The People's Front for the Liberation of Fishing

Fishing or angling? Debate over the name of the new all-embracing organisation that is going to represent angling interests in England and Wales has swung away from Angling (or Angling Unity) to something around that word “fishing” I can exclusively reveal.

This is my first bit of exclusive revealing, I do believe, since I exclusively revealed that the body would be called Angling Unity (or Angling). I had every confidence in this assertion because here, for the first time, anglers were speaking as one.

That was before some splitter suggested “Fishing” of all things. So the betting has swung now to something like the Fishing Association or simply Fishing although you can get good odds on “Judean Liberation Front.”

Apparently there was a feeling that “Angling” sounded too antiquated, the sort of thing that Isaak Walton would do with a pole and a length of cat gut.

Fishing, on the other hand is bold, simple and to the point. Unless, of course, you use a net. Then there’s the problem with gender neutrality. The beauty of “angler” is that it can refer to either sex while the rarely used “fisher” does not trip off the tongue so easily as “fisherman” which can get us in to so much trouble with the gender police.

Fisherman is the word you associate with so-called fishing humour – the male-oriented birthday cards, mugs and tee-shirts depicting silly men standing in the rain in waders, exaggerating the size of their catch or doing unspeakable things with maggots.

Fishermen refer to their wives (they don’t have partners) as “‘er indoors.” They lie about walking the dog or going shopping when really they’re off to the river. They’re always buying tackle they don’t need to feed their obsession and they eat Marmite sandwiches washed down with flasks of lukewarm instant coffee.

It is for this reason that I have persisted with the concept of the “fisher” in my writing. I think it works particularly well in fly fishing and have absolutely no problem now writing of “fly fishers.” Somehow “fly anglers” just doesn’t work so well for me.

Angling, on the other hand, has survived well over the centuries, which is surprising given its description, not of fishing, but merely the angle of rod and line. But it doesn’t look as if it will survive as the name for the new body.

Instead it seems we are marching in to the bright new dawn as fishers who go fishing. Unless someone decides otherwise and at some future date I can exclusively reveal that the People’s Front for the Liberation of Fishing has prevailed.

What ever happened to the Vosso?

For some time now I have been curious to know what happened to the salmon runs on Norway's Vosso River that I read so much about in Arthur Oglesby's book, Salmon.

I started a discussion about it here in this fly fishing forums thread. After carrying out some recent work looking at the salmon farming industry I am now convinced that salmon farming was largely to blame.

There is an excellent feature about the river in the Winter 2007 journal of the Flyfishers' Club. The feature, written by Morten Harangen, mentions a recent fishing trip to the river when he failed to catch anything.

He says the record book for 2005 mentions "seven or eight" salmon caught on the river. But were these genetic Vosso salmon? Or were they escaped farm salmon? It does not say.

The catch is pitifully small, even if, as Harangen asserts, "there is no doubt there are still a few forty to fifty pounders out there."

I hope he is right. What will be difficult to discern is their genetic purity. On the other hand there is every reason to believe that something, if not entirely genetically pure, then very close to the original strain, could be restored even if it hails from a salmon farm cage. This is because a significant constituent of the Mowi strain, the first salmon farm fish to emerge in Norway, were salmon taken from a Vosso tributary, the Bolstad.

These large-growing fish are typically four or five sea-winter fish. The more winters that salmon spend at sea, the bigger they get, hence some excitement in the May Tay Salmon news bulletin from the Tay Salmon Fisheries Board, that a good proportion of the Tay's spring fish this year appear to have been bigger three-winter salmon.

All well and good - I'm as delighted as anyone to see evidence of big spring salmon back in the Tay - but the run is still relatively small compared with the 1970s. A few big salmon does not a spring run make.

As for the Vosso, it was closed in 1992 and re-opened in 1998 without any signs of improvement.

So why did the river collapse? Karl Magne Bolstad whose Berga farm overlooks the Bolstad pool, and which has some of the most famous beats on the river, has no doubt that many smolts were killed by sea lice that accumulate in large numbers around salmon farm cages. But there was also a lot of dumping in the river when a road was built. That killed a lot of fish, he says. Moreover a power plant constructed on the river led to significant changes in water temperature, another possible contributory factor.

