far bank stalker

hmmm, the thing about disabled access is a good point well made, one i hadn't thought of and neither have the local angling club. They certainly also have alot of river bank that is worth the fairly high (double the rod licence) permit price. i mostly object to two things, the closing of public land to public fishing. there is a short stretch of land that is almost entirely maintained by tax money, the only thing the local club has done as far as i can tell is cut three swims, by cut i mean the vegetation. Also i object to the way their bailiff lied to me about having both banks when clearly in quite a few areas they only have one ,personally i'd always rather talk to a farmer and work a deal to fish an unfished area. It seems to me that in an area with the highest unemployment rate in the country that it seems rude for a club with so much beautiful river bank to close a tiny stretch of bank maintained entirely from the public purse to the local people who pay for it's upkeep and to effectively outprice permission to a fairly high percentage of the local inhabitants. I realise that this is a very personal account and i'm glad your story is better. i used to pay quite alot to be in the 'watford piscators' and will no doubt pay the local permit when the trout season starts to fish the good water they have, i fancy learning to trott a wet fly but i'm more excited about the fact that using google earth i found a genuine brook on a mountain about five miles from where i live. next year i'm going to cycle out there and try for a real wild brownie. till then just trotting for roach, perch and chub

To be honest i'm not sure what water abstraction means in precise terms. In my mind its something along the lines of water in its own mysterious way finding a new path to the water table and disappearing from its old one? Anyway i was planning a few journeys down to Hemel Hempstead and thought i'd check out the Gade. As a kid the stretch past Gadebridge park toward water end was always wild looking, a good 3-4 ft deep and totally un-fished. I thought there must be something good lurking, so my first port of call was to check this forum for any chatter, that's where i first heard the term 'water abstraction' My next port of call was to check 'google earth', one of my favorite pieces of tackle an lo! 'water abstraction' actually means water extraction! There remains a lush section of river in the water end area, where the rest of the river is directed to a trout fishery. The short section of beautifully maintained, lush river Gade is stocked from the fishery. If you can afford £400+ a year then you can go and pretend your catching 'wild' brown trout, no doubt they have distinctly unwild rainbow too. It seems everybody below the very exclusive water end area can bloody well pleb' off! I left fishing in the mid 80's, it had started to go a bit weird. the usually friendly banks of my local ( Tolpits in watford) had started to get alot of very unfriendly people in bivvies who would turn up for weeks and hide if anyone went near and then it turned out they were poisoning the fish with large beds of tiger nuts which turned carcinogenic after a short while. the tech' thing looked boring and so i found other stuff to do, however now that i live within sight of the Dee, Llan canal and Cieriog it seemed churlish not to start again I suppose my theme is this, in the twenty or so years of absence it seems to me that many of the areas that would traditionally have been free to fish have been 'muscled in' on by syndicate's who have essentially 'stolen' the right of their neighbors to fish. If my tax money pays to maintain the land, and my rod licence is paying to maintain the waterway then why should i pay to fish? Of course the usual would be 'we stock the river', but further examination of this tends to lead to something like they released some brown trout from a fishery once. This in a river which probably holds at least twenty species as well as migrant species And water abstraction? I think like in the case of the Gade and the Cieriog it's more likely to be water extraction by private 'put & take' fishery's (can they really be called fishery's?) Am i horribly cynical or does anyone else find this?

Hello. just started fishing again after 20 years of thinking about it. the last good session i had was a river in Watford rolling bait through weed alleys with a quiver tip and Speedia. i hooked into either a barbel or a carp and it just took off, bending my rod in two and breaking my line. i never was that good! still it stuck in my mind started up again earlier this year on woeful tackle, a rod that i will never admit owning and an old OLYMPIC brass centre pin. had some small wild brownies and now i'm hooked again! managed to pick up a Milward's Floatrover on the bay the other day with a mind to refurb it and i came across the site looking for good solid information, which of course i found. anyway, thanks