SEA TROUT

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 154, 27 December 1924, Page 3

SEA TROUT

INTEREST POINTS IN ITS LIFE

HISTORY.

The lordly salmon has always offered problems to the naturalist and the angler, and even to-day no one can satisfactorily explain why' this fish -which, feeds only in the sea will rise to a fly in a river or seize a boiled prawn in fresh water.' Another puzzle bo far unsolved, writes T. C. Bridges in tho .Daily Mail," is how the kelfc "mends", and turns from red to silver even before he has reached salt water on his return to the sea. The sea or salmon trout is a fish the habits of which are similar to those of the salmon in that it lives and feeds in the sea but visits the shallows of rivers far up towards their sources for the purpose of spawning. Its flesh, delicately pink, makes a most perfect dish, and there are epicures who prefer it to any fish that swims. Sea trout,are found in many rivers where salmon are rare or unknown, and they will' often pass up some small tributary while their larger cousins keep to the mam stream.'

In different parts of Great Britain they. are_known under quite different names.' In Devon and Cornish rivers they are always called "peal"; in Wales they ara sewin, in Ireland "white trout,"while m Scottish waters the smaller fish are known as "finnocks" or "herling." Perhaps there is no fish that varies more greatly in size, and an odd thing is that of two neighbouring • stress which run in adjacent valleys one will carry a run of small, the other of very large nsh. An- instance in point is afforded by the Dart and the Tavy, both, of which rise close together on the top of Dartmoor. Dart sea trout rarely ex?l m b m-weight, while those taken in the Tayy are frequently three times that size. The largest sea trout of which any authentic record exists was caught m Lough Costello in Connemara and weighed 261b. I have myself Been this fish stuffed m a glass case in the fishing lodge, and am certain that it was a sea trout, not a. salmon. The sea trout rises to a fly more readily than the salmon, and is usually taken by. a very bright coloured line. Thesefish rise freely in many lakes where salmon, though present, hardly ever take the fly. Unlike the salmon; which: rises only in daylight, sea trout also take the fly by night] and indeed there are some rivers, such as the Devonshire IJart, where sea trout rise only after dark, ihey take a worm or minnow freely, but will have nothing to say to a prawn or shrimp, " °£T»! l, e ¥ st, ory of sea trout while in th* sea little is known: Somo years ago one was taken five and a half mills off Berry Head, Torquay, -which weighed three-quarters of a pound. Like salmon, sea trout infallibly find their way back to their parent stream, and a curious case of heredity is afforded by the fact that each spring .fish of thesespecies still gather in the mouths of certain East Coast rivers where sluices debar them from running up tho stream.