388 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[May 14, 1898. 
boys look with contempt at the hand Hner. and this noble 
fish is caught on the lightest rods and lines, and given 
every chance for its life. 
In midsummer the water along the island fairly 
swarms with these fish. In July they spawn and , are seen 
running in pairs. The -devotion of a yellowtail to its 
mate is remarkable. I have hooked a fish which fouled 
the bottom, and when trying to clear it could see the 
mate standing by it, not loin. away, evidently trying 
to aid it 
The yellowtail is the bluefish of the Pacific, though 
not a bluefish, and much larger and far more powerful. 
In catching them several points are necessary. One is 
the holding of the rod, as the fish is so powerful that the 
novice is easily injured by pressing the butt against 
the body. The rod should rest over the left knee at an 
angle of .about 45 degrees, the butt being just beneath the 
right knee. This gives the sitting angler complete con- 
trol and a good leverage. A great question is whether 
to strike or let the fish hook itself. One of the best 
boatmen approves the latter, but I depend upon circum- 
stances. In any event the yellowtail should not be 
struck too quickly, as playful fish often nose the bait 
and nip at it, while others take 'it wildly in a grand 
rush. I have spent many hours watching them from a 
high pile, and conclude that the angler must use his 
good judgment. I have fished for yellowtails with a 
number of old salmon fishermen, and almost all agreed 
that the yellowtail was far ahead of it as a game fish; 
and I commend the beautiful creature to those who 
appreciate a hard fighter with "never give up" qualities. 
Sen OR X. 
Fishing Up and Down the Potomac. 
Point of Rocks. 
A DOCUMENT in the case: 
WESTfiRN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPJOtV. 
Washington Junction, Md., June 2. 
A. B. 19. Collect. 
Washington, D. C— Water clear all the way to the Monocacy. 
Twenty- three bass caught here yesterday; one 4%lbs. C. D. 
Charges 55 cents. 
That settles it, and the afternoon train carries a couple 
of hopeful anglers forty-four miles up the Potomac — a 
mile beyond Washington Junction — to Point of Rocks. 
The ride is a pleasant one; weather not too warm; and 
a party of fishermen in the smoker, bound for Wood- 
mont, help in a discussion of favorite lures, haunts, and 
noted captures. The tournament seems but just begun 
when our station is called. We have hardly noticed the 
canal, which lies between the railroad and the river, for 
the latter part of the ride, and as the river is not navi- 
gable here, carries the only shipping in sight. We have' 
only given a nod of recognition to Sugar Loaf Moun- 
tain, which has loomed up in the distance to the right, 
and catches the eye at every journey around the horizon. 
The Catoctin Range crosses the Potomac here, and 
Point of Rocks is named from its sheer bluff, which 
comes so close to the river that it must be tunneled for 
the road. The highest peak in the range is close by, and 
is about i,20oft. 
In the early days they were a little short on names, 
or some old native had but one reply to all questions. 
The mountain on the Virginia side is Catoctin; and on 
the Maryland side also Catoctin; a little above the Point 
a stream makes into the Potomac from the Virginia 
side — Catoctin Creek; a couple of miles above another 
stream comes in from the Maryland shore — Catoctin 
Creek; and about half a mile further up a small run on 
the same side is down on the Government maps as Little 
Catoctin; and no doubt there are others. 
This is one of the most frequented resorts for anglers, 
and for the same reason that white sheep eat more than 
black, has furnished more sport than any other point 
on the river. 
We have made no arrangement for the evening fish- 
ing, so content ourselves with a stroll over the canal, and 
out on the long bridge which spans the river here. The 
water is low, shallow, clear, and with the evening shad- 
ows coming, the reflection of the green hills close to its 
banks on either side lends it the color of the edge 
of the ocean. The bottom of the river shows 
plainly every stone and pebble, and we are amply re- 
paid for our walk in the watching of the' antics of a 
respectable bass in the cove of a shingle shoal above 
the bridge, where he is chasing minnows, and having 
apparently as good a time as we expect to-morrow. He 
does not seem to mind his audience in the gallery, but 
a pebble which the ubiquitous small boy was irresistibly 
impelled to shy at him sends him scuttling to the green- 
room, and the performance was over for the evening; 
he was insensible to encores, as was the small boy to 
our mild protests; he argued the bass belonged to him 
—at least as much as to us— and the court adjourned in 
some confusion for supper. 
