Thomas Tod Stoddart -- fuck the rock on!

Here's a great little excerpt from An Angler's Rambles and Angling Songs, written by Scotsman Thomas Tod Stoddart (1810 – 1880). David Profumo describes Stoddart thus: “ … a fishing author from the Scottish Borders who devoted his entire adult life to the sport. In his journal, the redoubtable Thomas Tod Stoddart records that in fifty years he caught some 67,419 fish (not including eels). Regarded in his heyday as the literary heir to Izaak Walton, he was the presiding spirit of Scottish fishing and was dubbed by John Buchan ‘the Poet Laureate of Angling’; these days he is largely forgotten, except for a remark that has entered piscatorial mythology. On re-meeting a childhood acquaintance, Tom was asked what he was now doing in life; a little resentfully, he replied, ‘Doing? Doing? Mon, I’m an angler.’”

Fucking Ra!



"Old Lyon was in the habit of devoting the greater part of the day to the assortment of his tackle, one hour at the most being appropriated to the testing of it; and the capture of a brace of trout giving occasion to a fit of pedantic ecstasy which usually exploded in a quotation, as long as my arm, from Horatius Flaccus, or some other renowned classic. The military octogenarian was astir on his pins by day-break, up and at them, while the trout still lay snug under their coverlets. His march back to breakfast was in double quick time, and in double quick time he tucked in under his belt Tibby's ham and eggs, a relay of fried trout, scones, bannocks and wheaten loaf, with the proportional supply of milk (he abjured tea or coffee),then sallying forth, showed face no more until the verge of dusk, when in he strode with all the dignity his veteran form could muster; and, disburdening himself of his creel,shouted 'Attention' with the voice of a Stentor, emptying, as he did so, from the old-fashioned wicker-work, a dozen or two of trout so ridiculously, in point of size, unlike what we were led to expect, that Tibby, as she held out the dish to receive them, was in the habit of exclaiming, 'Ye ne'er got thae in oor Loch, Captain B. Ye hae been up the burn, I'se warrant, an' a sair day's wark ye'll have had o't."