The Spinning Rod

SINCE the twelfth century, when it was noted in the records of an ancient monastery that the fishing wasn’t what it used to be, most advances in the science and art of halieutics, the sport of extracting fish from water, have been made in the British Isles. Yet in many cases like the split bamboo rod and the multiplying reel, the final touch of perfection in the instruments for going and getting them has been added in the United States.

In the days before the First World War an American on the Scotch Tay, Welsh Wye, or Irish Blackwater, as he laid his Jock Scott twenty-five yards or so across the stream, watched with admiration an occasional fisherman who would throw a metal minnow twice as far, and connect with subaqueous explosions twice as heavy as his own. In the long armistice between wars he noted that some of his competitors would be using instead of a powerful weapon of ten feet or more a delicate tool of eight or less. In lieu of the old revolving reel, or moulin as the French call it, he would have a queer offset contraption with a fixed spool, from which by a flick of the rod a t hreadlike line attached to a lure weighing less than a quarter of an ounce was projected a prodigious distance, often to the undoing of a large fish.

Between them that great tacklist Malloch of Perth and Mr. Holden Illingworth, a cotton manufacturer who had watched the threads easing off his spindles, had evolved by two stages the all but magic contrivance that bears the latter’s name, the Illingworth reel. The perfect equipment for the fascinat ing sport of spinning with the thread line for game fish had been found.

Numerous books have appeared in England and in France on the tackle, tactics, and technique of the new art, but in his Spinning for American Game Fish (Little, Brown, $4.00), Joseph D. Bates, Jr., is the first to deal comprehensively with the subject in relation to American fish and conditions. In fifteen chapters with fifty helpful illustrations he tells the intending thread-line spinner exactly what he needs to know, and enlivens the instruction with anecdotes of his own stream-side experiences.

No trout fisherman is likely to set up his spinning rod when t here is a hatch of fly, and widening circles on the pool indicate that the fish are surface feeding, but for the dour days when the water is too high or too colored or too cold, and the fish are definitely “down,” the spun lure is the specific medicine. For that sporting citizen of our waters, the black bass, it is a winning outfit, a worthy coadjutor to the click reel and fly rod. Indeed, it is particularly for the bass fisherman that Mr. Bates’s book is a “must.” It will help, too, with the seagoing cousins, striper, shad, mackerel, bluefish, and the gamesome spotted weakfish that Floridians call “trout.”

Spinning is great fun. The 7 1/2-foot, 4-ounce parabolic-action rod is a sweeter thing to handle than the stubby plug-caster, especially in playing the fish. The thread line gives a gossamer quality 1o the game that brings the heart to the mouth, but its 5-pound test, aided by the coaster brake in the reel, will handle more pounds of fish than its quota. The great variety of dainty lures, ranging down to a lightly leaded streamer fly, is a delight to collect and employ. Some of them spin, some provocatively wobble, some jump out of the water and gurgle, some just, swim and dart. Their choice will call for your science, their manipulation for all your art. The area of water that can be covered without effort, and with never a backlash, is a joyful surprise. You will miss the blithe music of the reel, but the soft plop of the lure faint in the distance has a beguiling charm.

The objection has been made to spinning that it kills too many big fish that resist the attentions of the fly-fisherman. Surely nothing does more to increase I he head of fish in a river, and improve flyfishing, than the elimination of those old cannibals whose favorite delicacy is a tender grandchild. It is axiomatic on the cherished chalk streams of England that the more bottom-feeding monsters are removed from t he river by whatever means, the more dashing two-pounders respond to your fly.

Writing twenty years ago for English readers on the “Fly Bod in North America” the present observer produced a paragraph that he would like to repeat in order to in part retract : —

The River Gods have provided us with another game fish, the small-mouthed black bass, who will put the stoutest fly-rod through all its paces. A free riser at certain times of the year, a strong and varied fighter, the holder of the international record in the high jump, he is in the fullest sense a sporting fish. Personally, however, I must confess to a lack of perfect sympathy with him. Though he takes your Silver Doctor with Han you know in your heart he would rather have a frog, a crayfish, or the unspeakable helgramite. His favourite morsel of them all seems to be the “ bass plug.” This is usually a highly painted affair of wood and aluminum with little spinning propeller-like objects attached. When under way it looks like nothing in the world so much as a small submarine running awash. Furthermore, the waters he inhabits possess as a rule less of beauty for the eye and soothing for the spirit than the meadow or mountain streams where the trout and salmon dwell. He lacks the enchantment of association — of literature.

As the years go by, one discovers that the competition for bass is less keen and exhausting than that for the salmonidae. Save in the wilderness or on some rich man’s salmon river, you have more water to yourself, more room to stick your elbows out. Actually it has become the more contemplative recreation. The new rods, reels, lines, and lures have given it a fresh charm, a new field for winter planning and spring, summer, and fall (yes, fall!) fulfillment.

Perhaps even a new “literature” will appear. We have Dr. Henshall’s classic of sixty years ago, The Book of the Black Bass. Recently we have had two sound factual books by Bay Bergman, a lively work by Jim Casque, peerless guide to the streams of the Great Smokies, and those engaging essaylets by the Peripatetic Editor of this magazine. Mr. Bates’s timely book, although he talks more of trout, will go into the select bass corner of my fishing library.