I 8 THE ROACH. 



weighted and balanced when in use to a nicety. I men- 

 tioned a little while ago that a good porcupine quill was as 

 good as anything that could be used in these deep- still 

 waters, and I still stick to that opinion. If the water is 

 infested with huge quantities of small bleak that swimi in 

 shoals near the surface, it will be necessary to use a float 

 somewhat larger than can be used where the water is not so 

 infested. There are swims in the river Ouse and kindred 

 sluggish waters, that get full of bleak within an hour of 

 throwing in the groundbait, and if the float is very liglit and 

 the bait sinks very slowly the bleak attack it and spoil its 

 attractiveness long before it reaches the roach at the bottom- 

 Under these circumstances, in any very still water that con- 

 tains a lot of those small fish, it is as well to adopt two rules : 

 one is, use gentles as a hook bait as little as possible, rather 

 pin your faith on boiled wheat; paste is nearly as bad as 

 gentles; and, secondly, use a float some sizes bigger than 

 the first sight of the swim warrants. I find a fairly stout 

 porcupine quill, nine or ten inches long, and capable of 

 carrying some half-dozen medium-sized split shots to be 

 about the thing for this purpose. This weight on the gut 

 line causes the bait to sink rapidly in bleak-infested swims, 

 and gives you a much better chance with the roach below. 

 Small red worms on a hook are worse in this respect than 

 gentles and paste. The hungry little fish will bite and pull 

 them all to rags, and torment you to no end. Some anglers 

 may say : " Oh, you can easily get rid of the bleak by throw- 

 ing some dry bran on the water ; they follow it down stream 

 and out of reach." But supposing there is no stream, then 

 the remedy will be worse than the complaint; besides, 

 where you keep throwing ground bait in the bleak will come, 

 and I find that a fair-sized float, if properly weighted, and 

 the sinkers or shots put at the proper distance from the 

 hook and from each other, is not detrimental to good sport. 

 Of course if the water operated on contains no bleak, or, 

 at least, very few, then the float may be a size or two smaller, 

 say one carrying about four split shots of a medium size. I 

 must again imipress upon the young angler that the remarks 

 contained in this chapter relate to deep still water fishing for 

 roach, and must not be confounded with stream, or even- 



