10 DAYS AMONG THE PIKE AND PERCH 



thing from seventeen to thirty pounds can be set down as 

 a fair specimen, not often caught. 



Experts say that under favourable conditions pike grow 

 rapidly ; they have been known to weigh between four 

 and five pounds when only four years old ; and they also 

 say that next to a carp they are the longest lived of any 

 fresh-water fish, forty or fifty years being fixed as the 

 extreme limit. 



Some years ago the Anglers' News reported the taking 

 from a lake of a dead pike weighing sixty pounds. Dowdes- 

 well, near Cheltenham, was the place ; but as the result 

 of investigation this pike also must be added to the list 

 of the fabulous. The old Trent professional, Charlie 

 Hudson, who lived at Dunham and fished the Lower Trent 

 for well-nigh, if not quite, fifty years, and who was the 

 most likely man to know the biggest Trent pike that ever 

 came from those famous waters, assured me that, during 

 the long series of years he had fished with hundreds of 

 patrons, he had only a record of four pike that individually 

 exceeded twenty pounds. Strange as it may seem, the 

 very largest of all, a fish going twenty-seven and a half 

 pounds, was taken on a lobworm and leger, when breaming 

 in the hole under the very shadow of Newton cliffs, a 

 swim known locally as Dunham Dubbs. 



In an old volume of the Fishing Gazette dated November 

 22nd, 1879, Mr. Brougham, an old-time secretary of the 

 Thames Angling Preservation Society, contributed an 

 article on Mr. Jardine's big pike. He said that it weighed 

 on the club scales of the Piscatorial Society 34! Ibs., and 

 was an exact counterpart of the other 35 -pounder cap- 

 tured by Mr. Jardine two years previously. This ought 

 to settle the vexed question as to the exact weight of Mr. 

 Jardine's brace, as they have been growing during the 

 interim. 



In the same volume of the Fishing Gazette there is an 

 account of an interview with Mr. John Cooper, senior, the 

 very king of fish preservers, and he said a thirty-eight 



