FISHING STILL WATER 



A small wet fly slowly drawn well below the sur- 

 face using a very fine leader got rises almost at 

 once. That afternoon and the following day we 

 took fourteen fish in this way from this pool. The 

 largest was forty-two inches long, and weighed 

 twenty-one and one-half pounds. He was taken 

 on one of my regular salmon dry-fly leaders, the 

 gut ending in .010-inch diameter to which was 

 added a nine-foot Hardy dry-fly trout leader with 

 / gut .008-inch diameter. The salmon took the fly 

 with a leap about six feet long and two feet out of 

 water and came down on the fly just below the 

 surface. He must have seen it a long way off. 

 The fly was a No. 10 Wilkinson. Many of these 

 fish will jump for the fly, but most of them suck 

 it in just below the surface, showing their back fin 

 as they do it. An old French guide with us told me 

 he had been forty years on the river and had never 

 before seen any fish taken in such still water. 

 This would seem to indicate that this method of 

 fishing was new to the river. I came back feeling 

 that I could always get plenty of salmon if I could 

 only find a good number of them in a still pool. 



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