FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 

 live bait was much more deadly. Of course heavy pike are often taken 

 on a spinning bait, especially by trailing In the big, deep Irish and other 

 lakes, where live baiting Is rarely resorted to. I remember many years 

 ago discussing with Jardlne the best way to get the record Irish pike, 

 and he said he believed. In such a large expanse of deep water, generally 

 with a rocky bed, such as Lough Mask, a large, slowly-revolving, slowly 

 moving, natural dace, with some sort of phosphorescent or other luminous 

 attachment would be the best way, because there are few weeds as a rule 

 that you cannot see, and those chiefly in the bays where there is deep water 

 just outside them, and by slowly spinning round the sides in ten to twenty 

 feet of water he would expect to find his monster. He said he should con- 

 struct a special bait to spin slowly, and yet not sink too easily, to try on the 

 Shannon with a wire trace, as on some visit in the seventies he had had 

 his best gimp tackle smashed by enormous fish when fishing near Athlone. 

 He had seen and admired the splendid pike from Athlone which I had 

 had set up, which weighed full thirty-seven pounds some days after it was 

 caught, said to be caught by a local professional fisherman with rod and 

 line, but I could never get at the real facts, and am Inclined to think it 

 was caught in a net, or more particulars would have been forthcoming. 

 The dUBBculty about live -baiting in Ireland is to get the live bait, and 

 some English anglers have gone to the trouble of taking over a supply 

 of Thames dace, but I never heard that their success was sufficient to 

 lead them to repeat the experiment. Personally I would much rather 

 trust to a supply of preserved baits. I was going to say preserved in for- 

 malin, but I know some good pike anglers who seem to think formalin 

 repels pike at times; that a pike which has had hold of a dace, not long 

 out of a bottle with formalin preservative, does not come at it again so 

 readily. A salted bait, on the other hand, is decidedly attractive to fish 

 of prey, and it might be a good plan to wash the baits preserved in formalin 

 in salt and water and leave them over night with some salt sprinkled over 

 them. The beauty of formalin is that it keeps the dace, etc., bright, and 

 makes them tough, and does not shrivel them up, like salt, if left too long 

 in it. For spinning a large dace slowly with a wobbling spin I doubt if there 

 is any better tackle than that known as Storr's flight, after an old London 

 pike angler of that name who fished the New River reservoirs regularly 

 some thirty or forty years ago. It is simply a large strong triangle (varied 

 in size to suit the bait) on a length of gimp with a loop. With a baiting 

 needle the gimp is passed through the fish from the vent to the mouth 

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