The boatman comes over to the hotel later to make 
arrangements for to-morrow; a stranger is also here, who 
is to use bait; but we are all to start together early — so 
.early we retire. About 3 o'clock a groan from my 
friend interrupts as pretty a struggle with one of Dud- 
ley Warner's lolb. fish as you ever saw, and there sat 
my companion on the edge of his bed, unable to get 
breath enough to tell what's the matter. Finally he 
gasps it is his heart — but as he has a chest like a barrel, 
had never been affected so before, and the sharp pain 
came only with inhalation, it was diagnosed _ (at forty 
every man is a physician or a fool; sometimes ear- 
lier) as a pleuritic attack, or an inflammation of the 
intercostal muscles, and duly prescribed for by one 
who had had the experience of a dozen such attacks. 
Though somewhat relieved, his fun was spoiled with 
the pain and the fright, which did not leave so sud- 
denly, and he decided to catch the daylight train for 
home. Of course he was not to go alone, and we began 
a weary trudge with our bundles to the Junction, nearly 
a mile away. , . , , 
We had hardly gone a hundred yards m the bracmg 
morning air till he set down his bundles, drew a long 
breath, and said: "It's gone." And we turned back once 
more, reaching the hotel as it began to stir, to the sur- 
prise of the management, who took us for fresh arrivals. 
He fished all day, and never thought of the trouble 
again. It is a good remedy. 
After breakfast we went down to the canal, into which 
three prints had been dragged from the river, and tied 
one behind the other. Each angler boarded a punt and 
his boatman took a paddle in the stern. A boy-bestridden 
horse was hitched with a long rope to the forward punt, 
and in a few minutes was trotting up the tow- 
path of the canal, and the punts were throwing 
a shower of _ spray from their square prows with 
as much noise and show of speed as a 30^- 
knot torpedo boat. The novelty, the dewy spring 
morning, the foliage and blossoms of tree and 
bush, the merry-go-round semblance of rush, and 
above all the love of out-of-doors, all helped to make 
the ride as thrilling as a scow on the raging canal could 
possibly be. We went in this fashion nearly to Bruns- 
wick, formerly Bremen, five miles away, as the low 
water, rocks and rapids make it impossible to take such 
craft up the river; then the boats were dragged over the 
bank of the canal into the river, and we set out to drift 
down to the Monocacy, some distance below the Point. 
We fish backward and forward across the river; in 
the riffles and dead pools; under the bushes and behind 
the stones; we change our flies; we drown them; but, 
do what we can, we have not caught a fish at noon. We 
stop at a good spring in a deep gulch a hundred yards 
away from the river bank to eat our lunch, rest, and 
hold a pow-wow over our disappointment and its prob- 
able causes. Clear water and low, no wind, and clear 
sky, tell part of the story, but our conclusion, approved 
by the guides, is, they are not on the feed; and there is 
considerable argument as to when the bass does his 
feeding. It is popularly supposed that early morning 
and late evening are the best fishing times, and that the 
earliest start gets the longest string. There is an old 
proverb in favor of the man "who sets his net betimes," 
but there are exceptions, and many good anglers have 
giA'^en up what they call bef ore-breakfast fishing. 
Bass Fishing by Night. 
It is in fact so much a matter of locality, climate, and 
habits of the food itself, that there is no rule. There 
may be places where most fish feed and rise in the gray 
dawn, but the writer has never found them. The noon 
hours are as a rule not so good, but occasionally our 
best catches are made then, and sometimes the bass can- 
not be caught in dayHght at all. The Knobel Fishing 
and Hunting Club, principally a St. Louis organization, 
but with members from three or four adjoining States, 
has a club house on Buffalo Island in the St. Francis 
River, a few miles out of Paragould, Ark. This is iir the 
sunk lands, the whole country having been wrinkled 
by the New Madrid earthquake in 181 1. The St. Francis 
spreads out through several channels here, with so little 
current as to permit the growth of river grass to such 
an extent as sometimes to be impassable for skiffs, even 
with water s or 6ft. deep.. There are many varieties of 
these aquatic grasses, and some of them are very beau- 
tiful. No matter how turbid a flood comes from the 
headwaters, when it strikes the sunk lands the checking 
of the current and the sifting of the weeds clears the 
water, and it is always crystal, and anywhere that the 
rank vegetation permits the bottom may be seen. 
