Extracts from the experiences of a river angler, mostly barbel, but with comment and musings about other species, river wildlife and associated topics. All pictures will enlarge if you click on them.

We ended up going to a stretch I was familiar with for the afternoon and evening, and even there it was a couple of hours before anything happened. Two or three fish in a day is acceptable to me on this bit of water, and three sprightly fish eventually got their heads down on my carefully droppered bed of particles, dragging the rod round boldly and storming off downstream. They seem to like the thick cabbage beds on the Loddon, and burrow into them furiously when hooked. The tail of a nine pounder can look quite impressive when it is all you can see waving out of a weedbed that the fighting barbel is busy demolishing.
All three fish looked like doubles in the water, and two nearly made it.

The next fruitless visit to another new stretch produced one bream, but the sight of four kites wheeling over a newly cut hay field more than made up for the lack of fish. At times they hovered just above the trees, and I could make out the glint in their eyes as they searched the field after the recent grass cutting. I suppose there are mice and voles that get minced as the hay is cut, and the kites are used to going in and mopping up the casualties. Lovely elegant birds, that are apparently spreading every year, and there is more than enough road kill and rabbit to keep them going. Their proper name is Red Tailed Kite, I think, and those reddy ginger colours are easy to make out at close range.

The exceptional water levels have meant that some stretches of river that have not been weedcut for perhaps twenty years are to be cut this coming week, mostly because the water is threatening to flood houses and highways. The two wet winters and springs have meant that the river is flowing at 140% of long term average, which means it is carrying 40% more water than normal at a time when weed growth has also been unusually vigorous. The cutting is a compromise between the demands of farmers, homeowners, conservationists and fishermen, and the weedcutting consultation meetings I have attended over the last few years have shown me how much the EA tries to take all concerns on board before any cutting takes place.
It remains a considered and minimal cut in my view, and certainly a much better situation than occurred twenty years ago.

Angry anglers must also realise that a large amount of weedcutting is regularly practised on the Upper Avon, Test and Itchen for angling benefit, on the trout fishing stretches, and this has been common established and accepted fishery management for centuries. The effect on fishing, flow and inverts is seen as beneficial. The wholesale bank-to-bank weedcutting of the sixties and seventies does not occur now, and the ever reducing level of cutting probably does less damage than we think, though it looks a bit horrendous when the boats are in action.

The new island on the river that was constructed by the EA last autumn has survived the floods, and is currently still underwater due to the high levels, and gathering some goods rafts of cut weed. It is already proving to be a haven for chub, and will no doubt become an improved habitat for dace, chub, and barbel as well as salmon.

The next evening I tried again for an Avon barbel, and immediately caught two large bream, both over eight and the biggest a shade under nine! Avon bream are not usually welcomed by me, but I have to say they were very clean, golden bronze fish, that made me stop winding in twice during the fight. They were both females, and looked as if they had not yet spawned. The male Avon bream are often ugly black fish, all covered in warts and tubercles, but these fish were almost nice to look at, and also lacking in the thick slime that their stillwater cousins have. A chub of a little under five rounded off the evening, but still no barbel.

Next two days will be spent on pulling up the infestations of Himalayan Balsam that are starting to take hold on the river. With luck, and with a good education programme for anglers, we can keep this stuff at bay on the river, but it does need us to keep our eyes open and take the trouble to pull it up whenever we see it. I always attack it when I see it on the Kennet and Loddon, but they are really lost causes, along with the Frome and some of the southwest rivers. Not giving up on the Avon, though, and am pleased with the support from local fishing clubs to date.

The Kennet came up trumps for me though, and bags of four or five fish in a day, including a couple of ten pounders, reminded me of just how hard they can fight at close quarters. They may not compete with Canadian commons for speed, but the stamina of a fit ten pounder, in deepish water under the rod top made my arm ache. These fish may well have spawned and recovered, they seemed very fit and quite fat in the belly, but may have been gorging on the hemp and crumbled boilie that I was bait dropping so generously for their benefit. The Kennet still suffers from very turbid water, and it is a shame that the fish can rarely be spotted. The ranunculus still seems to grow well on most stretches, but rarely reaches the profusion that typifies Avon weed growth. I will be glad when the Avon and Stour clear properly, and the fish can be sought out by spotting, rather than mostly fruitlessly fishing blindly.

