Chapter I: Front Matter

MINOR TACTICS OF THE
CHALK STREAM

AGENTS

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ROUGH SPRING IRON BLUE DUN.
OLIVE. NO. 00.
NO. 1.

GREENWELL’S GREENWELL’S WATERY DUN.
GLORY. GLORY. NO. 00 DOUBLE.
NO. 0. NO. 00 DOUBLE.

PALE SUMMER PALE SUMMER
GREENWELL’S GREENWELL’S BLACK GNAT.
GLORY. GLORY. NO. 00.
NO. 1. NO. 00 DOUBLE.

TUP’S TUP’S
INDISPENSABLE. INDISPENSABLE. OLIVE NYMPH.
WET. NO. 0. WET. NO. 00 NO. 0.
DOUBLE.

DOTTEREL TUP’S
HACKLE. INDISPENSABLE.
TIED FLOATER.
STEWARTWISE. NO. 0.
NO. 00.

MINOR TACTICS OF THE CHALK STREAM
AND KINDRED STUDIES

BY

G. E. M. SKUES
(_SEAFORTH AND SOFORTH_)

SECOND EDITION

]

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1914

_First published in March, 1910_

=Dedicated=

_TO MY FRIEND THE DRY-FLY
PURIST, AND TO MY
ENEMIES, IF I HAVE ANY_

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION

It would ill become me if I allowed a Second Edition of “Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream” to go to the public without expressing to those writers who have dealt with my volume in the Press my grateful sense of the generosity with which, whether they were or were not in agreement with the main object of the work—the endeavour to put the wet fly in what I conceive to be its right place on the chalk stream—they have one and all received it. In the fifty or so Press notices, short and long, I find, without exception, an absence of the harsh word, and a pervading urbane and kindly spirit which is of the true Waltonian still. Such fault as has been found has in the main been that I have shown undue timidity in dealing with the pretensions of the dry-fly purist. To that criticism I should like to reply that in dedicating my book to my _friend_ the dry-fly purist I was using no idle word—that in asking him to make room for the wet fly beside the dry fly as a branch of the art of chalk-stream angling, I knew myself to be making a claim on him which he would not willingly concede, and I was determined that no harsh or provocative word of mine should give offence to any of the many good friends, good anglers, and good fellows who would not—at the first onset, at any rate—find themselves able to see eye to eye with me.

I take leave to hope that the interval since the first publication of “Minor Tactics” has brought a good few of them round to the view that, without ousting the dry fly from pride of place as major tactics of the chalk stream, the wet fly has its subsidiary, but still important, place of honour in chalk-stream fishing.

G. E. M. SKUES.