TROLLING SPOONS.
The writer is an old-fashioned fisherwoman and goes light with tackle. However, I have noticed that the simplicity of fishing tackle does not in the least interfere with luck. If you are going to fish with worm, hook, and sinker, you will need no advice. Perch, pickerel, black bass, cat-fish, and others to be caught in still fishing, will be your quarry. As a rule you will troll for pickerel and pike, and there is no sport more pleasant in the world than that which is to be had at the end of a trolling spoon: the motion of the boat, the vibration of the line, the spinning of the spoon, and then the sudden strike, with all its possibilities for taking in big fish. I defy anyone to have a more exciting time than netting a salmon from a trolling line and landing it successfully in a canoe. But this is not a thing to be attempted by the novice. Much better let the salmon go and save yourself a ducking.
The finest art of all fishing is fly-fishing. One either does or does not take to it naturally, after one has been taught something of the art by brother, father, or guide. Alas, that the fish greediness of campers is making good fly-fishing, even in the wilderness, more and more difficult to get! Personally, if I am after trout or salmon, “plugging” or “bating,” as it is called, seems to me an unpardonably coarse and stupid sport. Yet our lakes have been so abused by this process that fly-fishing is frequently impossible. To sit or stand in a canoe, casting your line, the canoe taking every flex of your wrist; to see the bright flies, Parmachenee Belle or Silver Doctor—or whatever fly suits that part of the country in which you are camping—alight on the surface as if gifted with veritable life, and then to be conscious of the rush, the strike, and to see a rainbow trout whirling off with your silken line, is to experience an incomparable pleasure. To have a strike while the twilight is coming on, a big fellow, with the line spinning off your reel as if it would never stop, to see your salmon leap into the air and strike the water, to reel him in, then plunge! and down, down he goes; to feel the twilight deepening as you try to get him in closer to the canoe again; to know suddenly that it is dark and that the hours are going by; to feel your wrist aching, your body tense with excitement; to think that you are just tiring him out, that you have almost got him—almost, then a rush, a plunge, the line slackens in your hand, and he is gone. That is fisherman’s luck, and great luck it is, even when the fish is lost.
ROD CASE.
FELT-LINED LEADER BOX.
CASE FOR TACKLE.