Skridlov

In reply to the last couple of posts (apologies for not splitting up my reply) I've contacted The Ouse and Adur conservation society and summarised as I've already posted here. This is indeed my river and my own home, which is on the lower reaches of the river is actually at flood risk. The proposed work seems to be aimed at the tidal section downstream of Henfield in the Small Dole and Beeding areas. These sections are very brackish although that didn't bother Carp much. But as I said there have been no significant modifications to the river in the last few years. As for Eels, at the beginning of the season I caught more Eels than I have for many years - not sure why I omitted to mention them. In the last couple of months, none. I understand that there are some bonkers provisions in the current EU proposals for European Rivers. If I feel strong enough one day I'll investigate. I'm currently waiting to hear from E.A. in response to my most recent email to them. As for Sea Trout, as I mentioned I caught a fluke fish of at least 12 lb a couple of months ago. On a light feeder rod, 6lb line, fishing maggot and sweetcorn on a no12. Static, not on the retrieve. I've caught plenty of fish but it was the fight of a lifetime. Obviously I returned it and I've got the photo if anyone disbelieves me. Strange but at the time it really felt weird, like a consolation prize of some sort and a farewell to part of my own life. Roy

This is a small river. Nothing would be easier than netting it. Two or three people could clear out large sections undisturbed without difficulty. Over a couple of years this would probably result in what we're now seeing. As for "for the pot", it's more a case of for the £££s I suspect. Maybe the people who are stripping the wiring from alongside our motorways and rail lines are actually rewiring their modest dwellings. I sometimes walk down the Brighton marina arm and chat with some of the people who fish it regularly. The "free food" business is happening there too - people filling sacks with mackerel. It really p!55es off some of the local anglers. One of the local commercials recently found a huge length of net concealed in the hedgerow. The same place has a licence to shoot Cormorants too. I have watched the population here grow enormously in the last decade. I walk the coast regularly and where I would once see half a dozen Cormorants I counted almost 70 last year. A local lake (not a commercial and I don't want to mention which one) has a population of fish which are ALL very large - it's shallow and 8 years ago you couldn't get a bait down past the Rudd to the Tench. In the last few years there are almost NO Rudd at all. It's effectively impossible to net this lake covertly. I have friends from several parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I travel to the Czech Republic from time to time and have been to and fished in Latvia and Estonia. All of these regions have been depopulated of coarse fish because of the habit of eating them. There's a HUGE demand for Carp, particularly at Xmas in Poland above all. Since I started fishing in the late 50s we've always tried to look after our coarse fish population. I have Georgian friends who tell me that their rivers are pretty well stripped. I was in Crete last year. Speaking to a couple of people who set nets on the south coast it became clear that there's nothing left. Even the Seagulls have left. Yet people have been living in and fishing the Med for millenia. I would bet money that poaching is a component of the problem. Local angling shops have told me that they're hearing more and more about this happening. I've outlined above why I came, reluctantly, to the conclusion that poaching is likely to be at least a contributing factor.. Roy

Very briefly (not much time this evening) there hasn't been any major change to the river. There has been a problem, growing over the last couple of years that one of the weirs at the fork in the river is broken and is now leaking underwater to the extent that the level upstream in this section for about 2-3 miles before it meets an old lock has dropped by about 2 ft. When I fished this section on the first week of the season I was shocked that there was no fish activity at all and put it down to insufficient water (about 2 ft only.) There's an intermediate mini-weir about a mile up which has a board missing too. Now last autumn I ran into a bunch of young persons from the EA at the fork. I buttonholed them and asked a few questions as I'd been told there was an active policy (EU derived) to eliminate or lower weirs in order that "migratory fish could get upstream". This was offensively, culpably ignorant. On every tide over about 5m at the coast (ie most of them) there is a back flow over these weirs up to 3 ft deep! Twice a day. The dimwit making this statement had probably spent about 30 minutes by the river in his life. Anyone local angler could have pointed out the reality. I've pointed this out repeatedly in correspondence with the E.A. but it just doesn't seem to register. Their careers obviously depend on implementing E.U. directives even if it lays the rivers to waste. But no, I don't think that any type of engineering or landscaping has had a significant effect on the current disaster. Roy

