Fishing leaves a long paper trail. These stories run from shell hooks on Okinawa and a net a bog kept for ten thousand years to a bass record shared across an ocean, a salmon no British river has matched since 1922, and the falls on the Columbia that vanished in a single morning. Along the way: a prioress who may not have existed, and a reel stamped Zero Hour Bomb Company.
Every tile in a Fishing game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
History
nine stories
1The net a bog kept for ten thousand years
On the tile: Antrea Netc. 8400 BC
In 1913 a find in a bog on the Karelian Isthmus turned up cord, floats and net weights: a fishing net. Radiocarbon dating showed that the willow whose inner bark was twisted into its twine grew between about 8,560 and 8,240 BC. Bogs preserve what ordinary soil destroys, which is why a net this old survives at all. Whoever knotted it was fishing shores newly uncovered by the retreating ice.
Around AD 200 the Roman writer Claudius Aelianus described anglers on the Astraeus, a river in Macedonia. They fastened red wool around a hook and fixed to the wool two feathers that grow under a rooster's wattles. Their rod was six feet long and their line the same. It is the oldest clear account of fishing with an artificial fly, though scholars point out that Aelian never actually says the anglers meant to imitate the insect he had just described.
Magna Carta is remembered for liberty and due process. Clause 33 is about fish. It orders that all fish weirs be removed entirely from the Thames, from the Medway and throughout the whole of England, excepting the sea coast. The Latin word in the charter is kydelli. They were substantial V-shaped structures of wood, set in the riverbed to steer fish into a basket or net at the point, and they sat in a document otherwise busy with inheritance, courts and the rights of barons.
The story goes that a prioress named Dame Juliana Berners wrote the first English work of fly fishing instruction, printed in 1496. The trouble is the paperwork. Her name comes down in three spellings, Berners, Barnes and Bernes, and no document has been found to show she existed. The American Museum of Fly Fishing puts it plainly: she is more than likely not the author. The treatise is real and it is good. The author is a guess.
Izaak Walton was apprenticed to a London ironmonger, a maker and seller of metal goods, and he was in his late fifties when The Compleat Angler appeared in 1653. It went through five editions in his lifetime, ten more in the eighteenth century and one hundred seventeen in the nineteenth. The chapter fly fishers quote most is not his. Walton's friend Charles Cotton wrote it, and it did not appear until the fifth edition in 1676.
England's extra fish day was not about piety. In the parliamentary session of 1562 and 1563, William Cecil pressed for what he called a politic ordinance on fish eating: more people buying fish meant more working fishermen, and working fishermen were sailors the navy could call on. Eating meat on a fast day could cost three pounds or three months in jail. One concession survived the debate. You could have a serving of meat on Wednesday if three fish dishes shared the table.
Founded near Philadelphia in 1732, the Schuylkill Fishing Company promptly elected a governor, a lieutenant governor, three councilors, a sheriff, a coroner and a secretary. Members put up a clubhouse in 1747 from nearby walnut trees and called it the Court House. They began as the Colony in Schuylkill, and in 1782 they renamed themselves the State in Schuylkill, at which point the Court House became the Castle. The IGFA calls it the first angling club in the United States and the oldest continuously operating social club in the English-speaking world.
8English flies that would not float in the Catskills
On the tile: Theo. Gordon1890s
Theodore Gordon left the cities for a quieter life near the Neversink River, and learned about England's dry fly revolution from his English friend Frederic Halford, who mailed him a full set of his own flies in February 1890. Patterns dressed for slow chalk streams would not ride water that tumbles. Gordon retied them with stiffer, sparser hackle so they rode high on faster American current. The result is still called the Catskill style, and the Catskill museum calls him the father of American dry fly fishing.
American fly patterns were a muddle. The same name meant different flies in different states, so Charles Orvis sent hundreds of letters to customers and anglers asking what they fished and how it was dressed. His daughter Mary Orvis Marbury was put in charge of the replies. Favorite Flies and Their Histories came out in 1892 with descriptions, histories and color plates for 291 patterns from Canada, thirty-six states and two territories. Nine printings later, a name meant a fly.
George Perry took a 22-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass from Montgomery Lake, Georgia, on June 2, 1932, and entered it in a magazine contest. Decades later the IGFA inherited the freshwater records and it became the all-tackle mark. In 2009 Manabu Kurita landed a bass in Japan's Lake Biwa that weighed about an ounce more. IGFA rules require a fish under 25 pounds to beat the record by two full ounces, so Kurita tied it rather than broke it.
On April 21, 1959, off Ceduna in South Australia, Alf Dean drifted a bait on 130-pound line and hooked a white shark. It weighed 2,664 pounds, measured 16 feet 8 inches, and had a girth of 114 inches, and it came to the boat in about an hour. No heavier fish has ever been confirmed by the IGFA; the runner-up on its shark list is a 1,785-pound tiger shark. Great whites are protected in United States waters and off limits in many other places, so the IGFA no longer accepts them as records at all.
