Wintle’s World of Angling – Rivers Crisis Part 1

Mark Wintle, an angler for thirty-five years, is on a quest to discover and bring to you the magic of fishing. Previously heavily involved with match fishing he now fishes for the sheer fun of it. With an open and enquiring mind, each week Mark will bring to you articles on fishing different rivers, different methods and what makes rivers, and occasionally stillwaters, tick. Add to this a mixed bag of articles on catching big fish, tackle design, angling politics and a few surprises.

Are you stuck in a rut fishing the same swim every week? Do you dare to try something different and see a whole new world of angling open up? Yes? Then read Mark Wintle’s regular weekly column.

The heavily overgrown but beautiful Dorset Stour – Mind the nettles! (click for bigger picture)

I am by nature an angler who prefers to fish a river. There is something about moving water, its ever-changing nature, which fascinates me. Merely the fact that it stretches for miles, with weirs, sidestreams and backwaters, adds an air of mystery. You can never know exactly what is in a river. Forget named fish; I can’t always even predict what species might turn up next. But as has been discussed in several forums recently, I am alarmed by the extraordinary lack of anglers on many stretches of river. Apart from those stretches of river already owned by clubs, will much of this fishing end up unavailable simply because no-one is prepared to pay a market rent for it?

This week I’m going to look at the worsening crisis. Next week, I’ll suggest ways that we as anglers can encourage a return to our rivers. And in the third and final part try and persuade those that might fancy trying river fishing to have a go.

Take the end of last season

Let me give you some examples of how deserted the rivers are. Take the last Saturday of last season, March 13th. Fair enough, the weather had been bad during the previous couple of days; Graham had even had an enjoyable hour map reading in the snow covered wilds of the North Dorset hills the previous evening trying to find a way back to Peter Jacob’s Wiltshire farmhouse, and the Stour was only in okay condition, rising very slowly but definitely fishable. Yet on a glorious day and with the river due to shut after the next day, I was the only angler on the stretch that I fished, and I only saw one other angler’s car on another stretch downstream. The fishing itself was hardly fantastic though the setting could hardly be bettered; forget the net result of a handful of roach (one cracker), it was just great to be out trying my skill on a gorgeous stretch of river.

Not much better this summer

Many of my trips this summer on several stretches of different rivers have seen me as the only angler fishing that stretch. Whereas a few years ago most of the swims would have been defined in the reeds and nettles, now I find that it’s often hard to see the river. On one stretch, the only way to fish it in summer is to take a hedge-laying tool (a double edged machete on pickaxe handle – slayer of all nettles) to cut a swim. When I ask around at club meetings of my local match anglers, many now admit that they do not fish a river at all until the first match on a river, often in October. It’s not that they don’t want to, just that they are now so conditioned to fishing stillwaters that the desire to fish rivers has been diminished.

Some waters have already been abandoned

Back in the early seventies, there was a genuine fear that big clubs from London, Coventry, Birmingham etc. would come in from afar and outbid local clubs for their river fishing. This was supported by the fact that big associations from these cities did just that. I can remember Coventry renting stretches of the upper Thames, for example. A decade later, as recession hit the manufacturing industry, these big clubs found their memberships dwindling, and the furthest flung waters slowly reverted to more local clubs again, except in those rare instances where the larger clubs had bought the rights outright.

What now concerns me is that those small clubs that might have re-acquired their waters twenty years ago are now finding it harder and harder to justify continuing to rent those river waters. Unless such a club has a healthy income from good stillwaters, its very survival is in peril. If the water let go is attractive to other clubs then it might continue to be available through another club, or even a syndicate but otherwise it may simply be abandoned. A friendly farmer might allow a couple of anglers to continue to fish but otherwise that may be the end as far as fishing is concerned. On my local Stour, I can think of several stretches of river that clubs rented for a few years, found them virtually unfished, and relinquished the lease. These waters remain unfished.

The shift of matches to stillwaters

One of the biggest changes in the last fifteen years is the shift of matches from rivers to stillwaters, and not just any stillwaters. Certainly, there are plenty of matches held on club lakes but many more are being booked on commercial day ticket waters. The result is even less exposure to river fishing for many club anglers. Although most regular match anglers will end up on a river at some time during the year, it’s far from a regular occurrence.

Different skills, different expectations on modern “commercials”

Developing the theme further, not only are pleasure and match anglers fishing these commercial waters much more, their expectations have changed. Even a bad peg may offer the chance of hooking a few carp that will put a bend in a pole. The long walks have gone, along with the uneven banks, tricky swims to fish, nettles and parrot cages (you know the type of swim – all hemmed in with bushes). The swims are uniform to a degree and the fish stocks high. Actual catches don’t always match these expectations, but some anglers never caught much on the rivers either.

There is another factor and that is the wholesale takeover of pole fishing. Many pleasure anglers use nothing else. The skilful arts of fishing a stick float, using a waggler or even just trotting a float in a straight line down a river, are being lost. There is no doubt that in the right circumstances, and bearing in mind that many commercial pools are designed for pole fishing, that pole fishing is highly effective. On a river, pole fishing is just one of a multitude of skills that are required to get the best out of a far wider variety of conditions.

These two factors make the task of persuading pleasure and match anglers to try fishing on a river difficult but not impossible. Lacking the right gear, knowledge, skills, confidence, and incentive to take a chance on a day on the river, they play safe and continue to fish the ‘guaranteed’ and comfortable option of a well-stocked pool.

Barbel at a premium

Some stretches of water remain popular; one reason is the increasing popularity and availability of barbel fishing. Waters on some of the Midland rivers continue to get plenty of attention because of this. In contrast, this season, I’ve noticed that some stretches of the Dorset Stour, previously very heavily fished for big chub and barbel, have had much less angling pressure. Is the fishing now so hard that few can be bothered with the challenge anymore?

In some areas, the revitalisation of previously polluted waters has seen a revival in river fishing for anglers once starved of such opportunities. I’m thinking of areas of the industrial North, rivers like the Mersey, Bollin, Don; perhaps those local to the area would like to comment.

Use it or lose it?

The danger remains that if we as anglers don’t do a lot to change the situation an awful lot of river fishing is going to be lost to the vast majority of anglers unless there is a massive swing back to river angling. Now, I can’t see that happening without a push.

Some arguments put forward to reverse the trend hold little water. The BAA’s case to drop the close season (they foresee an increase in membership) would make no difference whatsoever. If an angler can’t be bothered to fish a stretch of river during the nine months of the year when it is open he sure as hell won’t bother during the three months when the fishing is mostly crap. How do I know that it’s crap – because I’ve fished rivers during the spring, that’s how (it used to be legal in Devon). That removing the close season on scarcely fished waters might make virtually no difference to the amount of angling pressure is true. Twenty-five per cent extra on nothing is still nothing! Conversely, heavily fished waters like Throop need a three month respite from the relentless pressure. I find it hard to believe that if the close season were to be removed tomorrow that the close season would be dropped on such waters.

In some cases, rents will drop, or waters will no longer be available on a relatively cheap club card as some waters are taken over by small syndicates.

Next week, in Part 2, I’m going to suggest ways to make river fisheries more useable and attractive to anglers.