284 Rod and Tackle. QHAP. xx v 



of running line, but I have said in my last edition that I thought 120 

 yards to be ample, and longer experience has given me no reason for 

 lengthening my line. There may be singular occasions when a big 

 fish wants more than 120 yards, and you are not in a boat, so that you 

 can follow, or are hemmed in by forest, so that you cannot move after 

 him along the shore, and the home he is making for is far from where 

 you hooked him ; but such are very singular occasions I am satisfied. 

 Much of your enjoyment in fishing depends on having in your hands a 

 rod you can work with comfortable ease. The winch is not the least 

 part of the weight, and if you enlarge your reel, and double the length 

 and weight of your running line, fishing becomes a labour instead of a 

 pleasure. I do not see the wisdom of making all your sport a labour 

 for the possible chance of falling in with a fish that, in very exceptional 

 circumstances, might want a most exceptional amount of line. I would 

 rather fall out with such an exceptional character. I would rather 

 break my line with one such fish in a thousand, or, perhaps it would be 

 nearer the mark to say there is only one such fish in several thousands. 

 I would rather deliberately break with such a fish than take the cream 

 off all my sport with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine. I have 

 never had to do it yet. Of course I have been broken again and 

 again who has not ? but it has always been in the violent first rush, 

 never for want of running line, and I use, and commend to your use, a 

 winch holding 120 yards. That is to say, if you are a good fisherman, 

 and are pretty hard and quick on your fish, and especially if you have 

 a brake-winch to give you greater command. But if you part with your 

 line too freely you had better lengthen it to 150 yards. 



Will you consider for a moment ; a fish does not ordinarily set out 

 for the next county the moment he is hooked, his object on such 

 occasions is not foreign travel but his own village. He is frightened at 

 the novel feeling of restraint, exerts all his strength to rush from it, and 

 his object is to seek shelter in his home, which with the Mahseer, is 

 ordinarily the deepest part of the very pool in or near which you have 

 hooked him. He has left that shelter for the shallow, or the run, in 

 search of food, and only aims at returning to it ; or, perhaps, he has not 

 left it, and it is there you hooked him, and he has no definite ideas 

 of where lo go ; he just wants to make a short rush to shake off the 

 restraint, the thing that is holding him, and then he will return to his 

 home. 