The. summer sun is hot enough here to drive whites 
within doors, and there are no colored people living in 
the county. The bass have sense enough to keep in 
the shade then, and in fact through all the daylight. 
Sometimes a stranger not so wise comes and tries to 
coax them out. One is recalled, who went to try for the 
big fish, and for two days wore his heart out whipping 
eight or nine miles of the narrow channels of the river, 
and caught four ordinary bass. The second night, when 
despair had settled down and thoughts of home were 
much more comfortable than any probable prospects for 
the morrow, the superintendent of the club house, who 
had turned out to be an old neighbor, came in about 9 
o'clock and asked if the stranger was too tired to catch 
a bass. It was a cloudy night and dark as black cats, 
but, determined to find out something of which he had 
heard and only half believed, the rod was rigged with a 
single large white miller, to lessen chances of catching 
in grass or trees, and we set out; a box chair cushioned 
with 3cn old comfort, and with a padded back, made the 
most comfortable boat seat ever invented, and following 
instructions, no effort was made until we were a mile 
from the landing. We were in a narrow opening, and 
could just distinguish the heavy woods on each side; 
it was impossible to see each other or the tackle. Only 
line the length of the rod was let out, but not half a 
dozen casts were made when the grateful gulp of a good 
bass announced that the fun had commenced, and it was 
repeated often in the next half mile; we got back by 11 
o'clock, and brought back fifteen nice bass. The other 
visitors were principally gunners, and the fish were a 
welcome addition to the larder, which had sustained a 
practical bass famine for a week. 
The next day the stranger did not fish, but spent the 
heat of the day in a hammock with some old magazines, 
and that night the guide reported at nightfall, and again 
with a single white miller we worked two or three miles 
of water, and came in at nearly midnight with twenty- 
eight bass, and the fly is not badly hurt now. 
One more evening, and the fly used then was a non- 
descript on a large hook; a gray palmer as large as a 
half-grown mouse, and of the color; it is an imitation 
of the bushwhacking bait of the South, called a buck- 
tail, save it had a single hook instead of a triangle. That 
evening the superintendent, who had never tried a fly, 
took another boat and guide to accompany us, and we 
returned with thirty-two for one boat and a score for 
the other. 
It is not sport;, it requires no skill except caring for 
the light tackle, and the tackle need not be hght. The 
fish takes it at the top of the water; the line is so short 
he never gets a run, and comes splashing on the surface 
to the boat, and this noise of his struggles is the only 
excitement in it. It is not fly-fishing, for no cast above 
2oft. is made; longer is not safe in the dark. The lure 
is not a fly, for a salmon fly used in this fashion is little 
better than a troll. It is said that a spoon used in the 
same way does murderous work sometimes, but that 
evening two of the unemployed guides had gone out to- 
gether on their own hook, and passed down the river just 
ahead of us, and returned with us, and alternately used a 
spoon the whole way, but they had only three fish. In 
this case color and shape of the fly evidently 
had nothing to do with attracting the fish; the 
writer's theory was that as the fly was pulled 
toward the boat it made a wake, and that the 
fish rushed at the point of the ripple for the liv- 
ing object; one is probably fishing with a mouse and 
doesn't know it. But no one but a pot-hunter would 
find sport in it; it does get fish, but every other pleasure 
is thrown away. The afternoon in the woods was far 
pleasanter. To go out for a squirrel and bring home a 
fine wild turkey is one of the possibilities that leaves 
pleasant recollections of a locality that is otherwise prin- 
cipally swamp and mosquitoes. 
But to return to the Potomac: 
With our lunch we imbibe not only coffee, but re- 
newed hope, and start out refreshed. We are not out 
of sight of the landing place when' each has a fish, and 
our basket has nineteen when we reach the hotel; none 
are very large, but they are up to the average, and we 
are abundantly satisfied. 
