Negley Farson - Going Fishing: Travel and Adventure with a Fishing Rod

What the critics have said about Negley Farsons Going Fishing:

I first read Going Fishing in 1943 when, as a prisoner of war, I was serving a term of solitary confinement following an escape attempt and a friendly guard smuggled the book into my cell. For a couple of months it was my only literature, so I can claim to have read it pretty thoroughly! But Negley Farson proved much more than a solace; he was a revelation. Of all the fishing books I had read, his was the best. It still is.

Hugh Falkus

One of the great foreign correspondents of the twenties and thirties, Negley Farson of the Chicago Daily News would always take his fishing rod with him wherever he went. In the Kalahari Desert or in the foothills of the Andes, it was always there, ready to be used at the first opportunity; and in the mountains of the Caucasus, in the company of Alexander Wickstead, the Moscow correspondent of The Times, it was probably of help in keeping them both alive.

Conrad Voss Bark

Of absorbing interest and great variety ... the book does not contain a single boring line.

Angling magazine

You dont have to be a fisherman to cherish this lovely book. If you love the outdoors, give yourself a treat.

Angling Times

Where the dark rivers curve down from Exmoor

For
Reginald Bruce
of
Elmhurst Farm

This is just the story of some rods, and the places they take you to. It begins with surf-casting on the New Jersey coast, when I was thirteen, and carries on to such scenes as flyfishing the headwaters of the Kuban in the upper Caucasus, and casting for rainbow trout in the rivers of southern Chile, with a volcano erupting every ten minutes within plain view. There is not a record, or even a very big fish in it; and some of the finest things fishing has given me, I have found beside the streams of the West Country in England. I do not know the names of a tenth of the flies in the book, and thank the Lord I dont want to. I would not be at all upset if you opened my own fly-boxes and showed me a dozen strangers. I did not know the name of the finest fly I ever had, nor did the man who tied it: he was an English captain in the Army of Occupation, at Cologne, and he said it had worked well for him in southern Germany. After a prodigious career, a trout took it away from me one night in the Balkans. What I do know are a couple of dozen old reliables, and I think I know where and how to use them. As time goes on I shall add others to this coterie, when Ive found them useful.

I love rods, I suppose, with the same passion that a carpenter, a violinist, or a Monaco pigeon shot love their implements. I love using them. But, if I cant, I can get a lot of fun by just taking them out of their cases and looking at them. A pair of trout rods helped to keep me alive when I was facing a riddle of poverty out in British Columbia where they provided free food; and Ive used them for politics to make a wild Irishman talk, when he wouldnt have otherwise. Although I once thought I was going to come to no good through fishing, Ive even made money out of it my little Duplex rod has provided me with many articles. But chiefly I love rods because of their associations, the places they have brought me to. They have been part of my kit, when I travel, for many years. This magic wand has revealed to me some of the loveliest places on earth. That is the story of this book.

NEGLEY FARSON

The early days; surf-casting along the New Jersey sands; the Cattyrackers of the Delaware Bay; and the wild geese of the Carolinas

I went into the hazel wood

Because a fire was in my head.

I cut and peeled a hazel wand

And hooked a berry on a thread

And when white moths were on the wing

And moth-like stars came fluttering out

I threw the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

The New Jersey coast lay bleaching under the winter sun. The lighthouse blazed like a white bone. The dune grass stood still. And the green ocean lay like a pond. There were no footmarks along the sand.

The summer was over, one of those long summers of childhood. I was walking along the tide mark, examining the driftwood and wreckage cast up by a recent pounding storm. There was always mystery in these bits of broken timber and rusted metal, some of which had been lying off the beach for years. The strewn, irregular line of the highest surge of waves was a continuous story after each storm. But I was searching for a specific treasure. It was always the same; a particular type of tackle that we used off that coast a triangular brass swivel, to one end of which would be left, usually, a broken bit of parted Cuttyhunk line; a three-ply twisted gut cast from another loop; and a four-ounce pyramidal sinker dangling from the other.

This was the rig of the surf-casters, those men who waded far out into the sea, and cast with a stout two-handed greenheart or snakewood, far out, hundreds of feet beyond the onrushing combers, to where the great striped channel bass lay crunching clams in the dappled lagoons of the sea floor. I found this tackle, entangled around waterlogged planks or twisted in some conglomerate wreckage, chiefly because of the delicacy of this sport. For, making a full-armed cast with the big quadruple reel, this four-ounce sinker was slung like a bullet into the sky. You controlled the spinning reel with your thumb, barely braking; and, if you had a backlash when the sinker was in full flight even the Cuttyhunk parted.

You stood there, watching helplessly, as your tackle sailed outwards, having severed all connections with you, to drop into the open sea. Sometimes a channel bass, or a flounder, or a weakfish would take the clam or bit of shedder-crab with which the hook was baited, and ultimately die. These, too, were washed ashore. The storms dug into the sea sands and beat everything up. We once found part of a yard of an old sailing ship. And it was ripping and snarling at one of these bits of decayed fish that I found Joe. The fish was a monstrous thing, with a mouth about a foot wide, ugly teeth, all head, and no tail; we used to call them all-mouths. Joe was the doughtiest bull terrier I ever encountered.

As I said, the summer was over. Joe was a castaway himself. Id like to know what sort of a person his master was, for some people did leave their dogs and cats when they went away. And Joe seemed to have been soured by it. He had, for several days, a grudge against all mankind. But I was out of a dog at that moment, and so a flirtation ensued that took me the better part of a dangerous afternoon. The end of it was that Joe followed me home, his hackle rising every time I turned to speak to him, until I got him into the backyard, and shut the gate. Joe was caught.

This was perhaps the finest channel bass season, this tail-end of autumn; and with the setting in of real winter the frost fish would come up along the coast, and there would be night after night when, with a bucket of long-necked clams, I would go out and fish for ling. Joe accompanied me, sitting by my side on moonlit nights, pondering in his dog-way, over the mysteries and melancholy of the lonely sea.