And there it was….. gone!

Just before the summer lifestyle has got really featured into your weekly routine, and snuggled down into your thoughts. Topping up your optimism allowance with a bursting brimful of feelgood.  That eventual relief of knowing winter and its juddering  and jagged after-chills are now long gone; benign, and in remission.  Here you are, long last it seems, settling into days and endless evenings back in nature’s wonders, in those big and beautiful outdoors. Feeling at long last  the glow, the healing warmth; and wholesome sunshine; and believing those endless days of summer are now, in your mind at least; lining up and stretching out ahead to be savored.  Voomb! The solstice whizzes through and your quota is nowa diminishing supply, with each day cruelly shorter than the last.

In the physical  timeline of things, all that you were day-dreaming was ahead of you, is already now in the past. Midsummer is gone, passed through, left the station,  and for you and the world around you,  here now, the creeping decay towards the Autumn, that Fall, begins.

And so here you are, slightly flustered and regretful that you have missed the bloody boat…. Yet again.  Your just left making-do, playing catchup and grasping at chances.  With each quickly passing week, cruelly, the evenings get a little shorter and that dawns early light comes a little later with every passing day. Reminding you that a return of that biting wind, long dark nights and the dropping leaves, is now what lies ahead of you, and each squandered day brings you closer unfulfilled, to that inevitable fate of the clocks going back, those extra thermal layers and the biting misery of cold feet.  

It’s been a frivolous wastage of those precious moments of sunshine and smiles, and you will never, ever, get them back. You find yourself uttering, “Gawd it’s a beautiful day”!, That sky is blue, and the birds are joyously in song in late June, but your now under your little personal cloud as somewhere in nature, a clock is ticking in the background out of your reach, each tock playing with your thoughts, whittling away your contentment.

Abstract thoughts can be such a cruel blessing.

Although for the point I am making,  it is  back to March we need to travel now. Under those waters of the Brook, and winter has passed, light and some little warmth returns.  Within the female Trout the number of eggs to be developed that year are determined now, selected from some mysterious conglomeration of matter by the ovary, and christened by some gentleman or lady in a white lab  coat, the Germinal Epithelium. Which just adds to the mystery, awe and wonder in my uneducated brain. Had they called it the Doobury or the Skreat, it would seems so much less enigmatic and utterly wonderful than that grandiose moniker, the Germinal Epithelium.

These hundreds or even a few thousand, of tiny little cells join a few old eggs loose in the body cavity that were not shed in the previous spawn and the newly forming follicle cells. Inside the ovary these new eggs sit now  around 1mm in size, surrounded by follicle cells and wait. Stored ready within her cavity, waiting, until that peak of summer has passed and their journey to the Brook then really begins.

Until then energy of the food eaten from the Brook that is surplus to maintaining her weight and condition, is put into the hen’s growth, converted to new flesh, or, accumulated as her energy reserves.

Once  the mid-summer tilts and July gets underway, this extra energy is then put into developing those eggs, adding yolk and oily fats and proteins, swelling them all up to around 5mm. Some of those eggs inexplicably, break down in the ovary, and the follicles then produce a hormone needed for maturing the surrounding eggs, preparing for the most important act of the year; choosing and clearing a suitable gravel redd; carefully scrutinizing and selecting a male from the many suitors; and then spawning these miraculous little eggs into the Brook.

This isn’t Billericay, Blackpool, or Barnsley after a cold November night out on the town, nothing of last minute drunken desperation and “You’ll do love!” about this consummation.  Nothing haphazard, fatalist, or remotely indiscriminate about it. No, this is the accumulation of a series of careful considerations.

That cruel parody of this exacting process, the randomness of the stripped eggs and milt of the stock pond and the fish farm, haphazardly mixed together in a plastic bowl, is an anathema to her instincts and urges. An insult to her evolution. The Hen Trout is compelled to produce the optimum combination of genetic and environmental factors. Not just for her particular off-spring, but deeper, for the life of her species in that specific environment.

As the day lengths peak, and we humans lament  and grieve the passing Solstice, for those awaiting eggs in that spacious body cavity, the surrounding water now slowly changes to proteins and oils and hormones to complete them.  The acceleration towards teeming new life begin.

For the fisherman on a water like the Willow brook. The Grannom, the Mayfly,  many of the Up-wing Olive hatches, the Welshman’s Button Caddis, and those Blue Winged Olives have peaked and passed. The Trout feeding now becomes mysterious; harder to predict  and target, in the very long days.

These fishermen lament the summer’s heat and lack of surface activity, regretting now they had spent too few days appreciating the Mayfly, or being almost cowardly, avoiding the cold winds and occasional soaking, when those early Grannom Caddis clumsily fell on the waters and the Trout feasted and fattened on that early harvest. Still unconcerned it seemed of the presence of fishermen, and their splashy casts and dragging flies.

Often a badly timed trip to water in summer,  is met with a few hours of complete inactivity and very little sign of life of any type, the occasional willing Chub being scant consolation for these great white hunters.

I get told by people who are members of more than one club, “I fished last night on the Whatever and had three trout and lost another three, then I came down to Willowbrook at 2 pm and fished all afternoon and saw nothing”.  Such comments get me irrationally on the defensive for the honor of our little gem.

“Well go figure that one Einstein, maybe the Whatever was dead at 2pm too!” I think, but never say. “What a brainless comparison, try fishing the Brook at 10 o’clock at night and see what happens!”

And now they and their rods, must await the last days of summer, for the hints of Autumn when the water seems to freshen and some activity on the surface appears to return, easier to coincide with the Fly and Trout activity, now concentrated into shorter days.

And thus they wish away the best of summer for a few last glorious days in the sunshine before the Fall.

For a river keeper, or in my case, someone more informally linked to the habitat needs of the Trout’s ecology. My year starts from watching the weed growth in the stream, worrying about the algae build up, looking at how flows are reacting to the winter’s works, and then mentally noting the size of each of those hatches as the critters pass through, these latest trends for each of the insect species, noted in my diary, and hoping that they stick in my brain and become a wisdom of the water.

“That Grannom hatch wasn’t as dense as last year, but seemed to go on much longer in the colder wetter windy start to the season”.

“Even after the cold start. The Mayfly started as soon as the temp hit bang on 14.5c again”.

“The Blue winged olives where 3 weeks early and not with the same intensity”

“I’ve never noticed so many Welshman’s Button Caddis and seen the Trout going for them before”.

“Those clouds of Iron Blue Duns along the banks, were the first I had seen here for ten years or more”

Then as the number caught builds, I start considering the Trout, their sizes and numbers. By mid-season a picture will be appearing of the relative numbers of parr, juveniles, adults and older fish being caught in the system.

And then as the year turns on that Solstice and those evenings draw in, my attention also seems to instinctively change as I am drawn to start looking down at those gravel beds, our spawning grounds; those precious Redds; with a growing urgency to do what I can to get them right in plenty of time before November,.  

My feet now less aware of stealthy wading in pursuit, become more tuned to the actual feel of the footfall and the press coming back from the bed, feeling for the crispness of fresh clean gravel, or the soft spongy of silted up. Looking at new pockets, wiggling a boot down tentatively, feeling the depth. Considering what’s threatening the gravel beds and what can be done to help them increase their efficiency.

This man is mentally preparing for it, as that hen fish in the stream is instinctively priming for the same event. The days of deception and deceit over as the solstice passed, now the two bonded by a common goal; the best successful outcome in the Redds, from now on, that’s the focus and that’s all that matters.

Tight loops, wet lines and dry waders, to one and all.

Chris Avery