CHAPTER 10

THE ECOLOGY OF FISHING

‘To go fishing is the chance to wash one’s soul with pure air, with the rush of the brook, or with the shimmer of sun on blue water. It brings meekness and inspiration from the decency of nature, charity toward tackle-makers, patience toward fish, a mockery of profits and egos, a quieting of hate, a rejoicing that you do not have to decide a darned thing until next week.’

Herbert Hoover

Paul: I spent most of the time until I was in my twenties bait fishing, coarse fishing, all that freeline stuff. And you know what? I was a much better fisherman when I was in my mid-teens.

Bob: Than you are now?

P: Oh yeah. As a teenager, you try everything, you absorb everything. You never grumble and give up and go home. You never even consider it. So you can’t fail but to do well, because if it’s not happening, you’re going to try this, then you’re going to try that … endless enthusiasm. Back then, if there were chub under the trees, I’d go out and I’d get one. I’d definitely get one. I just had that attitude.

B: But there were also more fish back then, weren’t there, Paul?

P: Certainly were.

B: Lots more back when you were a teenager. In the mid- to late-1920s, yeah?

PAUL

When we first thought about making Gone Fishing, Bob did have a slight concern that fishing was not politically correct these days. He’s got a point. I think about it a lot, and I know it’s something that really unsettles Bob.

Paul McCartney, who might be the world’s most famous vegetarian, did a campaign a few years back about going veggie and he mentioned he’d given up rod fishing. He was out fishing many years back and it struck him that this struggling fish on the end of his line wanted to live – and he was killing it for the fleeting pleasure the sport of it brought him. The fish’s life was as precious to it as McCartney’s was to him. He gave up fishing and eating fish, and hats off to him.

I have a huge amount of affection for the fish I catch. It might be one way and they might really resent meeting me, but I love meeting them. And most of the fishermen I’ve met in my life also have an utter love for their quarry. They feel so strongly about fish to the point that I think a lot of them – not all, but a lot, a significant proportion – would be happy to stop fishing immediately if it was doing significant harm to those fish.

I’ve seen it happen. When stocks are low in certain rivers and the Environment Agency says, ‘Right, no more fishing this river,’ the fishermen not only accept it without question and move on, but most of them will be saying, ‘About time, I’ve been saying they should have taken this measure for years.’

Take catch and release. Today, all coarse fish are released back into the river after they’re caught. This is to ensure that fish numbers are protected. Catch and release has been a standard practice for most people and has been a part of the culture of fishing in the UK for over a century. It’s regarded as a cardinal sin and a capital offence not to return the fish. Eternal damnation. This is certainly the case with coarse fishing. Not so much with game fish, but times are changing.

For people of my dad’s generation, fishing was driven far more by economic necessity. Coming from the deprived hillsides and valleys of Wales in the 1920s, if you caught a trout, you wouldn’t have put it back. That fish might have been one of the few things that stood between you and hunger for the next couple of days. Some might argue that this is a purer form of fishing – you’re catching it to eat, out of necessity, not catching it for sport and toying with it for the enjoyment that brings. But most fishermen today have two loves: a love of fishing, which is something we’ve done since we started walking upright, and a love of fish, whom we respect enough to say, ‘We don’t need to eat you any more, so we’re going to put you back, and God bless.’

It’s a strange urge, isn’t it? You want to both celebrate the fish and capture them. It’s part of human nature – think of the native tribes who go hunting. They’re going out to capture and kill their quarry, but they do so with a total and utter respect for it. Most fishermen are the same, except they don’t kill. And anglers do more, by far, than all other conservation groups to ensure survival of fish and improve water quality.

That moment when you put a fish you’ve caught back into the river, and they take a moment to get their bearings – I can’t help but feel there’s a brief second where they realise they’re being freed and are genuinely a bit shocked and pleased about it – and then with a flick of their tail, they’re away … That’s lovely. It’s as good as the fishing itself.

Paul: A beautiful Icelandic trout gracefully demonstrates catch and release.

If I go fishing now, I would find it hard to kill a fish. As I previously mentioned, if I’m fishing in Hampshire, I do occasionally take a trout with me and take it down the road to a little smokery and have it smoked. If I’m going to eat fish, which I do, then I reckon I should be aware of what it entails and be prepared to do the dirty work myself, rather than delegate it to someone else.

Some of you will say, ‘All right, then, Paul, if that’s how you feel, you should also be going down to the slaughterhouse and murdering your own cows,’ but I don’t tend to eat meat any more, so pick the bones out of that.

When catch and release was introduced almost across the board with salmon, there was a certain amount of backlash. Game fishers felt that catching salmon was something that had been going on for thousands of years – for as long as there’s been fishing, for as long as there have been people on earth.

Plus, these are fish that we eat and buy in the fishmongers, so why can we take them from the shelves of the supermarket – and God knows how they’ve been caught, but I can tell you it’s a much more unpleasant way than on the end of a rod – and not from the river?

