The answers part 2

I hate myself when it happens, and I go not so much into a rant, but more a marathon ‘stylie’ inform-athon.

While not falling into the full patronizing mansplaining mode that the perpetrator has just subjected me to. I feel a need to cover all bases, cut off further doubts and objections, and, like a diligent student, show all my working out, and where applicable, list all of my references and research. Snuffing outany further objections or arguments at the pass, and prevent them entering the field of discussion in future.

Though it could look like it, it’s not showing off. Just an attempt to bypass any more of this introductory ungainly dancing, the uncomfortable feeling-out, and unnecessary getting-to-know-you period. To be either accepted and dealt with on a level, or be put back firmly in my place. All the while during my outflow, the diatribe, being careful not to insult, put a nose out of joint, or create a wall or burn a bridge, where I desperately need a door or at least a window to open, and to come away with an new ally on side.

It may take 5 minutes or more, of what has to be a monologueand risk coming over as smart-assed, but can save then 20 tedious minutes of being batted back and bombarded with condescending tones, lost patience, fed only the barest basics and risk that descent into antagonism. Or, I can just end up looking like a complete twat and achieve very little.  

Looking like a complete twat’s not always bad if they need to deal with you again. It makes a mark, it sticks, it’s memorable. They then hopefully soon learn that you’re not as bad as they feared and open up more, thus licensing you extra leeway for ever doubting you in the first place.

You can always turn it round; but in this en-passe to get our Pump for the gravel back, time was not on the side of those Willow brook Trout I feared at the time. I needed to clear this human hurdle and gain a clear dash to the finishing line.

Usually I get this officious blocking from people who have been through education or training and can be incredibly knowledgeable about Carp, Algae; fresh water leeches; Guppies; or Tadpoles. But soon get left behind when discussing our unusual Trout stream in a region pretty thin on them and rely unfortunately on becoming increasingly condescending to keep one step ahead… “But hey, I’ve got the certificate in freshwater biology or a degree in ‘whatever’, and he’s just a lowly member of a fishing club telling me ‘stuff’, and there’s no way my ego’s going to concede he actually knows more about it than Me!”

And who can blame them.. they’ve spent many years of study to earn those letters that they proudly peg down the back of their names with. The gravitas acting as some sort of ballast to keep that newly inflated ego from floating up into the ether I guess. Their role now is to manage and inform, no longer to listen, grovel, and serve, that was for MacDonalds or the Whetherspoons bar, when they supplemented the cruel student loans with shit-end jobs under orders from sadistic cretin’s given uniforms.

This was a Trout stream expert blocking me though, giving me the runaround and dismissing my experience and knowledge of my patch, and he knew his stuff.  Just that this learn’ed obstacle in our way, did not know the whims and vagrancies of our particular water and its Trout population, nor was he aware of my experience with it, it seemed. So I needed to bypass the basic getting to know you stage, which had lamentably failed and hit a brick wall. Cut to justifying my position, and to get him listening properly to my concerns.

Normally if I realise this is likely to happen in an upcoming meeting, I review all the research and data for a night or two, practice the conversation, build up my confidence and prevent the dreaded drying up on detail (an opportunity for them to interject and take back initiative).

This one came at me out of the blue and completely unexpected from an interaction with the Wild Trout Trust, I took a deep breath and got out as politely as possible a bombardment that went something like this I hope, well this is what was intended:-

“Can I please have a little time to explain a few things here? Simon Johnson, when he was the head of the Wild Trout Trust personally taught me to use that machine in the river, and where to use it and the basics of how to survey a stream bed. I’ve spent many years visiting other river keepers to see their work on Trout breeding and improve that surveying skill of mine. I’ve visited the river keepers in Derbyshire, in the Yorkshire dales, the Lincolnshire wolds and the Hampshire chalk streams to get advice and learn. I have been employed in feeder streams of the River Test working on spawning grounds. That pump machine that you are holding onto, was entrusted to us as a club, because we knew what we were doing and it was deemed particularly necessary for our waters.

I’ve been watching Trout breeding on the Willow brook over a dozen years now. I have photographed the hen cutting the redds, carefully selecting her mate from the cock fish around and chase off the rivals. I have watched her cover over the eggs with her tail after they’ve both settled together in the scrape and seen the puff of milt, and then seen her move forward cut a new Redd to cover the old. I’ve spent long hours on early November days photographing it. The pictures were published in your Salmo Trutta magazine of the Wild Trout Trust . So I do know and understand what the breeding looks like and entails, and, the difference between that and a lone Trout sat on the gravel with her fins down feeling the flow. Our Trout always, always, for the past dozen years or more, have come on to the Redds in the first two weeks of November.  Your colleagues at the WTT and at the EA had no problem accepting  this information from me in the past. Or dismissed my opinion when I said something was badly amiss with our stream bed.