It's astonishing how human activity in different areas has collectively destroyed one of the world's most precious wild salmon rivers with barely a whimper of protest. Today, hatchery-reared smolts are being transported past the salmon cages but will that work as a conservation effort?

Bolstad does not sound too optimistic of restoring the strain. A once mighty salmon river, its fish the stuff of legends, has been lost to angling and may never return. That's a crying shame.

Saturday's fish is Sunday's dinner

There are magical chalk streams and there is Sally Merison’s beat of the river Dever just a few minutes away from the busy A303. As a tributary of the River Test, the Dever is smaller than its more famous big sister, but no less pretty.

A small syndicate fishes the stretch that runs past Sally’s house but not at the weekends when she allows family and friends to fish. That’s when she’s not fishing herself. I had a great day fishing here last year with Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance.

This last weekend Sally invited us again. It’s not just the fishing either; she spoils us silly with a trencherman’s lunch in the hut. One or two Mayfly were coming off the water but not enough to interest the fish yet.

We started fishing shortly before noon and I soon found a feeding fish in mid-stream on a 15 yard cast. But just to the right and closer there was another larger fish in the shallows under a tree. It’s a difficult cast with a tree behind and a need to slot a sideways cast below a branch and above some bank-side vegetation.

The fish needed the fly just a little in front. It took an interest but not enough. I changed the fly to a small brown spinner imitation. Another cast or two and he went for it. Once the fish was returned I started casting to the farther fish that was feeding midstream a little way up from the bend. The trees allowed a long straight cast and the fish took the fly quickly. With two early fish I was thinking it was going to be a day of easy fishing. Far from it. Most of the fish were sitting deep, sullen looking. But there was still plenty action for the dry fly.

I notice that the trout pigmentation varies quite dramatically on different fish. Sally says the fish take the hue of their surroundings. She thinks it has something to do with visual information passed through the eye. Fish that have spent time in a culvert, she says, are dark coloured, while those that have been sitting on shingle are sandy coloured.

The trout today are quite choosy. There are just a few feeding fish but I’m picking them off as I find them, sometimes with a change of fly, often spending some time on one fish. You know you have a fight with a 3 pounder on same strength tippet fished off a 3 weight line on a light seven foot rod.

I read a lot about matching the hatch but when not much is hatching, what do you do? The fish seem to be taking small flies so I try small grey dusters and klinkhammers. Both work with different fish. I end up with eight for the afternoon, all between one and a half and three and a half pounds.

These would have been caught on perhaps five or six different flies. I kept one fish and had a look at its stomach contents. There were four different insects, two different coloured midges, a Mayfly larva and a cardinal beetle.

The point I would make is that article after article in the fishing magazines will concentrate on fly types, yet if you can present a fly well to a feeding fish and if that fly looks a reasonable approximation to an insect there is a good chance you might get it to take.

I found one fish, almost tempted it, then spooked it and I moved on. Later I came back to the spot and saw it was feeding again. I tried a different fly and it took. All the fish were well hooked and all came to the net. It doesn’t always happen like this.

The fish I kept weighed in at 3 lb. I gutted it on the Saturday evening and rubbed some sea salt on the insides and flanks, wrapping the fish in silver foil. The next day I cut off the head and tail, stuffed the insides with herbs from the garden, propped the flanks open with sticks and laid it belly down on the grill in the smoking tin, leaving it to smoke over wet wood chips on a burner for about forty minutes.

The result was a meaty, lightly smoked and herb flavoured fish great with a bit of lemon, mayonnaise, salad and new potatoes and plenty for four of us.

One Fly, one dace

I took part in the One Fly competition on the River Test the other week. I plan to have a report in my fishing section soon when the FT gets round to publishing it.

For my own part I found it a little disappointing hauling out(not many)rainbow trout stockies from cloudy water on a fast retrieved nymph. It's not the way I like to fish a chalk stream.

The weather was warm yesterday so I popped down to the River Wey near Elstead only to find that it too was cloudy, like thin cocoa. There was nothing doing but on my way back to the car I saw a fish taking insects from the surface. It was a peculiar swirling rise, not like that you get from a trout or even a grayling.

Anyway I stuck a little black fly on, had it taken, and there was a dace. Just one little fish but it made the trip worthwhile somehow.