January 2006 – Where there’s muck there’s fish

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.