Now I know that early November breeding is unusual for this part of the country that you cover and represent,  but ours do, !. I do habitat work in that stream all winter, I actually spend much more time on habitat than fishing. Every week when the water levels allow throughout the closed season, I’m working in that water and walking its banksides. There has never been any Trout seen on the Redds after November or evidence of new scrapes or activity. I have looked every year to find them, and I’m not the only one out looking. I’m not saying they don’t; it’s just they or any evidence of them, is ever witnessed.

I’ve  just surveyed the stream carefully for the potential sites and we seem to have lost a lot of gravel from the areas that we always had good spawning grounds. What is left is very compacted and heavily silted up. We do not have the time to waste looking again, honestly, the clock is ticking, it would be a waste of both of our time. If you’re not sure about me, then please talk to the guys at WTT about me. We need to get on.

Our population is scale sampled, the oldest Willow brook Trout’s are fast growing 4 year olds, (we may have 5 year olds, but we’ve never found them). So unlike other waters our adult breeding fish are not active for many years and now we have a problem recruiting more breeding aged fish. Unless we can help them with spawning and that first year of development then we are risking the vigor of our population. And that pump is the key to that. The problem at Willow brook is here and now, and I believe its urgent. I don’t want to wait until next year when its worse and more damage is done. And I certainly don’t want ‘anyone’ in that stream in November blowing the gravels clean when the Trout will already have been laying their eggs!

I can pick the pump up from wherever it is, and will personally drive the pump back to you or anyone who needs it and even help them use it. But we do need it back at the Brook now, where it was entrusted to us as a club, by the people who you represent. If you’re going to insist on making me wait for it, then maybe you could at least advise me where we can hire one from.”

That seemed to do it and erode the objections. The machine was promised to us now in early October with the proviso that our local rep insisted he bring it personally and at least see where I planned to use it and check if I was right in what I was saying.. Result! A bit of Quid-Pro-Quo and face saving was completely understood in the circumstances. That was fine by me, once I had him on home territory, the river banks, talking about our Brook’s features I was confident in my knowledge, and he no doubt had some valuable fresh insights to share and plunder, it was win/win, I had needed to create an ally of this guy and a previously shut door was now opened.

Next, was getting some helpers.

I prefer the business end of the pump in my own hands, but need help moving it around and have the helpers working in the stream nearby with bars and rakes. I’m not great at delegating on this, I’m always critical of anyone else operating it, though I’m much too nice and diplomatic to bring it up (that word ‘diplomatic’ is doing some real heavy lifting in that sentence). 

Operating the Pump is very ‘Goldilocks’ in its results. Many operating it go too shallow and just endlessly puff away the surface silt and spend far too long on it making an immaculately clean surface and just couldn’t be made to understand the potentially disastrous consequences of this action. “Oh what harm could I be doing?!”

Imagine some helpful guest offering to wash up, and then scouring the black off your non-stick pans until they’re good and shiny silver.

I preferred my backpack leaf blower for other members to use, it wasn’t as quick, powerful or thorough, but it couldn’t cause as much damage as a poorly operated 4 stroke motorised pump. Hand forks and bars are great, the best really, but they take a long time and a lot of work. We didn’t have the resources of numbers to do it by hand this year.

In a stream, a bed of gravel naturally settles and snuggles together over time, kept in shape and resisting the current, held there by the knit and the smaller particles cementing it down. A stable base layer of the stream, yet necessarily porous to some passing current forced down and through it, to be fully effective stream habitat.

Our problem is the silt carried into it, gets deposited in the gaps and chokes up the flow. We need to flush that out, but not the grit and smaller stone, to keep a supply of fresh oxygenated water to pass over the developing eggs. Needing to avoid disturbing the surface too much or the gravel becomes unstable. If it is, inevitably disturbed in places, we can to an extent bed it back down with a rake and let the waterflow, the currents, knit it back together. Like a trout does with her tail covering her scrape, but the best technique is toavoid this and get the Pump tube in deep down under the bed, helped by a long steel bar opening up and creating easy accessfor the steel tube, and then flush up the silt back through the gaps with a minimum disturbance to those surface stones. It’slike the diffuse pollution put in reverse.

If the surface layer has been too thoroughly cleaned by overlong pumping by our OCD operators; all the fines and small grit lost and the gravel jumbled over. It is no longer stable and just starts rolling away in the current. You can see it immediately tumble off and trundle away, to resettle naturally somewhere downstream. Too much of this on the gravels and we can strip away a lot of surface stone. Sadly we don’t have the spare depth on Willow brook to afford this.

