Welsh Journals

holding at least three hundred yards of line. The necessity of the latter was unequivocally stressed this summer when I had promised a fish to one of the zoologists at Cardiff University. (He'd been studying parasites of marine fishes, and hadn't been able to get hold of a specimen of a tope.) By this time I had handled a number of fish that went beyond 50 pounds, and I was reasonably confident. The fish that picked up my bait at eleven o'clock that morning, however, gave me no chance at all. Two hundred and fifty yards of my new monofilament nylon screamed off in a very short time and only the fact that the hook straightened out as I threw everything in to turn him saved the line for me. We have evolved tactics that will beat any tope that swims, and I am pretty certain in my own mind that this fish wasn't a tope at all. There have been a number of encounters like this one, and I now feel that it's pretty likely that we have been in contact with blue, or porbeagle, or mako shark. I don't believe that we'll ever land one of these from the shore: reels simply don't have the line capacity to deal with the initial run; but soon I hope that there will be the chance to fish for them from a boat-and then we shall see. Sooner or later every one of my non-fishing acquaintances asks me the ultimately irrelevant question: 'But are they good to eat'? Usually I mumble something like: 'Well they do say that they enjoy them on the South Coast. but mentally I categorise them with the appalling Mr Frederick Harrison in To Have and to Have Not who said, if you remember: 'Fishing is nonsense! If you catch a sailfish what do you do with it ? You can't eat it' HOME In grey streets That snake a valley's bed Dolls' houses stand, wed In close formation Like regular soldiers Stiffly at attention;