I’m not going to get into an attack on commercial fishing here, but if we’re looking for a reason that salmon stocks have declined, and an industry that seems to have little serious regard for fish welfare, then it’s probably worth having a long, hard look at them before anyone else. Though it is important to acknowledge that some traditional commercial fishing has maintained communities for centuries and the fishers have lived in harmony with the fish. Historically, there were far greater fish stocks and no industrial trawlers capable of hoovering up a whole run of salmon destined for one particular river, for example. Times have changed so we must too, in order to preserve and conserve stocks.

If you’re a fisherman taking a single salmon (which of course you’ll check to make sure it isn’t carrying eggs), then you dispatch it quickly and humanely with a small bat (it’s also known as a priest, because it administers the Last Rites). It takes a few seconds. Commercial fishing vessels just haul hundreds of fish out of the sea in nets, tip them in the hold and leave them to flap around until they finally suffocate.

So to many game fishermen, releasing a wild salmon felt like a hard pill to swallow – until the first time you put a salmon back. It’s both very difficult to put a salmon you’ve finally managed to catch back in the river, and an utterly amazing thing to do. It’s such an extraordinary creature. Its wildness, the colossal journey it’s undertaken, its iconic position in fishing lore – if I call a roach life-affirming, then a salmon makes you want to praise the universe. Not to undermine any other fish, but when you have that salmon in your hands and it suddenly gives a kick of its tail, and then it’s gone – that’s great. In fact, I can’t actually imagine not releasing a salmon anymore.

But you have to admit, the catch and release programme hasn’t saved the salmon. Since the early 1970s, the number of salmon in England and Wales has declined by 50%. Numbers were terrible before, but now it’s gone off the scale. In 2014, wild salmon stocks were at their lowest level ever recorded, and they’ve continued to do badly ever since.

This isn’t just frightening news for the salmon – it’s very worrying for a lot of people, too. Salmon fishing in England and Wales supports 900 full-time jobs and provides £22 million of household income, mainly to the rural communities and economies where salmon fisheries are located. If there’s no salmon fishing, there’s no income.

And think of how this unchecked decline will affect Scotland. Take the Spey. It was the holy grail of salmon fishing – probably the best out of the big four on the east coast. People would come from all over the world to fish it. For years, you could not get on the Spey for love nor money: it was dead men’s shoes. Nowadays, you can get on it easily. That’s because the salmon’s declined so much. People aren’t going to pay massive sums of money to go and fish, book a hotel, use the restaurants and pubs, and pop into the tackle shops, if there’s almost no chance of catching a salmon. The economies of those remote parts of Scotland have been kept alive for countless years by anglers, but they depend on the salmon being there to catch.

At the times of year when nobody would be going to Scotland beyond a handful of skiers, fishers would be all over the rural areas. I’ve fished the River Findhorn in blizzards in February and March, but who is going to go if the fish aren’t there? It’s such a concern. Not just for their tourist industry, for everyone – the salmon is a species that’s synonymous with Scotland and it’s just disappearing.

The problem with dwindling salmon stocks isn’t the anglers. It never has been. But no one can say definitively what the problem is.

What is known (from a large report commissioned by the government’s Environment Agency in 2018) is that there are far fewer young salmon, at every stage of their development, in the 49 rivers in England and the 31 rivers in Wales that support salmon.

Most salmon populations have declined, in some cases severely, and are not predicted to improve in the next five years. The numbers of rod-caught salmon are currently amongst the lowest ever recorded. Around 70% of juvenile salmon heading for the sea for the first time die before reaching the coast. And only a tiny proportion – something like 5% – of salmon who successfully make it out to sea will ever return. This fish is under so much pressure. And there’s a combination of factors that are causing this.

Commercial fishing is one. It’s not the only pressure and the Environment Agency have said it might not even be the main cause of dwindling stocks in our rivers, but it’s certainly a factor in the decline of the salmon.

It’s joined by the spread of salmon lice. These lice attach to a passing salmon and then begin eating them alive, leaving great, ragged wounds on the salmon’s body that are open to infection. The Atlantic Salmon Trust cite considerable evidence of a link between intensive salmon farming off the coast of Scotland and the spread of these lice to both wild salmon and sea trout.

For a brief time, these fish farms looked like they were going to be the saviour of our native wild stocks. The thinking was that with such cheap and accessible salmon, people wouldn’t need to catch the wild ones in huge nets any more. But it’s not worked out like that. It might seem like a good employer for a rural area, but it’s not. I’m happy to say it: it’s a dirty industry that doesn’t employ many people, and the practices many of them use are appalling.

