Sport: Goggle Fishing

Izaak Walton’s definitive work on 17th-Century fishing, The Compleat Angler, is now a literary curiosity rather than a manual. A treatise published this week borrowed from its title but not its style. The Compleat Goggler* introduced a new sport, told the best ways of indulging it.

Guy Gilpatric, author of The Compleat Goggler and inventor of the sport, was a professional aviator who climbed to a passenger altitude record after three months as a licensed pilot, an advertiser who climbed to a vice-presidency after 13 years with Manhattan’s Federal Advertising Agency. Then he escaped to the French Riviera to write popular stories about a Scottish engineer. His spare time he passed in fencing and pistol shooting until he found scaly targets more interesting.

A goggle fisherman, wearing watertight glasses, a bathing suit and earplugs, dives down into an underwater paradise which is, as Author Gilpatric describes it, half marine science laboratory, half Freudian dream. There, armed with a spear, he harpoons a mullet, merou, moray, ray, octopus, none of which is so suspicious of man underwater as of man out. Besides being better exercise than most fishing, goggle fishing has one further sporting advantage: It exposes the fisherman to some risk of being the victim as well as victor in the game. On one occasion, when a large octopus wrapped itself around Fisherman Gilpatric, he had a few bad moments cutting himself loose.

*Dodd, Mead ($3).