I'm pressing the E.A. and also pursuing some other avenues. I don't really feel like taking on their job and I can't really afford to either. But of course this needs doing. May be a bit late now. Roy

This river has two branches. There are a pair of weirs below which the river is tidal (although on the bigger tides the flow is upstream over the weirs for a mile or so) like many Sussex rivers. On each of the upstream branches of the river there are a combination of locks (the western branch is actually part of a former canal system) and weirs. These effectively segregate sections of the river. I would have thought that this compartmentalisation would prevent pollution events having a global effect on the river. The situation has not happened overnight. This year is the final stage of what I would say is a three to four year process. Which of course doesn't in itself preclude pollution as the source of the disaster. However previous pollution events have been relatively limited in effect and their results have been pretty obvious: ie dead fish. I have heard nothing about this even from the former fishery manager. The E.A. seem to be completely oblivious. My angling club likewise. The problem is that most anglers these days are only interested in fishing for farmed fish from wooden platforms on outdoor aquariums. Tidal rivers are hard work and by comparison unproductive. Nobody really cares about the situation. Unfortunately I do. Roy

I've posted something about this previously but it seems worth starting a new thread as I have a fuller picture. I've fished the Adur extensively over the last 8 years - both the tidal and non-tidal sections - and caught large numbers of many species as well as plenty of specimen fish. Over the last 3 years the level of catches has dropped dramatically. In 2011 I assumed that the cold wet summer was to blame; in 2012 I thought something similar was happening. This year, having fished and walked all along the river I'd say that it contains almost NO fish any longer. About a dozen sessions on various parts of the river without catching anything over a few ounces, and not many even of these. Not a single run on a Carp rod - or even a line bite for that matter. Walking the river and putting in loose feed shows almost no activity at all. I invited an old friend as a guest last week and we fished a section of the river at Sakeham. This stretch up to Wineham is usually teeming with at least small Rudd. My mate took a whip pole and walked most of the section to verify that the lack of activity was general. Not a bite between the two of us in 7 hours. This is just incredible. Now I know how to fish, having been at it for about 55 years and I know this river pretty well. Looking at my photos of fish caught in the time I've been living back down in West Sussex it's hard to believe the variety and size of the catches I made for the first 5 years compared to the wet desert that is all that's now left. For me this is a devastating development. I'm at an age where - like most of the anglers I meet who fish rivers rather than the open air aquariums which most lakes have become - being able to spend part of the year in a rural environment free of traffic noise and epidemic levels of humanity is a huge contributor to what quality of life I currently enjoy. Now that is gone. As for the reasons? Well Cormorants probably aren't helping although I don't see Cormorants being able to eat the sizeable Carp, Tench and Bream with which the river used to be full. Pollution? There have certainly been some agricultural spills in recent years however the geography of the river - which has two (nominally) non-tidal sections with weirs and locks would tend to protect the river overall from localised pollution. But both branches appear to be dead. That said I caught a huge (>12lb) fluke Sea Trout at the beginning of the season and there are plenty of Mullet coming right up the tidal sections so the river isn't entirely toxic. It's been suggested to me that East European poachers are a major source of the problem. Certainly I've been told that they have been caught with enormous gill nets around local commercials and that many deadlines are being found. I've been in tackle shops when people who don't strike me as sport anglers are buying "wire and beeg hook" at the beginning of the winter. Tasty, those Pike, I'm told. I don't know what to think. I'm in correspondence with the E.A. amongst other interested parties but sometimes get the impression that they think I'm just having a couple of blank days. But I've done marine ecology courses and studied biological sciences up to degree level - not that that qualifies me any better than any other experienced angler. There's a lot more to be said about this correspondence but I'll leave that until I see what reaction I get here. It's an internet forum so I fully anticipate the howls of denial, negativity and contradiction. But be assured, it really is this bad. One thing is for sure, here in S.E. England almost everything connected with the "natural" world is in precipitous and unstoppable decline. Roy

BTW The Black Rabbit is on the Arun, not the Adur, just upstream from Arundel. Roy

