MEMO from the publisher

Above (and below) the call of duty, Associate Editor Coles Phinizy dived under the three feet of ice on Minnesota's Fish Hook Lake to record by camera, as part of his ice-fishing story this week, the fish's-eye view. Describing the act, he said, "Suddenly you feel you're in Miami Beach," a thermal phenomenon suddenly I can't report without a shiver, especially since Phinizy emerging had to break the ice over the hole through which he's just submerged.

Phinizy believes that most summer time anglers, passing through the lake country of our northern tier of states in winter, probably stand in awe of the serene and cracking cold and then dream, beyond the white snow and blue ice, of a greener season when these apparently still waters will be jumping with fish. "But," he says, "they're jumping now."

How is another part of his story, but that they are jumping can be no surprise to Dr. Paul Robert Needham, University of California professor of zoology-fisheries, who has devoted a lifetime to studying fish, with emphasis on getting into the water with them, summer or winter, warm or cold. His conclusions, bearing on trout and their conservation, will appear soon in an article by Robert de Roos. This is just one of the several forthcoming articles on fish and fishing which I'd like to take this chance to mention.

In further pursuit of the trout, we'll have the alluring case—documented by Basil Heatter—of those in the Chilean and Argentine Andes, where streams run as fast as their fishes grow. Then, with the opening, for most of us, of the fresh-water fishing season, comes a three-part interpretive and instructive article on wet-fly fishing. Illustrated by Anthony Ravielli, it is written by Vernon S. Hidy, who sat, as it were, at the wrist and reel of perhaps the greatest master of wet flies, James E. Leisenring.

On the salt-water side, the universal fish is the shark. Among fishes, where comparisons can sometimes be really odious, it is all teeth and no brains. It's one that man would as soon live without. But its dangerous profusion makes it one that man must learn to live with. When SPORTS ILLUSTRATED adds the shark to our portfolio of fish profiles, we will tell, among other things, the best ways to do it.

Plus, of course, the news of fish and fishermen as it happens in tournaments, competitions and the luck of the cast.

PHOTO

COLES PHINIZY