Pollock Fishing at Digby Gut. 
There is no salmon fishing within at least 
thirty miles of Digby Town, and owing to the 
merciless way in which the water is poached, 
what fishing there is is very uncertain. By the 
middle of June the trout fishing in that locality 
is practically over, and even if it were not, the 
black flies and mosquitoes make fishing a pain 
rather than a pleasure. My friend and I had 
devoted a couple of days to brook trout fishing, 
but when the fish declined to rise, we cruised 
the woods for sign, and I was able to demon¬ 
strate to him that there were several cow 
moose, with their calves, within five miles of 
the town court house. The third day of his 
sojourn with me I was dubious what I could do 
to amuse him. Finally, in desperation, I tele¬ 
phoned to Sandy Adams and asked him if the 
pollock had commenced playing in the rips yet. 
“I ain’t saying there’ll be any pollock in the 
rips this evening,” Sandy replied, “but last 
night one boat took fifty, and the night before 
one of the Everett boys got pretty near as 
many. You and your friend might come down 
and try. The tide’s a bit late to-night, and 
they won’t be schooling until four or half-past. 
Now, when Sandy Adams gives you an 
answer like that, you can be reasonably sure 
that your efforts will be crowned with success. 
If the fish are not running he will tell you so; 
if they are scarce he will inform you of the 
fact. My friend had only a light English trout 
rod with a small reel holding at most thirty 
yards of line, so I bade him leave his own gear 
at home and took two of my salmon rods with 
reels to correspond. I removed the salmon 
lines from the reels and equipped them with 
thirty fathoms each of stout mackerel line. A 
salmon line costs five dollars, and thirty fathoms 
of the line I used can be bought for twenty 
cents. 
When I told my friend that we were going 
after pollock, he did not seem at all enthusi¬ 
astic. He had caught many pollock while fish¬ 
ing for salmon trout in tidal waters, and re¬ 
garded them as anything but a game fish. He 
was not then acquainted with the difference 
between the “harbor pollock” of Musquodoboit 
and the pollock which frequent the rips of 
Digby Gut. Many a time have I cursed the 
small pollock when the salmon trout have been 
rising but not freely, and every time I cast a 
wretched half or quarter-pound pollock has 
persisted in immolating himself on every fly on 
the cast before the trout eyed it. 
Digby Gut is a peculiar place. It is the en¬ 
trance to the magnificent sheet of water known 
as Digby or Port Royal Basin. It is about a 
mile wide, deep enough for the largest battle¬ 
ship to enter, and it serves as the inlet and 
outlet of a large tidal lake. The normal rise of 
the tide is twenty-eight feet; in other words, an 
area of over a hundred square miles has to be 
flooded to a depth of twenty-eight feet and 
emptied again twice in every twenty-four hours. 
Unless the reader has actually seen it, he can 
hardly conceive the sight the gut presents when 
the tide is running at its maximum velocity. 
The whole length of the channel (some four 
miles) is a series of eddies, miniature whirl¬ 
pools and rips, alternating with comparatively 
quiet backwaters. It is through the fiercest of 
the rips that the pollock school most freely. 
They are after the young herring; the herring 
which, when they have passed the gut and 
escaped pollock, porpoises, dogfish and seals, 
will meet their arch enemy, man’s contrivances, 
in the shape of tidal weirs and nets, and will 
eventually leave Nova Scotia in the form of 
“Digby chickens.” 
My friend and I went to Sandy’s place of 
abode by the lower road. I took him that way 
to show him how rough a road could be and yet 
remain passable for a light vehicle. We 
arrived in very good time, the tide was running 
in, but not with any force; it had some twenty 
feet to rise. There was hardly a sign of life in 
the gut, one or two crows flew up and down the 
shores and one small rowboat was pulling over 
from the Granville side to fetch a doctor for 
some sick person. A number of men were re¬ 
pairing sails and doing other odd jobs under 
the shadow of the bank. They were pollock 
fishermen and were waiting for the first sign 
of the school. We might as well be on the 
water as on the land, so we embarked and 
pulled over toward Granville, where the shore 
was lined with boats and the little wharves 
Avere black with men, apparently loafing and 
watching some small boys catching sculpins and 
flat-fish. In reality they were fishermen waiting 
for the pollock. 