Weedgrowth on the Avon has been exceptional this year, and linked with very high levels and flows, has resulted in huge problems for farmers and, we are told, the interests of breeding wading birds. The low lying fields have certainly been ankle deep in water a lot of the time. The Avon weedcutting has had to be more severe than normal, which is a cause for some concern, but it must be viewed in the light of a period of much less cutting, and having attended weedcutting meetings on behalf of the Society and local clubs, I must say that the EA have been very responsive to angling interests over recent years. Some years there is little or no weedcutting, and the amount of cutting is reducing all the time. It is now carried out in a minimal and much more controlled way, and I would not welcome the job of trying to satisfy the demands of farmers, conservation bodies and anglers, all with conflicting demands!

One stretch I know is not going to be cut at all from now on, as a direct result of consultation and reasonable negotiation between myself and the EA, and there have been changes in cutting practice which have achieved drops in levels that are slow and effective, thereby not stranding fry and inverts, again at the suggestion of anglers. This has involved a single, sinuous narrow cut, which lowers levels and retains the bulk of the weed growth. It works best in low flow conditions, however, and every year is different. In the future, the level of weedcutting will get less and less, I am sure, but in the meantime we can work with the authorities to minimise any potential damage to ecosystems.

A quick visit to Budgie and Trevor to see how the Roach Club roach rearing project is progressing was a delight; the roach are now feeding furiously on the shrimp and daphnia that Trev is farming in his back garden, and losses have been minimal. There are tens of thousands of healthy little fish that are being given a chance of survival and will ultimately be returned to the river to try and give the roach in the middle reaches a helping hand to repopulate. Recent EA fish population monitoring confirms that roach are noticeable by their absence, even though chub and to a lesser extent, barbel are maintaining numbers.
The little roach love the live food that are being bred in Trevor`s conservatory, and will soon need to be fed on fish farm supplement as well. The EA are very supportive of this scheme, even to the extent of providing a promise of some more tanks to increase the roach rearing capacity of Trev`s back garden.
The enthusiasm and commitment of both Trevor and Budgie is astounding, they deserve every success and credit for what has been achieved so far; must get them to try rearing some barbel as well!
They are both BS members, and just the sort of contributors that angling needs. The Avon roach need them too!

First barbel on the Loddon
19th June 2008

First trip of the season was to the friendly little Loddon, and combined with a visit to Glyn the Baitmaker to pick up some fresh boilies and paste. A new recipe was called for, not because his last mix was not effective, but to keep up an interest and confidence from a base and flavour that you know is both high quality and unique. I had seen Avon barbel move a couple of hundred yards to home in on a bed of crumbled boilie made by Glyn, and rip up the bottom on the baited area, and am always confident that his stuff both attracts and catches fish.

I used the new boilie on the river that afternoon, and was most appreciative of a barbel on it during the first session of the season. Such instant success is to be expected from good bait, and shows that the heavy prebaiting that some people employ and recommend is not really necessary a lot of the time.
It was only one fish, though, and typical of results so far this season for most eager and over-expectant barbel anglers. A few fish, and some very big ones, will be caught, but it seems to me that the barbel are particularly unsettled and scattered this year, and we invariably forget that early season barbelling can be very hit and miss. Fish are almost always on the move to or from spawning, and take a few weeks to settle down and start feeding in earnest. The barbel I had was very fit, in perfect condition, and may not yet have spawned. The reports of very big fish I have heard so far would suggest that the big females are yet to spawn, and no surprise when you consider the very changeable, cool and unsettled weather we have had this spring, along with above average flows on many rivers.

It was strange to be playing a fish on what seemed like delicate and light tackle after getting aching arms with beefy carp rods, big reels and heavy braid on the St Lawrence, but the bite was as far from delicate, a typical wrench round and a nice way to start the season.

