I come from a town where,
during my childhood, the river ran black from a cocktail
of textile wastes and dyestuffs. During the 1960s the idea
that the river Calder in Dewsbury, once one of the North
of England’s grimiest textile towns, could ever support
fish was unimaginable.
Along its banks the eye-stinging vapours
would mix with the pungent perfume of Himalayan balsam,
a prolific invader with small bulbous seed-pods that would
burst with a satisfying pop when squeezed between thumb
and forefinger.
Today the Calder in Dewsbury is still
polluted but the river is much cleaner than it was and just
a few miles upstream in the mill towns of Sowerby Bridge
and Elland, improvements in water quality have been dramatic.
Environmental interventions have played their part but the
restoration of the river’s fortunes, I suspect, owes
more to the collapse of the textile industry.
In the quiet week after Christmas, I slipped
away from my in-laws, where we were spending the break,
to try my hand with a nymph in a section of river that,
until recently, had been all but forgotten by anglers since
the days before the industrial revolution.
Drew Short, a fishing partner for many
years, suggested a team of two nymphs - a tungsten-weighted
pattern on the point to get the fly down quickly, and either
a gold or silver headed nymph on a dropper that would bob
along a foot or so from the river bed.
It didn’t take long to connect with
a grayling. Drew was catching too and every fish was taking
the nymph on the dropper. The runs were fishing well.
A little while back I had bought a centre-pin
reel to do some trotting, mainly for barbel and other coarse
species. This section of river, where almost every overhanging
tree branch is strewn with strands from discarded plastic
shopping bags and other bits of rubbish, is nothing like
so purist as the average chalk stream. Here anything goes,
so, as the daylight began to fade, we rigged up some course
tackle and let the stream take some trotted maggots down
one of the runs. The float was dipping on almost every trot
and most of the takes brought a fish – a collection
of grayling and the most beautifully marked brown trout
that you could find anywhere.
There was a downside. Snow was falling
and the water was cold, even colder when I tripped over
some obstacle on the river-bed and pitched forward in to
the stream. “Well that’s it,” said Drew
motioning to go. But I was determined to try the trotting
reel. Over the next twenty minutes the water that had caught
in the top of my breast-waders gradually percolated down
to my socks.
The upside was that on our return, wading
under a bridge, we found a stunt bicycle in reasonable fettle.
You don’t tend to find this kind of reusable junk
in the Hampshire chalk streams. A little bit of cleaning,
polishing, oiling and chain repair has brought it back to
working order - the best catch of the day.
A few days later, back in the South of
England, I drove over to the River Wylye in Wiltshire. The
section that I fish has suffered noticeably this year through
a combination of low flows and persistent over grazing by
swans. The few grayling I caught were meagre specimens,
struggling to survive in a shallow, weed-free river. In
contrast, last weekend, Drew caught a grayling of more than
2 lbs from the Calder. “I thought I had two on for
a while,” he said.
Swan populations suffered in the 1960s
and 70s when lead shot was freely used by anglers. Today,
however, they have recovered to an extent that large numbers
of them are patrolling the chalk streams, eating the water
crowfoot that supports so much aquatic life. On one occasion
in the summer there were so many in a field by the river
it looked like a flock of bleached sheep.
The dark red meat of the swan makes for
good eating. I was served some once after a bird had been
shot by mistake in slightly disreputable circumstances.
But its potential as a game bird is about the same as that
of the farmyard chicken. Swan Upping, the annual census
of swans on the River Thames, harks back to the time when
the swan was prized for stately banquets before farmed Turkeys
from the New World became plentiful. Beak-marking of swans
to denote private ownership is now only carried out by the
Vintners’ and Dyers’ livery companies. The Crown
can lay claim to the rest.
Swan populations have risen so markedly
that it might be time to revive it as an eating bird. Not
that there is much chance of that happening. The swan has
earned itself that special status enjoyed by domestic pets,
prized more today for its aesthetic appeal than its eating.
I blame Tchaikovsky.
My suggestion last month of a fly
fishing Macnab (a salmon, sea trout, brown trout and
bass in the space of 24-hours), has led to some debate over
whether it might be possible on a single English river.
More on this, I hope, next month. In the meantime there
may be a need to start “trout upping”, just
to make sure they’re still there.
