CHAPTER IV 



MID-WATER FISHING 

 The Pike Spinning Trolling with the Dead Gorge Live Baiting, etc. 



THE PIKE (Esox lucius) 



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* -^HE pike plays no little part in the literature of 

 angling ; indeed, he has even been deemed worthy 

 of a book to himself. Of course I cannot afford 

 to give to him more than a limited space, and must 

 treat him with infinitely more brevity than Mr. Cholmondeley 

 Pennell has done. But if the reader wants to know not only 

 the various methods of catching the pike, but all about him 

 including his birth, parentage, and education with the 

 history of his ancestors, etc., then I commend him to that 

 capital work, The Book of the Pike. 



Pike, under favourable circumstances, grow to almost 

 any size a freshwater fish could be supposed to attain, even 

 to hundreds of pounds. In this country they have rarely 

 been known to exceed eighty pounds, but Sir J. Hawkins 

 speaks, in his notes to the Complete Angler, of one caught at 

 Lillieshall Lime Works, in 1765, which weighed one hundred 

 and seventy pounds. (Book of the Pike, p. 15.) Even a 

 forty-pound fish, however, is not by any means " common 

 wares " nowadays. I have the head of one that size which 

 was sent me by my late friend, " The Old Bushman," but 

 that was killed in Sweden. The largest I ever killed was 

 twenty-two pounds and a half, though I have, I think, hooked 

 some of over that size, but it was when spinning, with the 

 old three or four triangle tackle, which is a very risky method 

 of taking large fish, and they invariably managed, after a 

 run or two, to discard the hooks. The story of the Mannheim 

 pike has so often been referred to that I feel bound not to 

 pass him by. Mr. Pennell took much pains to investigate 

 that story. The fish, when caught, was said to be two hundred 



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