168 TROUT FISHING 



almost always disappoints you by not coming up 

 to your expectations of its weight. 



One of my most grievous disappointments I have 

 related elsewhere. I marked a great trout feeding 

 in a portion of the Kennet and Avon canal, suc- 

 ceeded in getting him to take a dry Wickham, and 

 for several minutes was convinced that I had on 

 the fish of my dry-fly career. He proved indeed to 

 be about twenty-four inches long when at last I got 

 him out, but unfortunately he was one of the old 

 breed which has become dolefully familiar to me, 

 and instead of weighing a good seven pounds as 

 he should have, he only touched four and a half 

 pounds. In the water, of course, he seemed much 

 more than that owing to his great length, and as I 

 was using fine gut the fight was long enough to have 

 been put up by a six or seven-pounder. 



As a matter of fact I have only once caught a 

 bigger fish with dry fly, and that was at Blagdon, 

 so it could scarcely claim special honours. It was 

 satisfactory, however, as rewarding a real bit of 

 dry-fly work. I found the fish rising late in the 

 evening in the river at the Butcombe Bay end 

 (the lake was low that summer, so there was a good 

 deal of river in evidence), covered it with a sedge 

 just as if it had been a Kennet fish, and landed it 

 after a real hard fight, four and three-quarter 



