#Angling - The day in 1935 when an American dentist was astounded by a Connemara gillie's way with the local salmon is just one of the 67 anecdotes contained within Fishing’s Strangest Days.
As Derek Evans highlights in his latest Angling Notes column in The Irish Times, Tom Quinn's book is "full of extraordinary but true stories from more than 200 years of angling history".
From dead-sheep bait to whopper-sized catches, intoxicated trout and flying pike, the latest edition of Quinn's collection compiles the choicest gems of bizarre fishing facts.
The publisher's blurb says it all: "Consider the Oxford scientist who in 1910 discovered the marvellous life-giving properties of brandy to fish who had otherwise gasped their last. Or how about the nine-year-old boy fishing for trout who caught a large mussel—containing no less than 40 pearls—and managed to earn more in one day than his father, a farm worker, had earned in the last five years.
"Then there’s the case of the two Americans who had an argument about whether it would be possible to cast a fly from the roof of the Savoy hotel into the Thames. The dispute was finally settled when one of them secured himself to a chimney, and, with the help of a policeman who stopped traffic on the Embankment, finally achieved the feat."
Fishing's Strangest Days is "like a tin of sardines - packed with fishy, bitesize tales guaranteed to have you hooked!" Published by Portico, an imprint of Anova Books, it's available in all good bookshops priced at €14.50.
