80 . FLY FISHING FOE TROUT. 



modern records. Stewart considered that a 

 good fisherman should average fifteen pounds 

 a day and a first-class one twenty pounds all 

 through the season. Twenty pounds means at 

 least forty fish in the waters Stewart fished, 

 and as everyone has many blank and bad days 

 an average of that number means formidable 

 baskets on the good ones. Stoddart says that 

 a good rod could take from twelve to thirty 

 dozen in a day and that a friend of his caught 

 two hundred and eighty fish in six or seven 

 hours. He adds that thirty pounds weight was 

 a good day on Tweed and few anglers attained 

 it. I can quite believe it. Henderson relates 

 how three rods on Coquet at Easter killed five 

 hundred and seventy-five trout in six days. 

 Younger's grandfather was reputed to have 

 killed thirty-six dozen in Kail water in one day 

 with the worm, and a nephew of Younger's 

 killed eighteen dozen in the same water with 

 fly. To come to more recent times, Hamilton 

 writing in 1884 says that he and another rod 

 took with the fly in one July day before two 

 o'clock in the Eamsbury water of the Kennet 

 forty fish, none under one pound, some between 

 two and three and three over three pounds. 

 Within my own day one hundred fish have been 

 taken with the dry fly on the Gade at Cassio- 

 bury. When I started fishing the Cumberland 

 Eden thirty years ago, a stone weight, say forty 

 fish, was a good day for a good rod, but not at 

 all uncommon. The doings of the redoubtable 



