How's your river level doing?

[Aknib]

Rain... Rain and... More rain.

The Trent has just topped three times its summer level at my regular checkpoint and will certainly keep going with more heavy rain that we're going to be getting in the early hours through to late morning tomorrow.

I still know a few spots i'd fancy for a Chub or two, how's your local river faring and will you be out to catch a hedgerow Chub?

 

[seth49]

These are ribble heights nr me.
And no it’s to cold and wet for my old bones,I’m happy waiting while it warms up a bit.

 

[Peter Jacobs]

I drove past our syndicate stretch of the Avon today and it is up over the banks and running hard.

 

[Pete Shears]

The Soar and the Wreake where I fish seem to be continually in flood,just as they drop to a fishable level another monsoon arrives.

 

[ian g]

Severn around Shrewsbury is around 3.5 meters above NSL , probably could find somewhere to fish but not sure I'll bother

 

[Ged28]

Looks like the lower Swale is about 14ft above summer level.

Edit
I've just read on facebook someones had 3 barbel out tonight. Hats off to him going in these conditions.

 

[riverman]

the river wharfe at wetherby has burst its banks and flooded one of the public car parks.

 

[@Clive]

My two local large rivers are chalk and cheese.

The Vienne is a freestone river rising on a high plateau and for much of its upper length has no major barrages so reacts quickly to rainfall. Below Availles-Limouzin there are three huge dams that act as regulators for the lower part. The record flood is only just over 5 metres. Even after a week of much neeed rainfall the upper stretch is now dropping after a 90cm rise in levels and below the big dams the hydrography chart is like an ECG trace as the three alternate letting water out to ensure continuous generation of electricity. In 24 hours typically you get the river running off 20cm followed by it rising the same height. That means only a few hours a day when it is pulling through.

The Charente starts out as a meadow land stream and enters limestone country about 40km later. As such it is much more regulated and whilst it has risen in the middle parts by 5 metres in the past, the lower part is more about flow than height as the surrounding land is barely 3m above sea level. At the moment the middle stretch that I fish is running a few cm above normal, but flowing quite a bit faster. There are plenty of places where fish can hide from the flow in locks and small channels.

 

[mikench]

I’ll be giving my local river a miss as I regularly do. I stopped the other day en route to have a look and it looked a raging torrent but hadn’t burst it’s banks.

 

[John Aston]

Looks like the lower Swale is about 14ft above summer level.

Edit
I've just read on facebook someones had 3 barbel out tonight. Hats off to him going in these conditions.

Damn ! I swerved the Swale yesterday as it was so huge and 'enjoyed' my annual blank on the Yorkshire Derwent. As I type , my favoured stretch is running 15.5ft above normal level. PS - after writing this post I thought I'd give it a bash. Jeez , feeder becks backed up over a mile each, acres of water in fields and route A under 2 ft plus of water and route B nearer 4ft .Back home - harrumph.

 

[Wakou]

Some might not be aware, google for "flood alerts" and narrow down to your river for real-time river levels provided by the automatic monitoring stations. eg.

River Chelmer level at Springfield - GOV.UK

Check the latest recorded river level and recent 5-day trend at Springfield

check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk

 

[keora]

Clive, what's the fishing like in France, compared to here in England?

 

[@Clive]

Clive, what's the fishing like in France, compared to here in England?

Much the same, but very different

One rod licence at €105 gives you legitimate access to all rivers and communal lakes where the banks have not been taken into private ownership. I would estimate that over 95% is available IF you can access it. You can legitimately cross fields to get to a river, but sometimes it is not possible to do so because of livestock or no vehicular access to anywhere near to the bank. Also, nobody trims the trees or hedgerows so sometimes there might be two or three places where you can fish in several kilometres of bank access. And they might not correspond with good places to fish.

Regards fish; if you discount the private carp puddles it is much the same as England regards species. The size of cyprinids other than catfish and carp is lower in my experience. There is little if any history of double figure tench, bream and barbel. Roach over 1lb would draw a crowd and it is only really predators that match UK sizes.

In my region bank space is much more available than back home. It gets busier in summer especially weekends, bank holidays and July - August when the tourists arrive. In general you can find quiet spots most of the time if you do the research first. Steve Arnold uses a google app to log fishing spots and access points. I have a notebook. Basically you start with google earth to locate likely places, then go and reccy them, and if access, ability to wield a rod, land any fish and it looks fishy all combine X marks the spot. Other than the carp brothels there is no grapevine to help you find good swims. Then use the river apps to check the level before travelling. Night fishing is restricted to a few places in many regions.

Buying tackle and bait is restrictive in that you won't find the choice you are used to. You might have to bring some rods in from the UK or pay a fortune for them over here. Maggots from small tackle shops are prohibitively expensive and poor quality. Fortunately you don't need them as sweetcorn does the job for most cyprinid species. Until the last few months when I have been buying some maggots for perch fishing I have managed with sweetcorn and garden worms for much of the last 11 years. If you need maggots go to the national chains.

Fly-fishing; there are no large trout reservoirs. Mostly the rivers and lakes are stocked with small trout in readiness for the March start and are empty by June. Small rivers suffer from the same problems with trees preventing casting. There are larger rivers that offer tremendous sport in their upper regions, but not near where we live. Same with grayling. None round here.t

Predator fishing with lures is practised by everyone and their wife. Usually latex jig heads and shads so I usually deadbait as every fish still living will have seen and ignored every lure on the market already. The season runs May to end of Jan.