The area we were fishing was a flooded area upstream of a massive hydroelectric dam, that links Canada with America, and the bays often contained small submerged villages or roads, and the huge glacial rocks added to the snag potential. Heavy braid was a must to avoid being cut off by either the rocks or beds of zebra mussels, but losses in snags were very few. My more experienced colleagues told me that the fish with hookmarks I was catching were once a rarity, but a few had obviously been caught before. British anglers are now outnumbering the locals most days, and the place, despite the huge scale, is getting ever popular. There are literally millions of carp in the river, however, and they are seen as a food source to some. There were Chinese and Eastern Europeans happily putting big carp in the boots, sorry, trunks of their vehicles on the last day I fished, much to the bemusement of the Canadians, who were just as happily fishing for tiny bass on useless little four foot rods bought for a few dollars from Wal-Mart. The Canadians were welcoming and friendly people on the whole, and we forged some good friendships on the trip, experiencing some awesome barbecue food. The size of their portions matches the size of their carp.

The final sight of the trip was of carp spawning in their thousands in one large shallow bay, but the spectacle was marred by the sight of some bow hunters, who think that it is sporting to stalk the spawning fish from specially designed boats, and then nobly and bravely shoot the biggest with crossbow bolts attached to lines. The fish are generally discarded once they have thrashed themselves to exhaustion and hauled in, and I do find this practice more difficult to tolerate than the taking of the occasional carp for food. The biggest females, often fish of forty pounds plus, are the preferred victims, and the lack of bigger fish over the last few years may be in some way a result of such selective culling.

I ended up with 144 carp over the two weeks, and a whole host of experiences that are making another visit next year very likely indeed.

The carp of the St Lawrence are famed for their abundance and their fighting qualities, and the first few days of my holiday in Canada has proved that they do fight astoundingly hard, but are not too abundant at the moment. The reason is blamed on a cold spring, and the big shoals of carp are still in the main river, and have not yet made their way into the shallow warm bays ready for spawning. We fished some of the main river swims on the first day or so, and although we had fish to over thirty and some nice twenties, the numbers of fish were apparently disappointing. Four or five such fish in a day was more than enough for me, though, and the experience of thirty pounds of sleek Canadian carp tearing line off the clutch and heading for America across the other side of the river was something I could like getting used to!

The carp are not very educated, and will take anything yellow on heavy tackle fished over a bed of maize, and they give terrific bites; just like barbel, the bite is half the fun. They really do fight like tigers, and the bigger fish in particular have unbelievable stamina. Seen lots of wildlife so far too, including beavers, raccoons, chipmunks, Essex carp anglers, turtles, white-tailed deer, ospreys and big black squirrels.

I can only fish for trout or salmon during the close season, and do so more as an excuse to get out on the river bank more than anything else, so my rod effort is not terribly high. I tend to keep stopping and looking at the plants and animals instead of working hard at keeping a lure in the water. There are those who are bringing back the old Devon minnow technique, which is deadly for fishing the deepest, fastest water on the river, but my enthusiasm is limited for the time being to the Mepps and its variations.

Sometimes I feel as if I am covering the water quite efficiently, and feel much more confident than when using a fly. If I get one fish this year I will be happy, but there is always more to going out fishing than catching fish. A little perch and an even smaller pike took an out of season fancy to the Mepps, but that is all. So far today I have seen several deer, a peregrine falcon, a hobby I think, and a scuttering brood of baby goosanders. The swans have a small brood of three, which is more than enough.

The Orange Balsam is sprouting as vigorously as last year, when I wrongly identified it as Himalayan and pulled it all up. It is still an invasive species, of North American origin, so no problem there really. It is soon overpowered by the native plants, and only a few plants make it to flowering, and produce startlingly bright tangerine orange flowers. It is a much smaller and delicate plant than the dreaded HB, so does not seem to present so much of a threat.

Water levels on the Avon seem to be very satisfactory, with official figures showing flows at close to the long-term average. It is nevertheless intriguing to see the old water meadow structures high and dry, and hard to imagine how the river would have looked when levels meant that these substantial sluices and channels were flowing. Many are several feet above current levels, and it is good news to hear that some are being reinstated for the benefit of both wetland birds and coarse fish fry.

The talks were all very professional and well attended and received, and the interest, goodwill and friendship among the members was plain to see. I was moved to tears at the end, because I was sitting right next to Marylyn Brown when Peter Wheat was announcing the recipients of the Gordon Scott Award for services to the Society, and when she realised he was talking about her and her husband Dave, her reaction was an absolute delight, but made me sniff a bit and pretend to rub my eyes! They are such lovely people, and genuinely selfless hard workers. The Award was never more well deserved.

