EA Net the Jubilee River

I’m not going to put many words to this story, but let the pictures tell it.

My point in many forum threads when anglers ask “where is my licence money going?” is, does your club ever ask the EA for any help? Our association gets on well with the local EA fisheries department and as a result, they recommended us to hold the fishing rights to a significant length of the new Jubilee River. Now, they want to know what species of fish are in there as it wasn’t stocked except with what has washed in through flooding or come down via the fish bypasses, how many and how big are they?

Just last week I was contacted by Dr. Alan Butterworth saying that they would do a sample netting of a section of the river, did I want to look in? You bet!

The net is paid out…   …and then hauled in by hand   Who wants to be a fisheries officer, in December?

The first netting didn’t result in much. A couple of small roach up to 6″ and a few of this year’s (?) young ones, perhaps 18 fish in all. Very disappointing, but scales were taken off most samples to be sent away for aging.

All fish are measured   Lisa takes a scale

The second netting went better, perhaps the first one woke up some of the dormant fish. Or it might have been because they set the second net a little closer to the far bank and the two barrier nets. Whatever, they had some nice results in this second attempt with a lot of small roach, bleak and even some sticklebacks.

A surprise pike   A bullhead   One of the breeders

As I left they were completing a third netting and from this they can say with a better degree of accuracy what is in the river. Although this is December and many bigger fish could be shoaled up and where we were netting, we could be missing them completely. We did have one eel of just over 60 cm though and as Alan pointed out, it was of nice smokeable size, if you like smoked eel.

It could be a while before all the results are known, but we are interested in the growth rate of these fish. If, as we suspect, the roach of 15cm are only 2 or 3 years old, then they could carry on growing and produce two-pounders. Much of the weed, a type of stonewort, is alive with crustaceans of all kinds and fish over one year old will thrive on this. However, we could still be looking at a further 4-6 years before the river starts to show it’s full potential.

The signs are promising though and this, fellow anglers, is where your licence money goes.