A few years back, at Burton Mill - in the same timescale as the decline on the Adur, it was hard to get a bait down to the Tench past the small Rudd. In the last few years there are no Rudd to speak of. In the last 8 years of fishing this water we have never caught Tench under abut 3-4 pounds. None. I fished the same place as far back as the late 60s when there was a spread of sizes. This lake is an SSSI and as far as one can see, the water quality is fine - it's fed (indirectly) from the chalk in the Downs. I used to drive by it in winter and don't recall any Cormorants at all until the last few years. I've been fishing all over the Adur consistently over the last 8 years so I'm pretty familiar of what to expect. It's never been hugely productive - which suits me fine; it keeps the bivvy-boys away. But there has always been an interesting selection of everything and you'd seldom come away without one or two nice fish. If it wasn't fishing particularly well you could resort to pulling out as many small Bream and Roach as you could stand. The difference in the last 3 years is astonishing. There is a water quality problem with the Adur, in that there isn't enough of it. The EA have failed to repair one of the weirs at Henfield which has dropped the level by up to 2ft upstream as far as the lock at Partridge Green and this section is barren; you can feed in maggots and free samples around the lily pads and there's nothing there to see at all over the entire stretch. One dingbat from the EA last year (an enthusiastic young graduate, I'd say) told me that there was a proposal to drop the weirs in order to "enable migratory fish to get upstream". Given that except on the smallest tides the water flows back over these weirs in a torrent up to 3 ft over the boards on every single high tide, this idiot shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion on anything but the level of the water in his bath. I've taken a look at the upper sections of the river and apart from the Wineham stretch which teems with fry and small fish there isn't much activity to be seen. As for water quality, well there was a big kill of the Sea Trout run a few years back, said to be caused by an agricultural effluent spill, which I well remember, however it didn't significantly change the way the river fished for other species at that time I suspect that the Cormorants are part, if not all, of the problem. And as for the idea that nature somehow rapidly adjusts predator/prey populations so that everything quickly makes nice, well, dream on. There's no balance in nature; there is no shortage of pendulums however. I walk the coast between Shoreham and Worthing regularly. In 2004 I never saw more than 6 or 7 cormorants on this stretch all winter. Last year I counted 64 of them on one outfall pipe alone and that is the new normal. I'd be surprised if they aren't a significant component of the problem and I'm not alone in this - there's a current proposal to cull, which (despite being very interested in birds generally) I'd support. A last note on water quality. Two weeks ago on an otherwise almost blank day, as every day so far this year on the Adur has been, I was fishing a feeder with 6lb line, a maggot plus sweet corn on a no 12 when I hooked what I thought was a carp and which I didn't expect to land given its power. About 15 minutes later I was gawping at a huge fresh-run Sea Trout on the bank - I'd say close to 15 lb. The fight and possibly the fish of a lifetime given the circumstances. Out of season etc but what the hell. And I have a couple of snaps to prove it although I didn't weigh it as I wanted to get it back in the water quickly. Fishing can be very strange. Roy

An absolute deluge of replies. Well, FWIW, which is surely not a lot, this river, the lower sections at least, seems to be now almost completely devoid of fish. The decline has taken place sharply in the last 3-4 years, during which time the local population of Cormorants has probably increased 10-fold. I think these facts may be correlated. The now proposed cull? Well, maybe it will happen if the urbanites who think they understand what's "natural" don't hear too much about it. However we're going to have to shoot (shoot? but that involves GUNS!) most of the bl00dy pests to have any real effect. And it's going to take a decade before the waters have recovered. I may not have that much time. Still, I doubt that many Coarse fisherman care that much unless the Cormorants are also depopulating the open-air aquariums known as "commercials". Are there any still waters in England that are fishable and which haven't been turned into Cr@p puddles? Even most club waters seem to have degenerated into "club commercials". Of course there's always sea fishing. Hang on, there are almost no fish left there either and those that are are being harvested as free food by our Euro-peon cousins. See them bagging up the last few Mackerel off the piers and jetties along the coast. Untill recently I wasn't aware that anyone had a recipe for Wrasse... Roy

