WINDERMERE 69 



new day in May or early June. These are things 

 which must be experienced they leave impressions 

 which can never be translated. 



In night-trolling for trout it is rarely that one 

 is altogether unsuccessful, and every trout that is 

 taken is a trout indeed, the bigger fish constituting 

 a basket in themselves. The dawn-fishing for char 

 with plumbline is a much more uncertain pro- 

 cess, and the results are more in the nature of 

 extremes one usually gets no char at all or a 

 fair take. 



But for every enthusiast who fishes Windermere 

 for trout and char there are twenty whose prey are 

 pike or the bold-biting perch ; and if there were 

 no pike or perch in Windermere there would be 

 but little fishing in the queen of the lakes. These 

 two constitute the visitors' fishes, and to catch 

 pike needs but little skill, to catch perch needs no 

 skill at all. With the guidance of a boatman to 

 indicate the likely ground, it is no exaggeration to 

 say that a man who can wield a rod may expect 

 to bag ten or a dozen pike a day, or as many 

 dozen perch. The amount of pleasure to be de- 

 rived from the catch will greatly depend upon the 

 previous experience of the angler ; if he is ex- 

 perienced he may set down the fish as " small " ; 

 if a novice he will declare the basket a mag- 

 nificent one, and marvel at his skill. In the con- 

 templation of what he has actually accomplishedj 

 he will forget all the fish he knocked off the tackle 

 in his mad attempts to get them into the boat 

 will be deaf to the suppressed language of the 

 boatman that a fifteen pound pike should fall to a 

 fool who failed to land it, and that, too, when it 

 was hooked in two places. 



