170 Thirty-ninth Amuial Meeting 



to decline. Once a seining shore on the Potomac was worth 

 thousands of dollars, but the seines now cut out earlier each 

 year, and the business l)econies more precarious and less 

 profitable all the time. 



When the spring is l)ack\vard, the weather cold and dark, 

 the fish ascend the river in the channel, ten fathoms deep, 

 and only come out over the netting grounds and gravel beds 

 when the water is warm and the weather bright ; but when 

 the school makes its iirst excursion to the shallows it 

 encounters a stake net, a seine, a fyke, or a drift; and these 

 miles and miles of nets shut the fish from the upper river, 

 while the nets in the bay even dam them from the river, so 

 that this year's entire catch in the river was less than a quar- 

 ter million, not one per head for W'ashington alone. 



But the sturgeon, herring, and shad are not the only fish 

 for which the Potomac was early famous. In "Superior 

 Fishing," printed in 1865, in the chapter on striped bass, 

 occurs the following : 



Fly fishing for Bass, however, is the perfection of the sport, and infi- 

 nitely surpasses in excitement all other modes of killing these noble fish. 

 The best season on the Potomac is in July or August, and the favorite 

 hours the early morning or the twilight of the evening. The ignorant 

 and debased natives who inhabit the romantic region of hill and valley 

 in the neighborhood of Tenally Town, about five miles northwest of 

 Washington, and who, dead to the beauties that nature has lavished 

 around them, and utterly unacquainted with scientific angling, look 

 merely to tlieir two cents per pound for striped bass; manufacture a fly 

 by winding red or yellow flannel round the shank of a large hook, adding 

 sometimes a few white feathers. They substitute for a rod a young- 

 cedar sapling, denuded of bark and seasoned by age, and attaching to 

 the upper end a stout cord, fish with the large flannel-swathed hook in 

 the rapids and below the falls of the Potomac, at the old Chain Bridge, 

 and without a reel kill bass of twenty or thirty pounds. 



No spot can be imagined more wild and romantic, and with proper 

 tackle, the reel, the lithe salmon rod, and the artistic fly — no sport can 

 l)e more exciting. The roar of tlie angry flood, the l)are precipices 

 topped with foliage on tlie opposite bank, the flat, dry bed of the stream 

 wliere it flows during the heavy freshets, but at other seasons a mass of 

 bare, jagged rocks, and the dashing spray of the broken current lend a 

 charm to the scene, while the fish, rendered doubly powerful by the force 

 of the stream, and aided by the numerous rocks and falls, have every 

 chance to escape. 



