202 THE DRY-FLY MAN'S HANDBOOK 



weed, shakes out the hold of the hook, or escapes in 



some one of the many pos- 

 Hooked foul. sible ways, the beginner will 



often persuade himself that he 

 has lost the fish of the season. The old hand will 

 generally turn to his companion or gillie, and dismiss 

 the episode laconically with the casual remark, 

 "Hooked foul, I suppose." When the fish is landed 

 no doubt can exist on the subject, because the weight 

 on the spring-balance and the fact of having to extract 

 the hook from some part of its external anatomy con- 

 stitute conclusive evidence. 



In some cases the foul-hooked trout is beyond 

 doubt a victim to a turn of real bad luck, having had 

 no intention of taking the artificial fly, in fact never 

 having risen to it. Many years ago such a case 

 occurred to me on the Anton. A fish was rising in 

 the upper part of a run of water from an open hatch, 

 and quite at the lower end of this run, another fish 

 was feeding with its head buried in the weeds and its 

 tail well above the surface of the stream. The rising 

 trout came short, and as I struck, the other fish below 

 went off with a rush making the reel sing merrily. 

 On my landing the trout, one of about \\ lb., the 

 hook was well home in the adipose fin. 



I take it, however, that this was quite an exceptional 

 case, and that as a general rule a foul-hooked fish 

 is one which has risen to the fly and missed it, either 

 accidentally or intentionally. I once landed a Wandle 

 trout which had rolled the cast round its gills, the 



