THE SALMON ANGLER'S OUTFIT 



made of greenheart throughout. In pronouncing this opinion I do not 

 wish to decry the split -cane rods with steel core, a comparatively 

 recent innovation of American origin, but now regularly manufactured 

 by British makers. They are beautifully finished articles, but I have 

 never been able to detect their superiority in performance to good 

 greenheart in any single respect, and consequently fail to see the merit 

 of paying three or four times the price of a greenheart for the more 

 elaborate weapon.* 



Of late years opinion has veered in favour of shorter rods than were 

 wielded by our salmon -fishing sires. I was brought up to consider 18 ft. as 

 the regulation length, and continued for many years to suffer unnecessary 

 fatigue in consequence. Francis Francis, writing in the 'sixties, prescribes 

 a rod 16J to 17J ft. long "for a man of short stature and not too robust 

 frame; for a man of moderate capacity, from 17 to 18J ft., or a little more; 

 for a tall, strong man, from 18 or 18^ ft. to 20 or even 21 ft. I have known 

 as much as 22 ft. used."t He adds a story sufficiently terrifying to scare 

 some people off salmon fishing altogether, to wit, that the Master of Lovat 

 of that day used to wield a rod of 24 ft. in the Beauly ! 



Now I learnt as a youngster more about angling in general from Francis's 

 pages than I ever did from any other book, except Stewart's "Practical 

 Angler." Francis fished in many waters, rambling north and south, east 

 and west, hospitably received in many a lodge, gossiping incessantly and 

 picking up yarns and miscellaneous information, much of it highly worth 

 remembering. But there is only one way of accounting for an experienced 

 fisher like himself prescribing such immoderate length in salmon-rods, 

 namely, that the weight was distributed differently in the days of ash 

 and hickory from what it is in the modern weapon of greenheart. There is 

 now far more weight put into the upper joints than formerly, enabling the 

 angler to deliver a heavy plaited line in the teeth of a strong wind in a 

 manner impossible with the old-fashioned light-topped rod and silk-and- 

 hair reel -line. A 16 -ft. greenheart with powerful top may be backed to 

 lodge a fly at quite as great a distance as the older and longer rod could 

 accomplish. 



But there has come to pass another and most commendable innovation 

 through the invention of adhesive tape. It was always known and admitted 

 that, weight for weight and bulk for bulk, a rod with spliced joints was 



*It is different with trout-rods. For a single-handed trout-rod there is nothing to equal good split cane. 

 ti4 Book on Angling, p, 294. 



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