Shellfish behaviour
Humiliated in a pub quiz at the Britannia Inn, Elterwater in the Lake District. The plan was to be home by now after a week on the Isle of Skye but bad traffic in Scotland forced a change of course. My God there are some scruffy areas on the outskirts of Falkirk.
We diverted to the Lake District and the Langdale Hotel. The pub meal was fine but we were kicked out of one room that the waitress told us was the "restaurant" where prices were 10 per cent higher. I think she was a bit irked when she found me laying our table after I had ordered at the bar. It's a pub. You go to the bar in pubs. I hate pubs with pretensions to be something they're not.
The upshot was that we ended up in the backroom with the locals who seemed to have a far better grasp of general knowledge than we did. I wouldn't have minded but the quiz marker even went so far as to add an "Sp" in brackets after a misspelling. I get better treatment than that from the FT sub editors. It was like school.
We were rubbish.
It's teeming down outside - exactly the weather we needed in Skye to provide a much needed spate that would have sent the fish up the river. The only fishing I had up to Saturday was an afternoon in a boat at sea fishing for mackerel and Pollock. Sea fishing is pretty messy.
We filleted our catch in the evening and barbecued it over an open fire by Neist Point Lighthouse where our friend, Jane, had just been celebrating her 50th birthday. There were a lot of lobsters, prawns and langoustines and plenty of champagne. Not a bad party all in all.
The trestle table featured in the pictures collapsed under the weight of Jane's son, Jack. Jane bruised her foot jumping off a wall - as you do at 50th birthday parties. Otherwise no major incidents.
From the cliffs we watched basking sharks and Minke whales feeding in the rich currents that work around the headland.
It was cloudy most of the time with the sort of fine drizzle that works in to your clothes but which doesn't soak anything. On Saturday there had been just enough rain to provide an outside chance of a run so I fished the river Snizort. The result was two small sea trout and a good pull which I'm sure was a salmon - I saw the fish - but which I didn't convert in to a catch.
The best, and saddest, story I heard in the week was that of the fresh-water mussel, once prolific in Scotland but now endangered. These wonderful creatures live up to 140 years, each purifying 50 litres of water a day while eating waste matter from salmon and trout
But they have been hunted almost to extinction for their pearls. It still happens illegally among locals who use glass-bottomed buckets. Historically the freshwater pearl was once so prized that Julius Caesar cited it to the senate as one of the reasons for invading Britain in 55 BC.
I always wondered what it was that brought the legions far in to the north of Scotland near rivers such as the Tay. It must have been the pearls.
The mussels need salmonids in their reproductive process since the gills of the salmon and sea trout host the juvenile mussels for a few months until they drop off in the headwaters of rivers. Today salmon and trout runs in many rivers are so sparse there is much less chance of spreading mussels and extending populations. Many mussel populations don't have reproducing adults anyway, just stately old mussels seeing out their days in a few spots out of reach of mussel hunters.
A few years back a clump of 800 80-year-old mussels was plucked from its habitat during so-called "river improvements". That's 64,000 years of life destroyed in a matter of minutes.
We need to know about these things when we fish. No species survives in isolation.
We diverted to the Lake District and the Langdale Hotel. The pub meal was fine but we were kicked out of one room that the waitress told us was the "restaurant" where prices were 10 per cent higher. I think she was a bit irked when she found me laying our table after I had ordered at the bar. It's a pub. You go to the bar in pubs. I hate pubs with pretensions to be something they're not.
The upshot was that we ended up in the backroom with the locals who seemed to have a far better grasp of general knowledge than we did. I wouldn't have minded but the quiz marker even went so far as to add an "Sp" in brackets after a misspelling. I get better treatment than that from the FT sub editors. It was like school.
We were rubbish.
It's teeming down outside - exactly the weather we needed in Skye to provide a much needed spate that would have sent the fish up the river. The only fishing I had up to Saturday was an afternoon in a boat at sea fishing for mackerel and Pollock. Sea fishing is pretty messy.
We filleted our catch in the evening and barbecued it over an open fire by Neist Point Lighthouse where our friend, Jane, had just been celebrating her 50th birthday. There were a lot of lobsters, prawns and langoustines and plenty of champagne. Not a bad party all in all.
The trestle table featured in the pictures collapsed under the weight of Jane's son, Jack. Jane bruised her foot jumping off a wall - as you do at 50th birthday parties. Otherwise no major incidents.
From the cliffs we watched basking sharks and Minke whales feeding in the rich currents that work around the headland.
It was cloudy most of the time with the sort of fine drizzle that works in to your clothes but which doesn't soak anything. On Saturday there had been just enough rain to provide an outside chance of a run so I fished the river Snizort. The result was two small sea trout and a good pull which I'm sure was a salmon - I saw the fish - but which I didn't convert in to a catch.
The best, and saddest, story I heard in the week was that of the fresh-water mussel, once prolific in Scotland but now endangered. These wonderful creatures live up to 140 years, each purifying 50 litres of water a day while eating waste matter from salmon and trout
But they have been hunted almost to extinction for their pearls. It still happens illegally among locals who use glass-bottomed buckets. Historically the freshwater pearl was once so prized that Julius Caesar cited it to the senate as one of the reasons for invading Britain in 55 BC.
I always wondered what it was that brought the legions far in to the north of Scotland near rivers such as the Tay. It must have been the pearls.
The mussels need salmonids in their reproductive process since the gills of the salmon and sea trout host the juvenile mussels for a few months until they drop off in the headwaters of rivers. Today salmon and trout runs in many rivers are so sparse there is much less chance of spreading mussels and extending populations. Many mussel populations don't have reproducing adults anyway, just stately old mussels seeing out their days in a few spots out of reach of mussel hunters.
A few years back a clump of 800 80-year-old mussels was plucked from its habitat during so-called "river improvements". That's 64,000 years of life destroyed in a matter of minutes.
We need to know about these things when we fish. No species survives in isolation.
Labels: Andy Taylor, Elterwater, Falkirk, freshwater mussels, FT, Julius Caesar, Lake District, Langdale Hotel, Neist Point Lighthouse, salmon, salmonids, Skye, trout
posted by Richard Donkin at
9:41 PM
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