those made in Dublin, though they seldom break, yet they now and then bend; and the English hooks, made of cast steel in imitation of Irish ones, are the worst of all. There is a fly nearly of the same colour as that which is destroyed; and I can tell you, that I saw it made at Limerick by O’Shaughnessy himself, and tied on one of his own hooks. Should you catch with it a fish even of 30lbs. I will answer for its strength and temper: it will neither break nor bend.
Poiet.—Whilst I am attaching your present, so kindly made, to my line, pray tell me how these hooks are made, for I know you interested yourself in this subject when at Limerick.
Hal.—Most willingly. I have even made a hook, which, though a little inferior in form, in other respects, I think, I could boast as equal to the Limerick ones. The first requisite in hook-making is to find good malleable iron of the softest and purest kind—such as is procured from the nails of old horse-shoes. This must be converted by cementation with charcoal into good soft steel, and that into bars or wires of different thickness for different sized hooks, and then annealed. For the larger hooks, the bars must be made in such a form as to admit of cutting the barbs; and each piece, which serves for two hooks, is larger at the ends, so that the bar appears in the form of a double pointed spear, three, four, or five inches long: the bars for the finer hooks are somewhat flattened. The artist works with two files, one finer than the other for giving the point and polishing the hook, and he begins by making the barb, taking care not to cut too deep, and filing on a piece of hard wood, such as box wood, with a dent to receive the bar, made by the edge of the file. The barb being made, the shank is thinned and flattened, and the polishing file applied to it; and by a turn of the wrist round a circular pincers, the necessary degree of curvature is given to it. The hook is then cut from the bar, heated red hot, by being kept for a moment in a charcoal fire; then plunged, while hot, into cold water; then tempered, by being put on iron, that has been heated in the same fire till it becomes a bright blue, and, whilst still hot, it is immersed in candle-grease, where it gains a black colour; it is then finished.
Phys.—Nothing seems simpler than this process. Surely London might furnish manufacturers for so easy a manipulation; and I should think one of our friends, who is so admirable a cutler, might even improve upon the Irish process; at least the tempering might be more scientifically arranged; for instance, by the thermometer, and a bath of fusible metal, the temperature at which steel becomes blue being 580° Fahrenheit, might be constantly preserved.
Hal.—Habit teaches our Irish artists this point with sufficient precision. We should have such hooks in England, but the object of the fishing tackle makers is to obtain them cheap, and most of their hooks are made to sell, and good hooks cannot be sold but at a good price.
Poiet.—I have heard formerly a good angler complain, that the Limerick hooks were too heavy and clumsy. He preferred hooks made at Kendal in Cumberland.
Hal.—I saw, twenty years ago, hooks far too heavy made at Limerick; but this O’Shaughnessy is, I think, a better maker than his father was, and the curve and the general form of the hook is improved. It has now, I think, nearly the best form of a curve for catching and holding, the point protruding a little. The Kendal hook holds well, but is not so readily fixed by the pull in the mouth of the fish. The early Fellows of the Royal Society, who attended to all the useful and common arts, even improved fish hooks; and Prince Rupert, an active member of that illustrious body, taught the art of tempering hooks to a person of the name of Kirby; under whose name, for more than a century, very good hooks were sold. I shall take a walk towards the lake to enjoy a view of its cloud-capped mountains, and I hope to find, on my return, that you have all had your satisfaction in a good day’s salmon fishing.
Phys.—We shall crimp and cool a salmon, if we catch a good one, for our dinner.
Hal.—Do so.
Orn.—But before you leave us, I wish you would be good enough to inform us why the salmon here are so different from those I have seen elsewhere: for instance, some caught in the Alness, in Rosshire, which we saw in passing round the south coast of Ross. These appear to me thicker and brighter fish, and one that I measured was 30 inches long, and 17 in circumference.
Hal.—I think I have seen broader fish than even those of this river; but the salmon which you happen to remember for comparison, belonged to a small stream, which, I think, in general, are thinner and longer than those in great rivers; and what I mentioned on a former occasion with respect to trout holds good likewise with regard to salmon; each river has a distinct kind. It is scarcely possible to doubt, that the varieties of the salmon, which haunt the sea, come to the same rivers to breed in which they were born, or where they have spawned before. And this could hardly happen unless they confined their migrations to a certain space in the sea, the boundaries of which may be regarded as the shore and probably deep water, which may be considered as effectual a limit almost as land; for fish do not willingly haunt very deep water, which even in summer is of low temperature, approaching to 40°, and contains little or no vegetable food or insects, which the smaller fishes search for, and the larger fishes follow the smaller. It is however possible, that in winter, all fish fond of heat will seek water rather deeper than in summer; and char and umbla in lakes are usually found in the deepest parts, being fond of cool water, and they come to spawn whenever the shallow water of the lakes becomes cool, in October or November. We cannot judge of the senses of animals that breathe water,—that separate air from water by their gills; but it seems probable, that, as the quality of the water is connected with their life and health, they must be exquisitely sensible to changes in water, and must have similar relations to it, that an animal with the most delicate nasal organs has to air. A vulture or a dog scents not only particular food and particular game at great distances, but even makes of the smell a kind of language; and I doubt not, that when dogs, that have been blindfolded and carried away from their home, return to it, it is by the sense of smelling: to them each town, lane, or field, must have a particular scent. And I have seen even a blind horse, an animal in which the sense of smelling is less acute, evidently find his way by it to his master’s house and stable, which was, indeed, near a tan-yard. The state of parts of water, in the sea or great lakes, produced by the impregnations carried down by particular streams, is much more permanent than a like state in air: so that though the knowledge given by the nasal organs may be more easily communicated at a distance by winds, yet that produced by streams on the bronchiæ of fishes is more invariable, and a migratory fish is less likely to be deceived. Yet in great floods, often connected with storms, or violent motion in the waters near the shore, salmon sometimes mistake their river. I remember in this way, owing to a tremendous flood, catching with the fly a large salmon, that had mistaken his river, having come into the Bush, near the Giant’s Causeway, instead of the Bann. No fish can be more distinct in the same species than the fish of these two rivers, their length to their girth being nearly in a ratio of 20:9 and 20:13.—I am going; good sport to you.