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General information on Fishing Hooks, Tackle and Gear for fishermen and women.
Fishing Hooks, Tackle and Fishing Gear 'Ars est celare artem.' The saying goes 'A good workman never finds fault with his tools,' but if by this it be meant that he can work as well with bad tools as with good, or produce equally satisfactory results, then it says little for the sagacity of those who made the proverb. It is specially in the more artistic descriptions of work that the importance of good tools is apparent. The flyfisher is a workman in a highly artistic school, and, if he is to do his work thoroughly well, his tools, that is, his tackle rods, hooks, lines, &c. &c. Must be of the very best. There are still some 'happy hunting grounds' scattered throughout the British Islands on which ' the shadow of the rod or glitter of the bait' has but seldom fallen, small mountain lochs and moorland streams wherein fish are so guileless and simple in their habits that they will rise with delightful confidingness at the most rudimentary specimen of the artificial fly, offered to them in the least attractive manner. Such spots I have met with where it took weeks to impress upon its trout the melancholy fact that ' men were deceivers ever,' and where day after day the veriest bungler raight fill his creel, and, format matter, his pockets and his wading boots, with the unsuspecting fario, which came up gaily to his flies, three or four at a time, in blissful ignorance and apparently undiminished numbers. Such spots, however, are becoming rarer year by year. Even the most sequestered waters are now sought after, and generally found out, by the indefatigable tourist or the lessees of the sporting rights ; and the inhabitants of such waters, however unwilling to be taught, are receiving the benefits of a sort of ' compulsory education ' that is gradually opening their eyes to several little things going on in the wicked world around, with which it is to their advantage to be acquainted. There are, of course, and probably always will be, degrees of advancement in ' trout knowledge.' The streams of Scotland and Ireland can never, in our time at least, be fished to the same extent as those of England, and especially of our southern counties. And it is very fortunate that it should be so, for many a man whose trout-fishing experience has been attained principally amongst the Scotch and Irish lakes and rivers, and who, not unnaturally, perhaps, considers himself a highly artistic performer, would be literally ' nowhere ' if suddenly transferred with the same tackle and mode of fishing to the banks of the Itchen, the Test, or the Driffield Beck. Instead of finding comparatively few trout and those under-fed, and predisposed to at least regard his lure with a friendly eye, he would see a water literally teeming with pampered and, therefore, highly fastidious, fish, whom his first appearance on the bank sent flying in a dozen different directions, and who, when his saturated nondescript did happen to pass over their noses, moved not a responsive muscle, and by their attitude conveyed the general idea of what the late Lord Randolph Churchill would have called ineradicable superciliousness. . . . But these are the products of ' centuries of civilisation,' and the ultimate outcome of the theory of the survival of the fittest. In regard to salmon as well as trout the principle of the Higher education also holds good, although not quite in the same degree as in the extreme cases above referred to, inasmuch as such abodes of bliss in regard to salmon have unfortunately long ceased to exist either in the British Islands or anywhere else within comfortable travelling range of Charing Cross. Every year the rent of a salmon river goes up ; already it is but little less than that of a grouse moor, and what it may eventually come to, if we are not all ruined in the meantime, doth not yet appear. Naturally, those who pay so dearly for their mile or halfmile of salmon water make up their minds to get the utmost they can out of it in the way of sport. The pools are assiduously fished whenever the water is in ' possible ' condition, and sometimes perhaps when its condition is ' impossible/ Often they are fished over two or three times a day ; and the consequence is that, at any rate after having been in the fresh water for some little time, and successfully resisted the first seductions thrown in his way, the salmon becomes mu~h more shy and wary, and untemptable by fly or bait unless presented in the most enticing fashion. To this end the refinement of every part of the fishing gear is one of the principal, indeed, the chief means. Like his ' star-stoled ' cousin of the chalk streams, he scrutinises with a practised glance the object which is glittering before his eyes ; and, however attractive may be the lure, if the ' line of invitation,' as some one calls it, with which it is presented be coarse or clumsy, or of flattened and, therefore, non-transparent gut, it is ten to one that he will ' decline with thanks.' In short, as 'fine and far off' might betaken, in the case of the trout fisher, as the password to success, so * neatness and strength ' should be the shibboleth of the salmon fisher. I make no apology, therefore, for dwelling in some detail upon each item of the fly-fisher's equipment, and more especially on that which constitutes the alpha and omega of the whole matter, namely, THE HOOK. Fishing Hooks Fish-hooks, as they have come down to us from antiquity, and are represented in bone or bronze in our museums and collections, appear to have been steadily improving from century to century, until in our own day the art of hookmanufacture, per se, may be considered to have reached perfection and no further advance in this direction is to be expected. Apart, however, from mere excellence of material and workmanship, the time is now apparently ripe for a sweeping change, a change not of detail but of principle : the principle that is, of constructing the hook with a metal eye or loop at the end of the shank, by which the line is attached (knotted on) direct to the hook itself^ instead of by the old-fashioned process of gut lappings or gut loops. Consequently hook-making maybe regarded to this extent as at present in a transition state ; and the angling world the trout angler especially is equally passing through a sort of interregnum between the old system and the new. The realisation and completion of the eyed-hook principle was sure to come sooner or later, for an age which is * nothing if not mechanical ' could not but in the end rebel against the crude and unscientific method of attachment bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and adopted with scarcely a protest by generation after generation of succeeding anglers. The eyedhook system was, in fact, the one great perfectionment in flyfishing that yet remained in spite of previous incomplete or partially successful attempts practically unaccomplished ; and recognising the magnitude of the task, as well as the importance of its achievement, if achieved, I have for some years past thrown all my energies into the attempt, with results which so far promise to exceed my expectations. The idea itself, of some sort of plan of attachment direct to the line by means of metal eyes or loops forming part of the hook, is by no means new. Mr. H. S. Hall, whose charming contributions to these pages will be read with interest by all dry fly-fishers, was my immediate predecessor and pioneer on the somewhat thorny, though by no means untrodden, track. Still earlier both during the century just ended and before the great advantages of attaching the hook direct to the line have been recognised by writers on angling and hookmakers. But when I say that the idea yet remained to be perfected, I mean that however ingenious or admirable in themselves in different ways all previous attempts have failed in the one essential particular of actually solving the problem ; of solving it, that is, by such a combination of eyed-hooks and knotattachments as to overcome all difficulties, and bring the system into general use. The 'system,' in fact, had to be complete at all points. The most perfect eye was foredoomed to failure without the appropriate knot, and similarly a faultless knot was practically worthless without its complementary metal loop. This ' loop ' might, theoretically, be either turned upwards or downwards, or be ' needle-eyed ' that is, drilled through the end of the hook-shank like the eye of a needle ; and in the first issue of these volumes each system was fully discussed, with the arguments pro and con. At present, however, if we accept the tackle makers as feeling the pulse of the angling world, it would appear that the arguments adduced, or other causes, have so far influenced public opinion that firstly eyed hooks are rapidly coming into general use (especially amongst trout-fishers) ; and secondly that my own patterns of hooks with the eyes turned down practically hold the field. I shall therefore, in the present edition, omit as far as may be reference to argumentative or controversial matters, now possessing little beyond an ' academical ' interest, and limit the scope of the following pages to explaining my own Eyed-hook system in its most recent development, as applicable both to salmon and trout flies.
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