Untitled - RB-Flys

PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH.
PIKE- TACKLE.
SPINNING AND TROLLING-RODS.
An idea happily now nearly exploded has prevailed
amongst trollers since the time of Nobbes of the Dark Ages,
that a pike-rod should necessarily be a clumsy rod a thick,
unwieldy, weighty, top-heavy weapon in fact, a sort of cross
between a hop-pole and a clothes-prop. Whatever our pikefishing
ancestors may have been in the matter of skill, it cannot
be denied that their rods and angling gear generally were in
every way vastly inferior to our own, and, indeed, such as to
make any display of what we should consider science out of
the question.
On no part of the fisher's equipment has more patience
been lavished, with the result of greater advances, than on the
all-important item of the rod. That so far at least as trollingrods
are concerned there was plently of room for improvement
may be gathered from the receipt given for the construction of
a trolling-rod by the authoress of the 'Boke of St. Albans,'
about A.D. 1486, wherein the implement in question is recom-
mended to be of at least fourteen feet long ; the '
staffe '
or butt
measuring '
a fadom (fathom) and a half,' of the thickness of
an 'armgrete,' or about as thick as a man's arm, and the joints
to be bound with stout '
hopis of yren '
(iron hoops) !
In the first volume I have given a description of the dif-
ferent woods used in rod-making, and I will not therefore
repeat it here, the more so as both hickory, greenheart, and ash
that is, almost all the principal rod-woods may be, and are,
very commonly employed in the manufacture of Spinning and