56 SALMON AND TROUT. 



REELS AND REEL FASTENINGS. 



The Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 was prolific in new reels, 

 many of which, it must be confessed, were not only highly 

 ingenious as inventions, but really excellent in their adaptation 

 to different sorts of fishing. Indeed, if reels have not in the 

 matter of 'improvement' quite kept pace with the improve- 

 ments in rods, they are yet prodigiously in advance of the 

 unmechanical windlasses with which our forbears, in the not 

 very distant past, were content to reel in the victims of their 

 prowess. But I will not slay the slain twice over, or evoke, 

 merely for the purpose of exorcising them, the ghosts of 

 * Pirns,' ' winch-winders,' ' multipliers ' (horresco referens /) and 

 other similar abominations, which if not actually as extinct as 

 the dodo, soon will be. . . . 



Of modernised improved reels or winches that which 

 presented, perhaps, the greatest actual novelty was the ' Com- 

 bination Reel,' so called because uniting the qualifications of 

 a Nottingham reel and an ordinary plain or check reel. This 

 it did without, so far as I can judge, diminishing the effi- 

 ciency of either. Further speaking with due diffidence of a 

 speciality of fishing which I have had very little opportunity, 

 or perhaps taste, for acquiring it would appear to be vastly 

 superior to the old-fashioned open Nottingham reel, in that, 

 being confined to the barrel by transverse bars, the line can- 

 not be perpetually 'winding off' or I should say 'twisting 

 off' the reel when not wanted, and hitching its loose coils 

 round the reel itself and everything else in its vicinity. 



Nottingham fishing apart, however, the reel is of very 

 general applicability, and being exceptionally light, as well as 

 simple in construction, presents advantages in many directions. 



For all kinds of fishing, for example, in which the bait is 

 commonly, or occasionally ' cast from the reel,' it is excellent. 

 So also it is in some branches of fly-fishing, such as (to mention 

 one in which I have uscd.it with much satisfaction) in lake 



