DID YOU KNOW THAT? Part
1 of 2
by Louis Bignami
When albacore were
first canned, housewives used to pink tuna would not buy. So the canners
contacted a PR agency, which solved the problem with simple stickers for
each can. The stickers said, “White tuna, guaranteed not to turn pink
in the can.” Now, of course, white meat tuna is a selling point.
Gary Soucie notes in
his excellent Traveling with Fly Rod and Reel “Common sense and human
logic convince us, as well as many regulatory agencies, that barbless
hooks do less damage to the fish and decrease the mortality of
catch-and-release fishing. Unfortunately, there is no science to support
the notion.”
The “cane” fly
rods in A River Runs Through It were really graphite Hexagraph rods
built in strip cross-section.
Noted fly fishermen
Lefty Kreh was once asked by a non-fisherman what the sense was of
catching fish just to let it go. He responded, “Do you burn your golf
balls after a game?”
Consider the world
record salmon from Alaska’s Kenai River, and realize that
Smilodonichthys Rastrosus, now extinct in North America for four or five
million years, AVERAGED six and a half feet and probably weighted in at
250 to 300 pounds.
If your brass
swivels don’t, use a toothpick to push silver polish into the barrel
and spin the swivel for a bit to grind out rough spots or grit. Then
give the swivel a dab of oil. And you’re set.
While people can run
a bit over 20 miles an hour, fish wiggle through water that is about 700
times more dense considerably faster. Sailfish can top 70 mph with pike
clocking 20 mph and bass 10 to 12 mph.
A fisherman,”
wrote Roderick Haig-Brown, “is good in proportion to the satisfaction
he gets out of his sport. [So] a merry duffer is better than a dour
master.”
Joseph Seccombe
wrote the first American fishing literature, “A Discourse Uttered in
Part at Ammauskeeg Falls in the Fishing Season, 1739” as a sermon that
was published in Boston in 1743. The sermon defended fishing in a period
of six day work when Sunday fishing was thought “Ungodly” by many.
A pessimist is any angler who thinks the
weather is too bad to fish. An optimist is any wife who thinks her
husband won’t fish anyway.
|