This afternoon was spent in quiet contemplation, practising with my scythe and keeping the pathways clear on the river, watching the plants growing with that bright green purposefulness so typical of the English spring. The nettles, soft rush and comfrey, dock and coarse grasses are all shooting upwards at an almost visible rate. The pollarded willows were certainly springing into life. A row of such trees have been planted as simple stakes in order to slow down some bank erosion, and now teeter on the water's edge, where once I had driven a big tractor mower two widths between the stakes and the water. Lowland rivers do behave in this way, snaking across the meadows and gobbling up the ground on the outside of bends, while new ground slowly forms on the inside of the opposite bank. Opposite the willows, a lone alder stands ten feet from the water, and hard dry ground has replaced the rooty, underbank swim where I had caught a big pike a few years ago. Only the fixed markers of such trees demonstrate how the river moves over the floodplain with time, so often now accelerated by unseasonal floods and sustained high water from climatic change.

The dredging of the Stour in the name of flood relief in the seventies and eighties destroyed the river as a salmon fishery, and is also thought to be responsible for the poor fish stocks of coarse fish between Blandford and Wimborne. There are signs of good recovery above and below this section, but even in the historically well-populated barbel zone around Throop, there are signs that recruitment of barbel is poor.
The work that the EA have done to date on the badly damaged middle Stour is commendable, and the use of stone croys and linked ORSU`s seems to be producing the goods. Some lovely barbel swims, with brisk flows and gravely pools and shallows have been created from a straight dull uniform bit of dredged river. We want our name on a few of these pools!

The cost of reinstating the millions of tons of gravel the Water Authority dragged out is hard to envisage, but the continued work of the Agency, backed with help and ideas from the clubs and the Society, will mean that we can help the river to mend much more quickly than it will naturally. Top marks to the local clubs as well; they have been begged and cajoled and harassed by me to stump up some cash, and we now have over five thousand pounds to spend on some works that would otherwise not have happened. With luck, we could see the diggers on the bank this autumn, so I will be eager to do some before and after shots.
ORSU means Off River Support Unit, basically a big ditch, oxbow, backwater or cow drink that has been excavated to provide fry refuge in high winter flows in particular.

Roach and barbel spawning success
2nd May 2008

The EA have been doing some electro-fishing to monitor the coarse fish stocks in the Avon, and first news is that they found some good numbers of large barbel in the usual, expected reaches. It seems to me that the regular barbel anglers could have provided that information, as angler catches are a valid and invariably reliable way of determining fish stocks. There are some concerns that regularly shocking big fish can cause damage, both internal muscle/bone damage and damage to ova in spawning females, but on the other hand I am informed that the Calverton broodstock are obtained off the redds by electro fishing, and the same big female fish are caught year on year. These fish provide plenty of viable eggs, and many fertilised eggs are returned to the river as a result, along with the donor females. We must hope that the risk to the fish is worth it for the information it provides on stocks and age, growth and year class structure.

Good news is that numbers of small barbel, in the pound plus bracket, were discovered as well, and it will be most interesting to see the total catch data in due course. The Avon and Stour barbel are continuing to get fewer and fewer, although bigger and bigger, and the generations that will replace them are awaited with some eagerness.

The roach responded to the warmer temperatures by indulging in some feverish procreation, and Trev and Budgie were delighted to see that the spawning boards had worked fantastically well in some spots. There were some that were ignored. Not surprising when you consider how few roach there are in the river, but in places where roach were gathering, they chose the boards that Budgie had designed in preference to the weeds they normally used! There are now several thousand eggs beginning to transform into little roachlings in the hatchery tanks, and the sight of all those eggs plastered over the netting on the boards has made all the work those two guys have done over the winter more than worthwhile. They spent hours and hours thinking and planning and constructing the boards, and though it may be a few years before the fruits of their labours are realised, the whole exercise is entirely laudable, and a bit humbling. The tiny fish can be seen twitching inside the egg cases, and a massive shoal of pinheads are now starting to collect as they hatch in response to the warmer weather.