Alfred Glassell Jr. hooked a black marlin off Cabo Blanco, Peru, in August 1953, trolling a five-pound mackerel, and fought it an hour and three quarters. The fish weighed 1,560 pounds. It is still recognized as the largest bony fish ever caught on rod and reel. Footage of one of Glassell's catches was used in the film of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and the marlin itself, mounted from its own skin, hangs in a Houston museum.
4Three quarters of a ton of tuna, landed in under an hour
On the tile: Ken Fraser1979
On October 26, 1979, off Aulds Cove, Nova Scotia, Ken Fraser hooked an Atlantic bluefin tuna on a trolled mackerel and had it at the gaff in under an hour. It weighed 1,496 pounds, and it might have made 1,500: the fish lay on deck nearly ten hours before it reached the dock scales. No other tuna has ever weighed in near that mark, and the IGFA still lists Fraser's as the all-tackle record for the species and the heaviest tuna in its books.
On October 7, 1922, Georgina Ballantine was fishing the River Tay near the village of Caputh when something took hold. Two hours later she landed a salmon of 64 pounds, or 29 kilograms, the heaviest ever taken with rod and line from a British river. More than a century on, nobody has beaten it. Perth Museum, which keeps her story, notes that the record is unlikely to fall, because salmon have grown smaller since.
Les Anderson sold automobiles in Soldotna, Alaska. Early on the morning of May 17, 1985, he and his partner Bud Lofstedt were after early-season kings on the Kenai River when Anderson hooked up, to his own shock. They rushed the fish to a scale in town, where a crowd had already gathered on rumor. It weighed 97 pounds, 4 ounces, and it is still the rod-and-reel world record chinook. He was introduced that way for the rest of his life.
Zane Grey wrote westerns and spent the proceeds chasing big fish. In May 1930, off Tahiti, he fought a marlin that dragged the boat five miles out to sea. As the crew gaffed it, sharks tore into the tail. Twelve men carried what was left to the scales: 1,040 pounds, from a fish whose measurements suggest it had weighed 1,200 to 1,300 whole. The American Museum of Natural History, then keeper of big-game records, refused it because of the damage.
On the night of June 13, 2022, fishermen on the Cambodian Mekong caught a giant freshwater stingray weighing 661 pounds, about 300 kilograms. That beat the previous record for a freshwater fish, a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish taken in Thailand in 2005. Scientists confirmed the weight, tagged her so they could follow her movements, and let her go at dusk under a rising full moon. They named her Boramy, which is Khmer for full moon.
On May 7, 1953, Lou Marron was trolling a live bonito off Iquique, Chile. Just under two hours later he had a swordfish alongside that weighed 1,182 pounds. His rod was black palm and his reel a 12/0 spooled with linen line, tackle that sounds like a museum case and did the job anyway. The IGFA still lists it as the all-tackle record for swordfish, more than seventy years on.
George Snyder made watches and silver in Paris, Kentucky, and he fished for black bass with live minnows. The reels he could buy wound too slowly, so he built one geared to turn the spool several times for every turn of the handle. The IGFA dates his first multiplier to 1810; a Kentucky account says about 1815. Either way it is reckoned the first made in America, and it turned still-fishing into casting.
Samuel Phillippe of Easton, Pennsylvania, was a gunsmith and a prize-winning violin maker, and a trout fisherman besides. In the 1840s he began making hooks, then turned to rods. British makers glued three strips of bamboo together; Phillippe tried three, then four, then six, and got a rod lighter and more flexible than anything coming out of England. No rod he built himself is known to survive, though one by his son sits in the State Museum of Pennsylvania.
Forster Hardy, of the family firm in Alnwick, wanted a reel with a detachable spool that turned on ball bearings and carried an adjustable drag. Early patents put the bearings around the outside of the frame, which made the thing a nightmare to take apart, since every ball had to come out one at a time through a small trap. The design he settled on went into production in 1890 and reached the market the next year in thirteen sizes, from a dainty two and a quarter inches to five and a quarter. They called it the Perfect.
Alfred Holden Illingworth owned a mill, and he watched wool peel off the top of stationary bobbins all day long. He built a fishing reel that did the same: the spool faces forward and never turns, so line slips off the rim when you cast. His real contribution was the bail arm that sweeps the line back onto the spool. The Illingworth Number One was patented in 1905, and in 1908 he won the International Bait Casting tournament with a modified fly reel carrying a cotton bobbin for a spool.
Fiberglass was born of wartime work on heat-hardened polyester resin reinforced with glass fibers for aircraft parts. Arthur Howald, technical director of the Plaskon Company, wondered what it would do for a fishing rod. He ran his own experiments and handed the results to the Shakespeare Company, which tried casting rods first, then fly rods, and put about a million dollars into the project. The Wonderod arrived in the mid-1940s and made bamboo and steel rods look like yesterday.
The Zero Hour Bomb Company of Tulsa incorporated in 1932 and made electric timer bombs for fracturing oil formations. In 1947 R. D. Hull turned up with an idea borrowed from a grocery clerk pulling string off a large fixed spool to wrap a package. His closed-face reel, the Standard, debuted on May 13, 1949. The company did not change its name to Zebco until 1956, which is why White House security once dropped a reel meant for President Eisenhower into a tub of water and called the bomb squad.
