FISHY YARNS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 38, 12 January 1943, Page 8

FISHY YARNS

A visitor to a certain asylum saw a man (Sitting by a wash-basin, the tap of which was turned 011 full. The inmate held a walking stick, to which was fastened a length of string. On the end of the string was tied a piece of bent wire. This he worked slowly up and down the splashing of water. "Have you caught many slalmon to-day?" asked the visitor sympathetically, j J The inmate looked at him and replied wearily: "Have you ever seen a salmon come out of a wash-basin tap?" Well, at least one man has actually caught a salmon in his washbasin. The famous naturalist and writer, Henry Williamson, tells how he once turned on the. tap in his .Devon cottage and suddenly there appeared a little trout-like form VA inches long! It was a samlet which had somehow got into the buried iron pipe which carried the water from the well, away up on the. hill 100 yards from Williamson's cottage. The unexpected often seems to happen to the angler. Who but a fisherman, for example, could extract a crate of eight unbroken bottles of beer from the innards of! a shark? Yet this was done by a famous New Zealand shark fisherman. It is not often that an angler's life is endangered when the wrong creature seizes his bait. A Negro, using a frog as bait, hooked something which appeared to be an eel. He landed iti and was about to pick it up when he let out a yell and ran as if his pants were on fire. The "eel" was a cotton-mouth water moccasin—one of the deadliest snakes in America.