Mike Oz had a clear idea of what was needed on the Teme at Bransford, and organised the work with calm and confident efficiency. Some swims were made very accessible, and a few were created without any danger or disturbance to resident wildlife. We agreed that it was very late in the year to do any proper tree work, but a few isolated willow saplings were safely trimmed and we experimented with some spiling work to try and rescue an area of badly eroded bank. It will probably be too late for the willow stakes to take this year, but we may get away with some slight success in holding back the erosion. Next year more productive work can be done in plenty of time; the willow stakes really want planting late autumn/very early spring to give them the best chance, and technically I think need all sorts of official permissions and consents; our small works were a bit experimental, so we should get away with it!

The main works at Bransford are planned for the autumn, and some big willows are expecting a serious pollarding. This "sky lighting" will encourage low bankside growth and instream weed, all of benefit to fish and other wildlife. They look very bleak to begin with, but the way willows sprout and blossom into new life is something that always amazes me. Before and after pics are also very impressive.

The members who turned up were a great bunch of workers, and much was achieved with a good deal of banter and fun to liven up proceedings. Mike provided some very welcome tea, and Adrian provided the main entertainment by falling down holes regularly.

My third reasonably successful cast resulted in a violent take, that made my heart leap, but no leaping salmon came to light, just a snappy little pike that was swiftly returned none the worse for wear. The number of coarse fish taken on fly, spinner or prawn are remarkably few, and no more than the salmon or kelts taken outside of their season on coarse anglers baits, but pike, chub, bream and the very occasional barbel fall to the salmon anglers every year. All are returned carefully nowadays; it is a long time since the local clubs had rules stating that all pike and chub must be killed.

The day before I had helped Trev and Budgie with the installation of some of their roach spawning boards in the river, sidestreams and an offline pond that is well populated with Avon roach. The plan is try and help the perilously low roach stocks by growing on fry in tanks, using spawn gathered on the boards, and returning them to the river after a couple of years. A self-sustaining population is the ideal scenario, but the collapse of the Avon roach in much of the river means that some attempt to give Mother Nature a helping hand is worth a try. The EA are very supportive of the scheme, and we are all eagerly awaiting signs of spawning near the boards. The salmon have a more complex lifestyle, and hatchery schemes are a source of much more debate!

I agree with the current EA policy of not stocking barbel into rivers in which they are non-native and not already present, and I am sure that BS policy would follow suit. However, we live in a world where few rivers are anything like natural, and where resources including fish stocks need to be carefully managed and exploited at times to fulfil reasonable demands. In my view, the recreational and socio-economic benefits of generating a barbel population in the Blackwater outweigh any possible detriment to existing stocks of fish, and the river and wildlife and local anglers will all benefit when it becomes a more valuable angling resource. The Blackwater is threatened with increasing abstraction, and developing it into a more popular and valuable fishery will work towards giving it more protection, I feel. The EA do have a duty to maintain, improve and develop fisheries, and barbel in the Blackwater is a chance for them to do so with no risk to other species. Or interests, or of threatening biodiversity. I have seen no real evidence that coarse fish of other species are prone to adverse competition by barbel; the chub roach and bream of lowland rivers seem to thrive even better amongst barbel. Current EA guidelines on stocking are quite complex, but not written in black and white terms, and they are sensible enough to see that each river is special and must be judged on a case by case basis.

I will ask the BS to give this campaign every support, as long as the local anglers and clubs are keen on the idea, which they certainly seemed to be at the meeting later in the evening. A good time was had by all; Ade Kiddell gave an interesting talk on general barbel fishing, all those who turned up, about 100 I reckon, were well catered for, the question session at the end was pertinent and lively, and I won a pair of socks in the raffle.

The Wharfe is a sizeable river where we walked, and full of features and flowing nicely, although it seemed to me that like nearly all our rivers, it had been heavily engineered in the past in the name of flood relief, but had managed to mend itself over the years. It seemed that the barbel are more numerous, and at least as big as my local fish, and I was impressed by the open and genuinely relaxed and sensible attitude that Warren had to his fishing, Northern folk seemed very open and generous so far, and the crowd at the meeting that evening backed up that first impression. The Society should be very proud of the organisers and supporters in that region, and although the weather was cold and grim, their welcome was warm and friendly.

The BS fishery on the Swale is going to get a visit or two from me next year, so those northern barbel had better watch out.