Читать книгу Fishing For Dummies - Greg Schwipps - Страница 114

Without question, the most famous book ever written about angling is The Compleat Angler published by Izaak Walton in 1653. Since that time, it has been through more than 300 editions and is probably the most widely read (or at least widely owned) book after the Bible and the Koran. Because The Compleat Angler is an all-around handbook for fishing in England, people who are not familiar with Walton have an idea that it is only for purist fly-fishing snobs. It isn’t.

Izaak Walton was primarily a bait fisherman who came late to the fly. He was a self-made businessman who retired in his 50s and wrote the book that would earn him immortality at age 60. His prose is so simple and clear that most people today could read his book with much less difficulty than they could read the plays of, for example, Shakespeare.

Much of the best advice in the book was actually written by Charles Cotton, a young man of leisure who was an amazing fly rodder. It was Cotton, not Walton, who wrote “to fish fine and far off, is the first and principle rule for Trout angling.” In other words use a light leader, and keep your distance from the fish so you don’t spook it. This advice is as valuable today as it was three-and-a-half centuries ago when Walton and Cotton filled their days fishing and talking. What a life!

As seen in the color section, the rainbow may have spots over the whole body (although in many rivers and lakes, the larger rainbows are more often an overall silver). A much more reliable sign of “rainbowness” is the pink band or line that runs along the flank of the fish from shoulder to tail. But even this indicator is not always 100 percent foolproof because some stream-borne rainbows have a faded, almost invisible band and many spots, as do the brown and brook trout.