Chris Avery | Thursday, 23 January 2025
Christmas presents are a brilliant deliverer of change, in the annual Trout habitat management schedule. Specifically it seems, Single Malt Whiskey; plain chocolate ginger truffles; and a home-made greetings cards with a snowy picture of the Brook printed upon it. Delivered, on a grey cold and dreary Saturday morning, they achieve so much …especially when hand delivered, not be little elves but by two sheepish contrite looking grey haired gits, and many weeks late!
One of the annual tasks of being this particular small fishing club, is transversing the borough to the variety of dwellings of those who own the banks of our water, and to whom we are to pay our dues, which we must. Fulfilling that nosey parker, sticky-beak itch, of seeing how the various other-sides live, while briefly hobnobbing with the Bourgeoisie, don’t you know!
Our dues being simply, that single bottle of malt whisky.
Whosoever back in the midst of time sealed that deal was a cheeky genius, whom is owed much thanks and praise! Without such largesse from the landowners our membership fees would be much higher, and no doubt in those days of stocking dopey slobs of farmed fish, the club would have folded under the financial burden of high membership fees and the growing disquiet and despair of increasingly woeful catch returns. Or, there again, maybe the club would have been forced into a more enlightened path earlier, and it in fact, prolonged our collective misery.
What is the fly fishing equivalence of a sliding doors moment? A slithery boulder moment? A wader crotch stretched over the twanging barbed wire moment?.... ( answers to the editor please).
This gift of fishing their lands does come with some constraint. Many of our problems and habitat woes, flow from both historic and present agricultural policies and land (miss-)management, and result directly from some of these landowners and their forefathers actions. We can’t kick up a fuss and get the Environment Agency involved, quoting some act or other for them to force their hands to mend or cease these farming practices, or we would all end up Brookless and fishing the local reservoirs for those fat stocked slobs.
Surely that’s what awaits in fishing purgatory for the dry fly river man.
That I fear, maybe my ghastly fate when I depart this mortal coil, and my level of damnation for all eternity is decreed to be endlessly stripping back the Woolly Buggers of fate, while stood on the concrete dam wall of eternity, until all time runs dry. And they then hand me a team of buzzers and order my unwilling hands to figure of eight retrieve them endlessly or until all hell grows cold. But for now long may I wade in running waters where the only hell known is an un-noticed Hawthorn bush in range of your back cast!
Thankfully on my watch only a few times have things gone awry with the water quality and we have had to notify authorities.
On those occasions the source has been one particular landowner with a stately home far far upstream ( by our lilliputian scale of reference) or the cock-ups of our splendiferous local privatised water authority. Those shareholders whose pension funds we contribute to in Canada and Australia, no doubt give not a toss about the raw sewage being poured out for many days unchecked into a child’s boating lake, and then overflowing into our lovely Brook which they are profiting from. Why should they?!
Anglian Water didn’t lift a finger, despite being made aware of the problem days earlier, until we, 12 miles downstream pointed it out to the authorities that on these rare, bright and balmy days of summer; not all was as it should be.
Up and down the Brook, children and dogs were gleefully paddling in this stuff and those authorities now notified, were also now obligated with a duty of care for the delightful and noisy, yappy, snappy little beasts; and even for the dogs. While upon our own banks, Moo Cows were slurping it up from the very cattle drinkers that we had provided for them, and our insects were choking and disappearing from the kick samples.
And then in some divine pincer movement, independently of our complaints it seems, the local press got involved. At last there was a reaction from the seemingly slumbering evil perpetrators in their shadowy offices, no doubt engrossed conquering Candy Crush or online Sudoku.
“Oh it’s made front page of the papers has it? Dear me! I suppose now we had better sends some chaps to plug up the hole, after all we are about to put the household bills up to increase those lovely profits, and we need to look like we actually care for anything other than bonuses and dividends. Its such a hard and thankless life… running a water company”.
Or had this farce been an episode of Scooby Doo…”Drat!! If it hadn’t been for those pesky interfering fishermen we’d have got clean away with shitting up the environment ….again!”
But I digress… and you dear reader must by now fear that habit of mine, so back on track…deep breath here, count to ten, and another potential rant avoided!
In my habitat ambitions there are 3 particular goals that I feel I need to achieve, not so much to improve our lot, though that’s always nice, but to future proof us from potential problems arising from the increasing number of new developments, in that constant for march ‘progress’ and need for more housing around the old steel town, upstream.
To continue to deal with choking from the seemingly endless problems of siltation and phosphates from our banks and sources up stream
And, especially the dangers from the energising of our climate and its inevitable hardships for this environment that we’ve come to nurture and protect. And, since as we have grown to know and respect it, have forged a strengthening bond.
Our fishery fundamentally needs to be cooler in its summer peaks or the first casualties a few degrees of centigrade up from now, will be the gonads of the unfortunate male Trout, shrunken permanently and no longer fully fit for purpose ( I think I know that feeling). A few degrees more and we potentially start to lose the Trout themselves as the oxygen levels are starved from the waters. It’s now that close and uncomfortable.
Momentarily we have briefly visited those temperatures over recent years, and it left me feeling quite futile and hopeless when faced with the figures. Seeing 24.5c on a thermometer last year and realising that was a true reading of the water temperature and it was destined to rise more in the coming hours, kicked in the opposite of the old familiar flight or fight; Instead a confused brain fug and swirling feeling when your struggling to compute that your destined to be delivered a blow that’s beyond your capacity to either deal, with or prevent. I imagine some of Mike Tyson’s mismatched opponents have felt the same with the first sickening crunch.
Knowing there is no universal thermostat you can conveniently turn down, no switch to be magically flicked to make instantly Tickety Boo! No practical solution. Not even some cobbled together improvisation to get you through the worst of it. There is nothing immediately for you to do but stand helplessly by and pray this is as bad as it gets …this time!
With each passing summer we are clearly and increasingly warned of what’s relentlessly coming ; and, knowing there’s no off the shelf quick fix, we have to prepare while we can, with what’s practically available to us. And crucially, with the understanding and generosity of those land owners .
So on that Saturday morning in January, it was the the fishing club and the Brook that got the best presents.
Coming next; Those gifts that keeps on giving, and The gloves are finally off for little Bonzo!
(And who would have known one of our main riparian owners was a huge fan of Sexyloops, kid you not!)
All the best to all out there in fly casting lands
Laters!
Chris Avery