Lauri Rapala fished Finland's Lake Paijanne and noticed that predatory fish charging a school would pick the minnow swimming with a slightly off-center wobble. In 1936 he carved a lure from cork with a shoemaker's knife and some sandpaper, surfaced it with tinfoil off a chocolate bar, and sealed it with melted photographic negatives. The wobble was the whole idea, and that lure was the forefather of the Original Floating Rapala, still the company's signature.
Nick Creme was an Akron machinist tired of digging bait, so he read up on chemistry and went to Cleveland to see DuPont, where a lab technician handed him chemicals to try. Working in the kitchen with his wife, Cosma, he cooked polymer and pigment into a soft plastic worm in 1949. The Creme Wiggle Worm, later renamed the Scoundrel, is generally reckoned the first of its kind. A decade later the company moved to Tyler, Texas, where it still is.
The story goes that James Heddon sat by the Mill Pond in Dowagiac, Michigan, waiting for a friend and whittling. When he got up to leave he tossed the piece of wood into the water, and a bass hit it immediately. The sign in the park that carries his name dates the moment to the late 1890s. What is documented is the result: Heddon is credited with the first wooden-body artificial lures, and his company sold the first commercially successful one, the Dowagiac.
Archaeologists have established that people were catching salmon between The Dalles and Celilo Falls for as long as eleven thousand years. Fishers worked from wooden scaffolds out over the whitewater with long-handled dip nets, and tribes came from as far as the Great Plains to fish and trade. On the morning of March 10, 1957, the gates of The Dalles Dam closed. Four and a half hours later the falls were under the reservoir. The treaty fishing rights were never sold.
On the Nagara River in Gifu, fishers work at night with cormorants on cords, a large fire hanging from the bow of each boat for light. A snare around each bird's neck keeps it from swallowing the sweetfish it catches, which are collected from a pouch in its throat. The masters of the Furutsu and Tachibana districts are not performers hired for the season. They are affiliated with Japan's Imperial Household Agency, and they hold the imperial fishing eight times a year.
The Test and the Itchen run clear and slow out of Hampshire chalk, and their trout can study a fly at leisure. Frederic Halford joined the Houghton Fly Fishers on the Test in 1877 and published Floating Flies and How to Dress Them in 1886. It changed fishing everywhere, and then it hardened. By his last book in 1913 Halford had become, in the fly-fishing writer Glenn Law's phrase, a dogmatic pedant who believed anyone who fished differently should not be allowed near moving water.
At Roscoe, New York, the Willowemoc joins the Beaverkill in a spot called Junction Pool. The story goes that a fish arriving there could not decide between the two streams, settled in the pool instead, and grew a second head so it could face up both. Anglers call it the Beamoc, and the town has made a night of it for generations: the Two-Headed Trout Dinner, which marks the opening of trout season in Trout Town USA, reached its sixty-fourth edition in 2025.
Norman Maclean set A River Runs Through It on the Big Blackfoot in Montana. When Robert Redford filmed it in the summer of 1991, Livingston stood in for Missoula and the Gallatin stood in for the Blackfoot, with more work done on the upper Yellowstone and the Boulder. Meanwhile the real Blackfoot met the Clark Fork behind Milltown Dam, which for a century held back millions of cubic yards of mine waste. The dam is out now and both rivers run free.
By the mid-1960s alewives, an invasive fish, were dying in the millions and fouling Great Lakes beaches. Howard Tanner, then chief of Michigan's fish division, decided to answer with a predator. In the fall of 1964 he obtained a million coho salmon eggs from the Oregon State Fish Commission, and on April 2, 1966, the first of those young salmon went into the Platte River in northwest Michigan. A Great Lakes recreational salmon fishery that had not existed before exists to this day.
Fleets had worked the cod of Newfoundland and Labrador for almost five centuries when Canada shut the fishery down in July 1992. About thirty thousand people in the province lost their work, and outport towns lost the thing they had been built around. Bigger vessels and better electronics had found the fish faster than the fish could replace themselves. The moratorium was expected to last two years. It lasted thirty-two.
New Zealand had no trout until settlers brought them. Brown trout came first, introduced in the late 1860s from British stock raised in Tasmania, and the easier-to-catch rainbow followed in the 1880s. With few predators and plenty of spawning water they got big and plentiful. Then the country made sure nobody could turn that into a business. In the Taupo fishery it is illegal to sell or buy trout, and nationwide you cannot farm trout or sell a wild one. Trout is not served in New Zealand restaurants.
The Firehole runs through Yellowstone's geyser basins, and the thermal water feeding it can push the river warmer than trout normally tolerate. Above Firehole Falls the water was barren of fish until people put them there. The park's stocking history records the Loch Leven strain of brown trout, from the Scottish lake of that name, first planted in the Firehole in 1889. Official stocking of park waters ended by 1959, so every trout in the upper river today is wild, descended from fish that were carried in.