This was the silver lining of losing the machine for a while, at least the members were not able to make this mistake, and so,they were obviously not to blame for our present predicament. That remained a mystery.

Most members of the club though, operating it, just harmlessly plunge it in here and there and as soon as they see silt puffing up,  they lose interest and move on, it’s not cleaning the bed its just opening a few pockets that will fill again, just going through the motions and a waste of everyone’s time. Still, at least they had a go, contributed, and I earmark those areas to re-visit later.  

Really the only other person I saw use it correctly with any understanding was old Bernard, the mole catching; rabbit ferreting; farm labouring; tractor driving; vegetable growing; pheasant flushing; downstream wet fly fishing; pile driving and sledge hammering; able bodied old son of the soil. But sadly there’s only one of him and he was knocking on the door of his eightieth year. His spirit was always willing, but we needed to preserve him. Too valuable and heartbreaking to loose and he owed us nothing now. He’d paid back the Brook many times over.

Your probably asking why? Why is all this necessary and did old river keepers need to do this? Surely its natural and unavoidable for a stream to be silted up a bit.

 Siltation from diffuse pollution, washed off the fields and damaged banksides, is often due to modern agricultural practices, so they wouldn’t have faced the same threats. Frank Sawyer the famous river keeper and inventor of the Pheasants Tail Nymph fly, and the Killer Bug, used to clean the Redds on his river with a Pony and a plough of some sort, there is a photo of him leading the beast down the center of the river, ripping into the beds. Sadly I sold all of my Frank Sawyer books and can no longer reference which river. Nor find if this was a one off experiment that was photographed, or a regular part of his yearly maintenance.  I wonder if the gravels were more stable in the flows than ours, whether the shape of them knit back together better than our rounded glacial deposits and crushed limestone mix. It’s certainly not for me to criticize the great man, and how I would have loved to have talked to old Frank about our wee Brook.

Once I had everything at last lined up and ready, I sent out a date to the chairman informing him when we aimed to do the work, then the truth finally came out at long last.

The old secretary casually mentioned that the pump was unnecessary and it was too much effort and that the club could easily afford to get a digger driver in to clean the gravels, “…it was much easier and a more efficient way of cleaning them!” He claimed.

This was communicated via an email cc’d to all the membersof the club, (an ‘Old’ tactic from the bad ‘old’ days of the club politics, when the ‘old’ claret laden Chairman and this‘old’ Secretary, seemingly lacking any filter, would deliver good ‘Old’ put-downs, public humiliation and challenges, by such emails on long winter nights).

“ You can’t get a digging machine to clean the gravels you’ll wreck the bed and banksides!” I reasoned with him, hoping he’d think it through.

“No it won’t , we’ve already done it! It did a great job and was very tidy on the banks, it was very successful.”

I was stumped. “Who did it, what..with what digger?” I was half expecting old Bernard to be driving it, which would have been almost acceptable.

“We hired in Oundle Drainage ( a local groundworks company),  Barry sent his son”

…this is a guy who I’d worked with on a landscape site and refused to book again..he had cut so many corners and caused so much damage, he was a clot, possibly the worst Backhoe operator I’d come across. My heart sunk.

Then the photos appeared of a very large caterpillar tracked digger from a few years previous, with present members of the club merrily watching on as the machines lifted huge buckets full of river bed high into the air and then dropping it back into the stream to flush away the silt, grit and fines.

Apparently he tried combing it with the teeth and then decided it was better and more thorough to scape it up by the bucket load and pour it back in. The fish feeding downstream on all the dislodged larvae must have been having a fiesta if they could see anything in the water.

I don’t know who suggested it and with what intention, no doubt it started out to be as gentle as possible, but it seems the plan had got out of hand. Even Frank Sawyers horse drawn plough would have seemed a gentle combing through in comparison.

In the 1960s I am told by an old farm labourer, that the land Owner had come to this stretch of what he considered at the time a drain across his land, despite a fishing club using it. And in the sections he and his forefathers hadn’t previously straightened and still had some natural stream base, used a digger to take out the crushed limestone gravel and compacted it down as farm tracks.

Over the following 50 years the Brook had gradually eroded enough banksides and sorted enough stone from upstream to replace some of the losses, which had then collected in beds as our rare and very slowly increasing redds. Which we’d then spent years of putting in flow deflectors to sort and grade the stone, to flush out the silt and trap it in the sides, we’d done everything we could to accelerate the progress and restore the stream. 

