"Trout Truths" by D.W.C. Farrington

Illustration by J.E. Grace

From The Brook Trout and the Determined Angler, by Charles Barker Bradford, 1900.

With Fly-Rod and Camera

One hundred twenty-five years ago or so today these folks were all looking forward to Spring and a new season of fishing. Even then there was the guy with the camera. And every time I see old photos like these I get a powerful urge to buy a new hat. 

Anticipating

Catch and Release

Click on photo for full size image.

An early example of enlightened thinking. For its time. This is from a book published over a hundred years ago, and the author and a certain William T. Hornaday challenge the "too-liberal fish laws" of Washington.

Note, though, that Hornaday pronounces this catch as "three times too many for one rod." I count sixty-five fish hanging, and it looks like the creel is full, say, maybe another fifteen in there. That means a reasonable brace of trout for one rod would have been twenty-six or twenty-seven fish.

Those are all probably wild fish, too. If only someone had come up with catch and release about then. I'd love to be catching those trout's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren.


And I wouldn't mind catching twenty-seven of them in a morning. Or sixty-five or eighty of them, for that matter.

And then letting them go.