We did not take one in the riffles, but the early ones 
in the shadows of the tall rocks, and the later ones on 
the edges of the weed patches. We have never caught 
many bass in swift water"; they may take the minnow then 
better than the fly; or maybe we have not tried hard 
enough or been careful enough or tried at the proper 
times. At any rate we have few to our credit from the 
bubbles, and are sure they are not so fond of the foam 
as are the trout Henry Talbott. 
Fresh- Water Angling, 
No. v.— Black Bass. 
BY FRED MATHER. 
Black bass fishing has not, so far, developed two 
distinct classes of anglers on the same line that 
trout fishing has, i. e., fly and bait fishers, but it has 
brought forth many methods of angling which are prac- 
ticed by good anglers in many parts of our country, 
each one believing that he can either get more sport, or 
more fish, in his way than can be got in any other man- 
ner. This is always a very comfortable belief, not con- 
fined to anglers, for the lover of the gun often feels posi- 
tive that the man who made his gun never made another 
quite equal to it, and as for dogs, why no man ever 
owned a dog like his, whether for grouse or snipe. I 
confess that I like to hear a man brag about these things, 
in moderation; it shows that he loves his dog and gun, 
which are his real companions in his trips, and knowing 
them more intimately than he knows other dogs and 
guns, he has learned to love them merely because he 
knows them. 
The angler who loves angling for its own sake, and 
not as a means of "getting a mess of fish," is content 
to have a fair day's sport, and an outing, without a feel- 
ing of envy of another who has taken one more fish, or a 
larger one, than he. Angling is not a struggle, like the 
"pegging down" contests in England, which I do not 
fully understand, but think them to mean that the boat 
is "pegged" in one place and the catch is counted at 
night, much like those abominable, condemnable — here 
put in such language as you think I might use in con- 
versation — "shooting matches" which were common 
in many places years ago, but are not now so frequent, 
where sides were chosen and several hundred men went 
forth to slay every living thing, putting a number on each 
kind, to see who should pay for a dinner. 
The angler has, in a general way, too much of this 
spirit left. He is gradually learning that he may have 
many days, weeks, and even years, of pleasure without 
breaking any records for either size or numbers. If I 
had a boy, and that boy loved to fish, he would be 
taught that the best angler did not always catch the 
most fish, nor the largest ones; that these things were 
influenced by location at a certain time, in which the 
element of chance entered; and that if he contented him- 
self with observing the general' rules laid down by the 
masters of the angling craft, and adding to them his own 
experience, he would derive great sport m angling for 
itself, without thought of either pecuniary profit in get- 
ting a "mess" — how I hate that word as applied to 
fishing for a meal — or of beating any other angler. I 
would probably say: "My boy, your companion took 
a few more fish than you did, and they averaged larger; 
but did he enjoy the day, with its chances to enjoy life 
on the water and its glimpses of those little things which 
only those can see who look for them, any more than 
you did?" 
If I have said this before, or something like it, let 
it be put down with Falstaff's "iteration," with which he 
was troubled; but it will bear repeating and "iterating," 
just as we keep hammering at spring shooting and the 
sale of game. The young angler needs to be started in 
the right way, and for him I write because the older 
one started in a wrong way, as I did, and thought that 
weight and numbers were the only things which sup- 
ported his claim to be considered as a "brother of the 
angle." That was the old-time test, and few of the "old- 
timers" can break away from it; but the younger ones 
are gradually repudiating the "test," and are contenting 
themselves with fishing for the sake of fishing, and are 
fully aware that the fellow who hooked the biggest fish 
on their favorite lake simply happened to present an 
attractive lure at the moment when the big fish came 
along, and was in the mood to take that lure; if not, 
the fish might have gone on for weeks and have passecl 
several lures which were more or less attractive, just 
as a man may decline a bit or a sup at a certain hour 
to-day and accept the same to-morrow. 
In former articles in this series there has been some- 
thing faid about the fickleness of fish in taking lures; 
and at the risk of repetition I will say: Every bait, fly 
or other lure that the angler puts out is seen or nosed 
over by many fish which do not care for it; some are 
not hungry, and others are not in the humor for that 
particular food; hence we must try to learn their desire 
for that occiasioi;, 