A couple of years ago I was walking down my club's stretch of our local river trying to decide where to fish. I decided to go over into the next field downstream. This is all farm land which has a mixture of beef bullocks and dairy. Arriving at the fence I confronted about six heifers and a very large bull. On seeing me the heifers all immediately went berserk and started p!ssing furiously. The bull, which was facing me (they were about 30 yds away) slowly turned sideways on to me but sort of looked to the side, straight at me. I took it for a very non-aggressive posture however there's no way I'd enter a field knowingly which contained a bull. Interestingly there was no sign stating the presence of the bull, although I think this is only mandatory where there's a public right-of-way. I wouldn't have liked to have encountered this group - as I easily could have - a hundred yards into the field with nowhere to hide and 40 lbs of gear on my elderly back. A couple of days later I took the trouble to look up information about Temple Grandin, an American woman about whom I'd seen a fascinating documentary. She's revolutionised the cattle industry in the USA despite (or possibly because) of her severe autism. There are few people who know as much about cattle behaviour, a subject on which she has high academic qualifications as well as vast professional experience - she's treated like a deity at cattlemen's conventions. To my amazement I read that a bull broadsiding to you is actually a sign of aggression! It's telling you "look how big I am!" Also, it appears that the most dangerous bull is the "tame" bull that's grown up familiar with people. At some point such an animal will surely challenge a human - which usually has only one possible outcome. She also advises that any bull that shows aggression toward people in an open environment should be culled immediately. Bear in mind that this is someone who's prepared to get down at ground level in a stockyard full of cattle to see the world from their perspective. I grew up around farms and took it for granted that dairy cattle were basically benign. Which they are, most of the time, recently calved cows being an obvious exception. But every year previously docile dairy cows kill people, usually stockmen, and frequently for completely inexplicable reasons. So I treat them cautiously. One beautiful herd of Freisians always wanders past me at some point in a spot I fish regularly. At least one just has to stand and stare for a while, getting left behind by the herd as they munch onward. Bullocks are more annoying. Sometimes a herd of 50 of them will follow me like the Pied Piper. I once asked the farm manager if it bothered him if I shoo-d them away. His reply: "you can try..." Their idiotic persistence has now stopped me from fishing one of the best stretches of the river.

Haven't posted here for a long time. I'm interested to hear from anyone else who fishes the Adur (coarse fish). It's my feeling that over the last 3 years there has been a serious decline in fish stocks over all parts of the river. What do you think? Skridlov

I recently received a mailshot (dated July 2008) from the E.A I expect most of you did too. It was apparently intended to encourage me to go fishing... Hmm. I was moved to send Daffyd Evans (Head of Fisheries; round here we call him "Daffyd the Fish") an email, as follows: "The snap of the letter-box, the ripping open of the envelope, the shriek of incomprehension, the fury at wasted resources..." Dear Daffyd - you don't mind if I call you Daffyd, I trust? No wonder rod licences are relatively expensive given that you waste the money on insanely pointless mailshots. Of course the key lies in the phrase "have your debit/credit card handy...". Nonetheless, even by .gov.uk standards this is one of the most inane efforts I have ever seen. If its intention was to encourage yet more people to go fishing, one might ask "why?" Given the acute level of angling pressure everywhere you'd be better off sending a mailshot encouraging more people to abandon the pastime. Of course that might impact negatively on your pension fund. Alternatively, why not a campaign for teaching our "New European" "friends" not to kill and eat our fish - having already devastated their own stocks. If these suggestions don't appeal, why not spend a little of it rectifying some of the damage already inflicted by blunders committed by the E.A.? Like restoring the Millstream at Arundel , West Sussex, to its former condition as a pristine, healthy tidal waterway bearing a population of wild Brown Trout, Dace etc. This waterway is now a nearly choked anaerobic ditch, devoid of life other than algae. The cause? The permanently closed sluice which you have fitted to prevent tidal pulses from entering from the River Arun, of which the Millstream is a tributary. Might I humbly suggest summary execution for the E. A. dimwit who made this decision? Best wishes and good bureaucratising. I now feel guilty that I may be responsible for the death of some poor swine. Never mind.

On a much smaller scale, an old friend of mine has a Cray boat on the west coast of Tasmania (Cray aka Rock Lobster). For many years the local Cray fishermen bitterly fought against the idea of quotas. My mate, let's call him Frank, was one of the few who supported the idea and actively co-operated with the fisheries authority in collecting data about catches. As he put it to me, with every year that went by he found himself going out in riskier and riskier weather to maintain his income, all the while seeing the average size of the Crays go down and overall catches decline. Anyone who has been in a small boat off the W. coast of Tasmania in winter will have an idea what this means. Since the quota system came in he has seen the fishery improve in all respects. Now the fishermen can save up part of their quota for winter - when the prices go up - and only go out when the weather conditions are safe. From what I understand everyone has accepted that the quotas have been very successful in all respects.

