SALMON FISHING WITH THE FLY. 181 



sea lice is a certain sign of a new-run salmon : these parasites 

 die after being twenty-four hours in fresh water.) I also re- 

 member, when fishing in the Galway river, in Ireland, in the 

 spring months, where from twenty to thirty salmon were killed 

 daily with rod and line, nine out of ten had sea lice on them. 

 The fish congregated in the stream below the weir in thou- 

 sands, and, although they had only been a short time in fresh 

 water, they did not seem to care much about feeding. 1 



To account for this satisfactorily is impossible, but it may 

 be reasonable to assume that for the first few hours after a 

 salmon has left salt water, where he has been in the habit of 

 feeding voraciously, his appetite does not leave him : but 

 eventually the absence of the food he has been accustomed to 

 will make him sulky and disinclined to feed. He is in such 

 good condition that he can afford to abstain for a while ; but he 

 will sooner or later be obliged to feed to maintain his strength, 

 in order to enable him to reach his spawning ground. It is not 

 to be supposed he can exist on water, and we know that at 

 times he takes a fly or bait greedily, particularly after a ' fresh,' 

 when he shifts his quarters up stream. He will then take the 

 first fly he sees ; but when once he is lodged it is generally 

 difficult to get a rise out of him. 



There is a certain time of year when salmon are less 

 inclined to feed than at any other period this is generally 

 from about the middle of July to the middle of September. 

 The temperature of the water and fef the atmosphere is then 

 higher than at any other time, and this has doubtless a great 



1 The most extraordinary thing is the difference in the. habits of salmon in 

 different rivers. In the Spey, for instance, in Scotland, fish rise most freely, and 

 as freely take the fly, almost in the tide- way, which comes up but a short distance. 

 In the Wye, where the tide runs ten miles up, the fish do not take freely till 

 they have run up seventy miles. Does this result from the fact that the Spey 

 fish are never in muddy water? the sea and river being quite clear and the 

 bottom pebbly, whereas the fish come twenty miles up the muddy Severn 

 and then have ten or more miles of muddy Wye besides to run up before they 

 get to clean water. This may make them so sick that they do not recover 

 before reaching the Hay in Breconshire, and only above that, seventy miles from 

 Ihe mouth, do they take freely. BEAUFORT. 



