TIGHT LINES AND DRAGONFLIES

A creelful of amusing anecdotes and reflections and some rather heavy-handed jollities concerning the author's flighty career as an angler. Mr. Hughes, English and burdened with an unsympathetic wife and family, nonetheless has managed some enterprising forays to international inland waters -- in Austria using an unorthodox method of dangling a heavy fly; in Yugoslavia where he inadvertently flushed ""Tito's fish""; in France where he fought a fish by rolling onto it and bashing it with a rock; and in Ireland, Scotland, and a stand in the home country where, fishing regulations are ""a serpentine and elephantine mess of dotty porridge."" Angling buffs may pick up a tip or two, but this is mainly a dossier of quips and cranks, with tributes to fish and comradely eccentrics.