A FISHERMAN'S STORY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 627, 13 December 1913, Page 6

A FISHERMAN'S STORY.

Remarkable incidents in fishing are worth recording, but surely few mare extraordinary have occurred tnan the following, sava a correspondent of the "Field.'' To realise it in all its wonder it is necessary to know what the Foss Pool at Sand, Norway, is like in a fairly high water —a mass of white, swirling water coming from the mighty fail of a greitt river, the while tailing to wards the end of the pool into tinblack of great depth, and in a few yards again a mas uf white, broken water as it leaves the pool. Here no boat could live an instant, and in the pool itse)f it would take two men r.ll they knew to hold it. With the river in this state on a dazzling morning the writer cast his prawn, very soon hooked a fish, and lost him in a rush, together with the treble gut trace and thirty yards of line. Five days later fishermen in the great pool below the Fosa hooked and brought up the thirty yards of line which | the fish had somehow managed to break off the trace. This was reniarmauls, but nothing to what followed. A fortnight and four days after losing the fish the writer was again easting a prawn into the swirling waters —still running high—of the Fos3 Pool, and hooked a fish. It was honked in what is called the Pot Hole of the Foss. The boatmen, as the custom is when fish are hooked in that pool, bent to their oars, and the boat rushed across the white waters to the, only place where it is possible ti land salmon. For five minutes the battle proceeded, the fish seeming <o fight in a curious way. and then it got off. The line was reeled up, and an astonishing drama revealed itself. My prawn had never been near the fish, but the hook had managed to get hold of the trace I had lost nearly three weeks before, the hook of which as still in the mouth of the fish, and I had been lighting him with the old hook, which in the battle tore out, and I landed the old hook and trace and half an inch of the line attached to the loop. In that vast malestorm of waters it is almost inconceivable that a hook should attach itself to a trace, yet it is precisely what occurred, with four witnesses to testifyto it 3 truth.