A Salmon and His Master
And what a salmon! Harry Wellman holds the record on the Miramichi, a 35-lb. 2-oz. fish.
ON THE SUBJECT of "Hobbies" Harry Wellman '07, Tuck School professor of marketing and often chosen Dartmouth's most popular teacher, has contributed a note on fishing, at the editor's request. Here is revealed the way the disease was caught, how it spread, exhibiting a sort of paralysis during the fishing season. And the final result, after landing a 35-lb. salmon, is a craving for a bigger one. This delightful disease is contagiouswatch out!
Here is Harry's story: "One of my very earliest recollections is of being awakened one morning by the twittering of birds; of getting up quietly and stealing down into the pantry where I drank quarts of milk and filled every pocket with doughnuts, cookies, rolls and cake; of tiptoeing stealthily down the stairs to the shed where I picked up my "rod" and a can of worms thoughtfully placed there the evening before. Then a three-mile walk to a good trout brook!
"Was it Saturday morning? It was not. Did I get a good licking? I certainly did but I also got some trout! It still seems to me as if my excuse was adequate. My father had given me a new, three-piece "bamboo rod"—not a pole, and a reel and a line. Two dollars and a half for a rod was a lot of money to trust to a nine-year-old kid. And a reel, too! I ask you; could you have stayed in bed or gone to school with that waiting for you? Neither could I.
"Well, I've never stopped fishing since that morning. I like to catch any kind of fish by any known method. In the earliest spring, I have been known to go down to the boiling Connecticut and catch suckers with a worm! In the late fall I still like to sit out an evening on Lake Memphremagog with my brother, in a leaky boat and catch Bull Pouts!
"You see, I'm rather hopeless. I like to catch Redfish, Kingfish and Tarpon—but I also like to haul in a few Sheepshead, Grunts and Snappers. It's just no use, I haven't any sense.
"Until about five years ago, I thought catching a trout on light tackle and catching Kingfish the same way was about the top of the sport. Then Halsey Edgerton and I went around the Gaspe and tried some salmon fishing when we got to New Brunswick. We had trout rods, trout lines, flies and leaders but we did have decent salmon reels.
"The first strike I had from a trusting salmon who had just come up the stream from the ocean, convinced me that I had never fished before! I can't describe it; it's just something you have to feel to understand. But once you have felt that strike and savage rush, seen one hundred, two hundred and even three hundred feet of your line go tearing down river, well, there just isn't any other kind of fishing.
"Ever since then I go salmon fishing in June, whether school keeps or not—and in September, too, if I can make it. I have fished in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—l am glad I still have the Province of Quebec, Anticosti Island and the Labrador Coast, to look forward to! I know it; it's a disease—but I don't want to get well."
