Really, Really Retro

In an annual celebration of The Complete Angler, Eric Sharp experiments with gear similar to that used by British anglers in the 17th century, tying his leader directly to the end of a fifteen-foot rod and fishing a wet fly for brown trout. “My 5X monofilament tippet was probably equivalent in strength to the two or three hairs from a horse’s tail used by Walton and his protégé, Charles Cotton (who really wrote the fly fishing sections of ‘The Compleat Angler’).”