FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 

 When I was a schoolboy and first read Walton (when I was supposed 

 to be doing that blessed Anabasis of Zenophon or some other holy terror 

 of boyhood) nothing impressed me much more than Walton's account 

 of fishing a fly under water for roach. He says: 



" In many of the hot months roach may also be caught thus: 



Take a mayfly, or ant fly, sink him with a little lead to the bottom 



near to piles or posts of a bridge, or near to any posts of a weir, I mean 



any deep place where roaches lie quietly, then pull your fly up very 



leisurely, and usually a roach will follow your bait to the very top of 



the water, and gaze at it there, and run at it and take it, lest the fly 



should fly away from him. I have seen this done at Windsor and 



Henley -bridge, and great store of roach taken, and sometimes a dace 



or chub." 



The very first time I tried this — ^it was on the River Lea in the old river, 



near Tottenham, one hot summer day in the sixties — ^I saw a big roach 



follow the house-fly or some other fly I had put on, and gaze at it, just as 



Walton describes, but some movement of mine scared him; afterwards 



I had many a roach in that way. In Walton's time doubtless the mayfly 



appeared in great numbers all along the Lea valley, now it gets scarcer 



every year in the upper parts, and has long been extinct in the lower. 



It means an immense loss of food — particularly for weeks before the fly 



appears, when it is crawling in millions on the bottom, and all the fish 



fed on it. 



THE SHEFFIELD AND BOSTON STYLE OF FLOAT FISHING 



The Sheffield style of float flshing for roach and other flsh may be de- 

 scribed as the opposite to the Lea style. In the latter the angler uses a long 

 cane rod, perhaps twenty feet long, and flshes a short line, secured to 

 the rod itself with no reel — ^much as in Walton's time; in the Sheffield 

 style — ^which has only come into much more than local use within the 

 last fifteen or twenty years — ^the angler uses a short rod and a long line 

 and a reel. The reel line is extremely fine undressed silk, but wonderfully 

 strong. The float is just a tiny slender quill, three to four inches long or 

 80, on a short length of fine gut and a single small roach hook, with one 

 or two small shot just enough to cock the little float, made of a quill from 

 the wing of a crow, not much bigger than a tooth pick. The favourite bait 

 is a single gentle, but any kind of bait which will stick on when cast with 

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