seal 50 miles upstream

[silvers]

ref. Great Ouse
The river is navigable from the Wash to Kempston Mill, which is just beyond Bedford, a distance of 72 miles (116 km). This section includes 17 locks, which are maintained by the Environment Agency, who are the navigation authority and who attempt to attract more boaters to the river.

There was one at Kempston about 5 years ago ..... I know because it surfaced in my peg on a match on opening weekend.
It was trapped and taken back to the sea.


And there definitely aren't any salmon in the Great Ouse!!

 

[The bad one]

There is a view that seals follow the salmon up river, which may well be why this one is so far upstream.

The news last week also showed record births of seals around our shores, kind of puts pay to the argument that sea fish are becoming scarce, doesn't it ?

Certainly the one's that come into the tidal section of the Ribble coincide with the salmon runs Fred.
Only ever been two in living memory that went above the Tidal, 70 + years ago and about 8 years ago. The last one was debated endlessly on here for the 3 months it was in the river. In it's case it was a Common Seal and young creature in it's first year.
But there's no doubt it did a lot of damage to all the fish stocks in the mile or so of river it resided on. On average a common needs between 5-8 k of fish a day to survive.
Once the salmon have stopped running, about now, they must turn their attention to the coarse fish stocks to survive. And nothing is off its menu
There's no doubt in my mind that the floods this year has helped the seal to go further and further up the rivers.

 

[Richard Bartlett]

R. Ure above Ripon, 17th June 2006

There were actually 3 of them, which a few days later were spotted another 10 miles or so further upstream at Masham - that's around 90 miles from the sea!

That being salmon country, I wouldn't take bets on them having managed the return journey