178 WATERSIDE SKETCHES. 



confession compels me to admit that I often fall back upon 

 it, but never without the guilty feeling that after all it is- 

 next door to poaching, and that I am fpr the time a mere 

 trimmer-fisherman. No pot-hunter should be, or ever is, 

 without it. There is small skill connected with a process 

 where the fish does all the work. It has not the excuse of 

 trolling, in which the chief art is how to find your fish. The 

 live bait wriggles and swims, the jack comes from near or 

 far, and, after inspection, takes it. After the lapse of the 

 usual time you haul in and lift him into the boat. Compare 

 his feeble attempts to escape with the play given by a fish 

 hooked only in his horny, prickly mouth. There is no 

 comparison, and when you hear men lamenting that in this 

 sort of live baiting they have been "broken away" — that is 

 the regulation phrase — you need not be perplexed if you 

 are somewhat puzzled how to estimate their skill as anglers. 

 Assuming that every pike -fisher deserving the name subjects 

 his line, traces, swivels, and hooks to a smart testing strain 

 before he begins, and that they are of ordinary strength, it 

 is difficult to conceive how a pike with a couple of hooks 

 deep in his gullet tearing at his vitals can, with ordinary 

 patience, break violently away. Grant the feUow time, and 

 he may be turned up like a log. 



Norfolk, which used to be one of the best pike counties 

 in England, is being ruined for the angler by the unsports- 

 manlike "liggering" or trimmer-fishing practised there. 

 The famous Broads on the eastern side are subject to a 

 wholesale system of poaching. Here is an instance. In 

 1873 a party of men obtained permission to fish a private 

 Broad, and set out from the capital city with an immense 

 supply of live baits and a cargo of trimmers. They never 