 

[Steve Arnold]

The river Lot is bombing through today! The level will still be within its banks (just!) most places, but I stop fishing when the flow tops 160 m3/s.

One winter the flow topped 2000 m3/s. Now water weighs 1 Tonne (1000 kg) per cubic metre, scary to think the force in that flow!

 

[keora]

Clive, thanks for your description of angling in France. I've been on holiday there about ten times, although I've never fished.

Interesting that there's no large trout reservoirs. There's plenty in the UK although reservoir trout fishing is less popular now than say forty years ago.

I should imagine that water pollution in France is not as bad as in the UK. Since France is a much bigger country than the UK but with the same population, perhaps pollution might be more diluted.

Do the French take away coarse fish they catch? I know someone who went fishing with a French girlfriend while studying in France. They caught a carp and decided to eat it. He said it was terrible.

 

[@Clive]

There may be large commercial trout fisheries in other areas, but I have not heard of any. There are some huge public lakes where fishing takes place, mainly predator angling. The coarse fishing side is neglected and I always felt that there might be some cracking roach in them.

I have not witnessed any pollution. However, the sheer size of the agriculture here would suggest that there could be pollution from that.

The French are moving towards conservation in that many places now have No Kill zones for predators, grayling and trout. I think there is a general decline in eating coarse fish possibly due to younger anglers being less keen to eat anything that does not come pre-packed, and also the huge growth in carp fishing. Some of the batterie carp anglers would rather eat their own children than a carp. I honestly don't think that any white fish is much better or worse tasting than any other species. It largely depends on how they are cooked. In restaurants I have eaten zander and it reminds me of perch and sea bream in texture. The taste however depends on the herbs and sauce.

If you do come over to this region drop me a line and I will try and arrange to meet up. I can provide the tackle and bait and arrange a Carte de Peche. The Chateauneuf-sur-Charente in 16 or L'Isle-Jourdain in 86 are nice areas to visit and have good fishing places.

 

[keora]

I fish parts of the middle Wharfe in West Yorks. Catches have reduced in recent years - I'm in a club which has good evidence about the decline. I used to think the cause was a combination of predation (cormorants and otters) and pollution. There's been lots of publicity in the last few years about the water industry ignoring regulations and dumping untreated sewage in rivers. I think now that pollution is the main cause.

I've eaten a few perch that I've caught and they are good to eat. Zander is similar, never caught one although I've eaten one in Belgium. I've tried pike and they were bland and bony. Grayling are good, I've only eaten a few.

Thank you for your generous offer of advice on fishing French waters. I no longer go abroad these days, too much hassle. I'm even getting choosy when fishing locally - I don't travel as far as I used to.

 

[John Aston]

It is temptingly easy for anglers to blame loss of sport on obvious targets like otters or cormorants, but I think our community often does so without any actual evidence beyond anecdote and rumour . Even getting data on past catches is hard and some anglers of my age (f***ing ancient ) don rose tinted specs about their salad days on the river , when rivers were cleaner and fish were more numerous . My own diaries go back almost 50 years now and on the waters I fish reveal sport which was often, but not always ,far worse than it is now .

For many years I have been involved in invertebrate sampling as part of the Riverfly Partnership and it is a very useful tool to evaluate water quality and food availability - a sort of canary in a coalmine if you like. But if I mention this to some primarily coarse angling clubs, I tend to get blank looks and indifference . Some of that is down to ignorance, but as often as not is the fact that minds have already been made up - it's otters , or (in one local case ) it was , apparently , a source of pollution which they had been told about but which was being hushed up by 'certain people'. The reality , I suspect, is much more nuanced - rivers can decline because of a whole host of factors , often in combination - abstraction, pollution , drought, flooding , predation , climate change , agricultural run off, invasive species, disease , habitat loss , new industry and God knows what else .

But oh how we love the quick and dirty (and crowd pleasing ) diagnosis - " It's effing East Europeans/ otters/mink / zander/ Sooty's fault" and the facile solution '"restocking !" . Really , in a river with a problem - how does that work?

One thing I am getting involved in this year , and I'd encourage others to do so , is the 'Citizens Science' Water Quality Monitoring Network - the more hard data we have about pollution the better placed we are to act on it .More on Angling Trust website about this

 

[@Clive]

I fish parts of the middle Wharfe in West Yorks. Catches have reduced in recent years - I'm in a club which has good evidence about the decline. I used to think the cause was a combination of predation (cormorants and otters) and pollution. There's been lots of publicity in the last few years about the water industry ignoring regulations and dumping untreated sewage in rivers. I think now that pollution is the main cause.

I've eaten a few perch that I've caught and they are good to eat. Zander is similar, never caught one although I've eaten one in Belgium. I've tried pike and they were bland and bony. Grayling are good, I've only eaten a few.

Thank you for your generous offer of advice on fishing French waters. I no longer go abroad these days, too much hassle. I'm even getting choosy when fishing locally - I don't travel as far as I used to.

Well, maybe in the next few years I might have a day with you on the Wharfe? It will bring back memories of my epic 60+ mile round trips from Barnsley on a moped, initially suffering endless line breakages caused by ledgers getting caught on the bottom (for which I invented a breakaway rig out of split pins and drilled coffin leads) and large (for the Wharfe) barbel caught on smelly cheese paste.