Now the very fishing club  who describes itself as the guardians of these waters, whose mission was preserving the Trout habitat, was again getting a digger in to lift up the collected and remaining gravels off the beds and loosen it,t hen drop it back shapeless and random, lacking it’s bonding grit and fines, with the result that when the winter floods came it was then carried off far down-stream. Flushed away, years of work and recovery.

And so at long last, here was the answer to the disappearing Trout Redds and the mounds of mysterious new gravels that now choked back uselessly far upstream of the Nassingtonroad bridge, too shallow to be of any use. And of the damaged silt traps caught no doubt by the operators bucket snapping the steel ties, and then damaged high banksides now crumbling inand causing more diffuse pollution. The reason was clear.

Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut!

Of all the things that I could imagine, I never suspected the club itself had been so reckless and cavalier with all our good works and the time and materials that we had invested.

I was not so much heartbroken, just stunned at the stupidity of some feckless people on the banks in those photos, who really should have known better. I can’t blame the Old Doctors or Accountants in the pics. But there were the supposed countrymen, men of the lands, water scientists and Architects, many of whom had been on courses with me, learning habitat management, who’d just stood and accepted this as good practice, and should have known better. No one had spoke up for the stream it seemed.

No not heartbroken, just increasingly livid, and could feel it building and would need to be careful now!

I realised they, the active members, were all getting older and none of them, apart from old Bernard, had my background of physical labour and strength, but surely they could see this had been a mistake. The damage was plain to see and I was sure with all this cloak and dagger stuff, keeping me away from the pump and the facts of what they had been up to.Some of them must have realized this was a step too far, best not mentioned!

But No. Now I had a defiant ex secretary with the gloves off, desperately it seemed, saving face, sending out CC’d emailed essays, saying we should hire the digger back in and resist my attempts to use the old pump which he was claiming publicly wasn’t practical and too much hard work and was ineffective. And that the digger previously, in his opinion and to his and ‘everyone’s delight’, had been a brilliant success!

This was like listening to the Kremlin talking about Putin’s peaceful operations to liberate the oppressed Ukrainians!

I ignored his suggestions and simply countered by saying that I had now already organized this with the Wild Trout Trust, they had approved this course of action and would be advising us. And then added, without pointing a finger at anyone in particular, that much of the damage to the area that we needed to repair and our shifting gravels, had probably been caused by that digger.

I thought that would be it, put to bed.

I should have known better…The reply was gleeful, he might as well have shouted checkmate too!. That the Wild Trout Trust themselves used giant diggers for habitat work, they have pictures in the magazine of them using them instream pouring in buckets of gravels.

He was not going to let it drop, and I knew anyone viewing the exchange would soon get fatigued by it.

I countered, that was in construction and on projects much larger than our little brook, and that we had used a large bucket too, to put 30 tonnes of gravel into this stream… but neither of those examples are gently cleaning existing gravels, which is what we needed to do here.

The ex-secretary then took this as a challenge and suggested we do both actions at the same time to compare results and see which works best, adding that he’d organize booking the Digger again.

I briefly considered sending out a long considered answer pointing out all the obvious flaws in this. I deliberated over the words and wrote it, but re-reading it through, realized it would be looking to the viewers, the other club members, as a prolonged piece of tedious bickering they were being drawn into, and would just invite further ridiculous and unrealistic arguments.

This wasn’t about winning an argument, it was about keeping the club on side, It needed nipping in the bud now and closing down. 

So for the second time at Willow brook  I resorted to the ‘short and sweet’ slam down. The verbal microphone drop.

I hate myself when it happens…. Relying upon an authoritative tone I didn’t really have or hadn’t been granted by anyone. It’s passive aggressive,… bullying in short; and when seen in myself, it’s unedifying.  

Last time I used the tactic was at an AGM when someone suggested re stocking the upper beats of the Brook again withfarmed stock-pond Trout. Then I needed to snuff out this hideous faux pas, before it became a discussion point. And sadly unable, in the clubs constitution, to shoot that transgressor in the head and thus put us all out of his misery. That time I resorted to the Mike drop in spoken words, and this time I put them in an email and prayed for the same outcome and result.

(I cant remember if I took the CC off the email, I meant too), I just simply replied.“ That’s not F**Ing going to happen!!”

The challenge wasn’t answered or commented upon. The Emails ceased. The digger was never mentioned again, although the opportunity certainly, sadly, did arise.

The worst thing about dealing with all this habitat stuff, is sometimes having to deal with bloody Humans and my own failings with communication skills.

I realised immediately I had now relied on that trick once too often. I needed to have the authority on these decisions in future. After fighting them, manipulating , and going behind their backs for years, now I needed to find a way to become part of the club hierarchy.

A very happy week to you all, the tightest of lines and the driest of fragrantly fresh waders.

Chris Avery