FISHING AT HOME AND ABROAD 



for railing, as it would, even with the boat going as slowly as possible, 

 need heavier leads than the rod should be made to carry. The best ground, 

 therefore, is in ten or fifteen fathoms of water and always over a rocky 

 bottom. Railing is, as a rule, quite useless over sand. Great care must 

 be taken to keep clear of the crab pots and their cork buoys, as these 

 generally lie thick on the best pollack ground, and if the hook gets foul 

 of the buoy line when the boat is going fast through the water, something 

 is almost certain to break, and it will not be the buoy line. Large pollack 

 are, moreover, quite equal to the advantage of dashing round the buoy 

 lines as soon as they are hooked. They must be restrained from such 

 tricks, as well as from their favourite tactics of diving headlong to the 

 bottom and fraying the gut collar against the rocks. There is, in fact, 

 only one manner of fighting a pollack, as a rule, and that is to bully it. 

 Not one fathom of line must be yielded, save under protest. This implies 

 perfect confidence in the tackle throughout its length, for, as the military 

 engineering textbooks say, the weakest point in the defence is the strong- 

 est. The pollack is most dangerous deep down among its native rocks. 

 Once clear of these, it gives up the struggle comparatively easily. The 

 counsel to keep the fish clear of the rocks needs passing modification in 

 view of an alternative policy, which used to be practised with great success 

 by a friend of mine on the big pollack of Bolt Tail, near Salcombe. He 

 used to scull out to the pollack grounds by himself and fish with light drift - 

 lines, and, so far from attempting to check the pollack's downward rush, 

 he would give the fish its head. His argument was that, with the fish well 

 hooked, these antics among the rocks mattered little so long as the line 

 was not tight enough to be severed by the mussels or limpets, and that, 

 after the first frenzied plunge, the pollack would generally allow itself to 

 be coaxed from its retreat and could then be handlined to the gaff. The 

 results certainly warranted this departure from the commoner practice, 

 but he had made a long and careful study of his own method and was 

 exceptionally clever at it. In ordinary cases, the pollack should undoubtedly 

 be coerced from the start. 



The Driftline. — ^The driftline is a deadly method of taking pollack, particu- 

 larly on the Cornish coast, where these fish run large anywhere between 

 five and ten miles from land. It differs entirely from the aforementioned 

 drifting for bass in Devonshire estuaries, for the boat is at anchor and no 

 lead is used. A single large hook is baited with half a pilchard, or with a long 

 strip of pilchard and another of mackerel, both showing the silvery skin, 

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