Well, it gets worse. I hadn't actually finished the book when I posted the above. Toward the end the author visits the sites of some of the Gulag camps in N.E Siberia and even in such a remote and inaccessible location there are people hoovering up the remaining fish. Of course for quite a lot of these people getting enough to eat is extremely difficult (mind you, getting enough to drink seems to present fewer problems...) There are quite a few people there who are aware that the situation is terrible - but the breakdown of controls is so extensive that there look to be no prospects for anything happening to address a situation that is such a low priority. It 's amazing that even in an immense country (I seem to recall that Siberia is about the same size as USA and W. Europe COMBINED!) it's still possibe to eliminate the majority of the fish in a couple of decades. And in reference to Jim's comment, many of the Siberian rivers are devastated by mining too, with all kinds of pollution and interference having quite literally exterminated ALL the fish in many of the rivers. I also know a little about the situation in Armenia. A web search on "Lake Sevan" will throw up a horror-story about the way in which a very special ecosystem can be completely devastated. To be fair, the Armenian government are doing a lot to rectify the damage (caused during the Soviet period) - but there is still uncontrolled illegal fishing. There's a lesson for us all here. What we have is extremely precious and very fragile. Currently there's a lot of concern about the potential impact of freshwater-fish-eating E. European "anglers" on our fisheries; I don't know how substantial a threat this really is but it would seems to be a good idea for levels of awareness to be raised amongst people coming to live in this country. I think this is not likely to appear very near the top of any government agenda, local or national. Maybe we can encourage the human consumption of boilies as a more efficient way of obtaining protein... Strongly recommended book though, for anyone who likes travel writing and fishing - if depressing in many ways.

I'd just like to bring to the attention of anyone who may be interested, a book; "HOOKED - fly-fishing through Russia" by Fen Montaigne*. The author is a Russian-speaking American journalist who was formerly a Moscow correspondent. In 1996 he spent an entire summer travelling all over Russia (including, notably, Siberia) with fly-fishing tackle. As a pretty intrepid individual, speaking the language well, and with numerous friends and contacts in the region, he was able to visit some exceptionally inaccessible and fascinating places and to fish in most of them. The overall impression produced by this excellently written book is one of complete despair - at least for anyone who loves sport fishing/angling. As a travel book alone it's interesting and enjoyable, but it reveals a situation far worse - in most respects - than we can possibly imagine from the UK perspective. The economic collapse of the post-Soviet world, and the near-total absence of any awareness of the ecological issues surrounding the aquatic environment have led to a situation where whole species are rapidly becoming extinct. Even some of the remotest places in Siberia are being fished out very quickly. The author recounts a trip to one of the rivers running into Lake Baikal where, despite traveling a long way up river in a small boat, and then tramping a considerable distance through the midge-infested bush, he encountered two groups of people busily engaged in exterminating the few remaining Grayling in the area. One group had got there using an old Soviet go-anywhere armoured personnel carrier... Some of the other locations, such as the Kola peninsula, famed for its runs of Atlantic salmon, are being run as high-budget fishing camps for the well-heeled of all nations - which at least has some marginal conservation effect - whilst everywhere that can't be easily policed by the local Mafia who control the fishing camps is being netted, poisoned, dynamited for the only available cash-crop, Salmon. On being introduced to the concept of catch and release, one of the author's local contacts stated that this was a practice belonging to " a more civilised society than ours..." Everywhere in the book the author encounters the amazing levels of carnage that alcoholism is inflicting on the country - where male life expectancy has now declined to about 58 years. At one point a Russian "angler" notes that "fishing is drinking in hip-boots..." Phew. Anyway it's a fascinating and well-written book, and reveals just how quickly fish stocks can be devastated by lack of controls and lack of awareness. Of course economic collapse comes into it too, but that's a bigger story. * I have also seen what I believe is the same book published under the title: "Reeling In Russia: An American Angler In Russia Fen Montaigne" Available second-hand from www.abebooks.com