The tide was running perhaps two miles an 
hour, and Sandy pulled just hard enough to 
keep his boat in position, while he told my 
friend about the heavy batteries and the block¬ 
houses which formerly defended the then gate¬ 
way to Nova Scotia. Some of the old cannon 
lie there yet, half buried in grass and weeds. 
Gradually the incoming tide quickened, a 
small boat with one man in it put out from 
Granville and a couple more from the Digby 
side. All three rowed against the tide, in the 
direction of the Bay of Fundy. Then a singular 
thing happened. A lone gull, flying lazily in 
the direction of the boats, suddenly wheeled, 
dropped on the water and rose again. In a 
few seconds it repeated the performance. 
Previous to this it was the only bird in sight, 
but before it could make a third swoop the 
sky was white with gulls. In five minutes they 
were there in thousands. Their hoarse cries 
sounded like Babel. The fishermen were busy, 
too; we could see them hauling in their lines, 
and we could even catch the glitter of the fish 
as they were hauled in over the stern. The 
excitement ceased almost as quickly as it had 
commenced. The birds circled upward until 
they became liny white specks. Then they dis¬ 
appeared. “Better run the spinner behind,” re¬ 
marked Sandy; “there may be a lone fellow or 
two ahead of the school. Those fish were just 
a little mess come ahead of the big body.” 
The spinner consisted of a narrow plate of 
burnished white metal some six inches long 
with a strong hook running lengthwise through 
it. It was about an inch wide and weighed 
about a pound. A strip of white skin from the 
belly of a pollock about the same length, was 
attached to the hook. Fifty or sixty fathoms of 
stout line completed the outfit. The bait was 
thrown overboard, the greater part of the line 
paid out, the balance fastened to a thole pin, 
and I resumed my rod. 
For a quarter of an hour nothing happened, 
then a splash followed by another one directly 
ahead of us announced that some fish were 
breaking water. A minute more and the guffs 
were all around our boat. I caught a momen¬ 
tary glimpse of a big olive-green-and-silver 
body thrown half out of water near my salmon 
fly, my rod bent like a withe, and the reel 
screamed. In rod fishing from a boat, all lines 
must be taken in the moment a fish takes the 
fly, otherwise you are sure to have trouble. 
By the time my friend had taken his fly and 
the spinner on board, my fish commenced to 
sound. Unlike a salmon, a pollock rarely 
breaks water or jumps when hooked. I de¬ 
voutly wished that I had used a finer line and 
been enabled to get an extra ten fathoms on 
my reel. I gave the fish the butt until my rod 
resembled a hoop, the line ran off until I 
could see the core, and I fully expected to lose 
my fish, together with my cast and fly. I 
managed to check him, however, and gradually 
got in half my line. Then he sounded again. 
This kept up for a quarter of an hour, then 
Sandy gaffed him, and the moment the fish was 
aboard, my friend commenced to cast again. 
All the time I was playing my fish the gulls 
were swooping and screaming, and fish after 
fish broke water within twenty feet of the boat. 
Then the school vanished, the gulls melted 
away, only to reappear round some boats a 
mile away from us. 
In a little time a large fish took our spinner, 
and was ignominiously dragged in over the 
stern. There was not much sport in the pro¬ 
ceeding, but Sandy finds use for all the pollock 
his patrons catch. Then a large school com¬ 
menced to break round us, one took the spinner, 
and when it was almost in-the boat, another 
one took the fly. Fortunately it fouled nothing, 
and my friend enjoyed a quarter of an hour’s 
savage fight with it before he landed it. 
We had an engagement in town at seven, so 
just as the tide was commencing to run in good 
earnest, and the gut was covered with boats, 
we were obliged to go ashore. It was a very 
different matter pulling through the swirl of the 
miniature maelstrom to paddling across early 
in the afternoon. An inexperienced hand who 
goes fishing in the rips is very apt to find him¬ 
self halfway up Digby Basin, or out in the Bay 
of Fundy. according to the way the tide is 
running. An experienced boatman can pick his 
way through the rips and eddies without any 
difficulty. We had six fish on board when we 
landed. Had we devoted ourselves exclusively 