Packing thousands of farmed fish closely together means an ideal breeding ground for the lice, and so they pour chemicals in to try and reduce the infestation. But the farmers are playing catch-up and they’re a long way behind. The lice have already developed resistance to a number of pesticides, and the effect they’re having on the wild fish (who let me remind you don’t, by and large, have access to sea-lice pesticides) is irreversible and devastating. The sea trout has already been practically wiped out on the west coast of Scotland as a direct result of the lice from salmon farms. Maybe in a few years we’ll be saying the same about the salmon.

Pollution of our rivers is still a major problem. The old days of entirely black canals and waterways, the water and everything in it poisoned by the off-swill of heavy industry, might have ebbed away but many of our rivers are still being polluted. There’s an awful lot of agricultural pollution, which is less obvious, less tangible and less visible, but does untold damage.

You might walk down a river in the countryside and think, ‘Look, there’s this lovely unspoiled river running through a sylvan valley, with a lovely old pig farm just sitting back on the brow of the hill there – what a perfect scene.’ But what you can’t see is the phosphates from the fertiliser and the slurry used on the farm leeching into the river systems every time it rains. It’s a silent killer.

In 2017, the Environment Agency said there was a ‘serious pollution incident’ every single week in the UK, where slurry from livestock farms ended up in a waterway. A 2016 report into Wales’s freshwater habitats found that just one in six were considered ‘favourable’ for wildlife. In 2018, the Rural Affairs Secretary Lesley Griffiths told the BBC that the scale of agricultural pollution in Welsh rivers was ‘embarrassing’ and promised tougher regulations would be brought in by 2020.

Our rising population also puts pressure on our rivers. Abstraction – where they take water out of the rivers for man’s use – is also a massive problem. Every time I hear people saying, ‘We’re going to build more homes,’ I think, ‘Oh, you poor bloody rivers. That’s going to mean more abstraction, more pollution …’

You can add to the pressures facing fish the risk of being predated by other animals. Young salmon are eaten in huge numbers by birds, but it seems no one’s willing to look at schemes to try and protect the fish.

Cormorants are one of the worst offenders. These large black birds are known in fishing circles as ‘the Black Death’ because of the numbers of fish they consume. Anglers on the Walthamstow Marshes report they see some 200 to 300 cormorants flying over in the course of a day’s fishing.

For two decades, 11 groups, including the Angling Trust and Salmon & Trout Conservation, have been lobbying the government to review the problems caused to fish numbers by cormorants. It’s never been looked at. The RSPB’s senior policy officer told the Independent that anglers must find ways to live alongside them’. It’s not the anglers who need to find ways to live when the cormorants are around, it’s the fish.

In 2018, the Dee District Salmon Fishery Board asked for ‘a sensible debate’ about a cull of birds like the goosander duck, after they found that 70% of their young salmon weren’t surviving long enough to make it to sea. The RSPB responded by saying that birds were only one of the pressures on the young fish, and ‘we would be very surprised indeed if the authorities decided to increase the killing of native wild predators on the basis of such slim new evidence’.

And these are just the problems for the salmon in our rivers. It doesn’t take into account everything that can happen to the salmon while it’s at sea. On the way there: predation, pollution, industrial fishing. On the way back: predation, pollution, industrial fishing. Seals, for example, take countless salmon, but who’s going to say, ‘Oh, we should get rid of a load of those seals.’ No one! People love seals, with their fluffy coats and their big emotional eyes. It’s the same with dolphins. ‘Oooh, look, lovely dolphins!’ Well, the salmon isn’t thinking, ‘Lovely dolphins.’ He’s rolling his eyes and saying, ‘F*ck me, bloody dolphins, seals, cormorants …’, although chances are he won’t be thinking it for long before he gets tangled up in some industrial fisherman’s net.

And as if that wasn’t enough, all the above could be made moot as the method by which the salmon will become extinct, because the rise in global temperatures might be able to achieve it in the space of just a few years. Many fish, like the salmon, require cold water to spawn in and even a small rise in this water temperature will see their eggs rendered useless. A couple of degrees up and the salmon is over. Finished. For good.

Amazing, isn’t it? It’s 2019 and the salmon, a species our ecologically aware nation both admires and has a better understanding of than ever before, is somehow in the worst place it’s been in for 60 million years. We’re seeing our native salmon die out in front of our eyes.

And it’s not just the salmon and the sea trout. All of our native species are struggling. The roach has declined from the Avon and the Wensum catastrophically. It’s very difficult not to look back through rose-tinted spectacles to your childhood, but fish were certainly more plentiful back then. Talk to any fisherman over 50 and they’ll agree.

What underlies all these declines is the common denominator: our rivers. Salmon are an iconic indicator of healthy river systems, so if the salmon is doing badly, it means our rivers are, too.

John Bailey, the UK’s best-known angler, told me he thinks that the last 25 years have seen our nation’s rivers more seriously damaged than at any other point in history. And bear in mind, during the Victorian era, a lot of our urban rivers were dog graveyards made of tar and human shit.

The odd thing about fishing as a hobby is that when you start, you want to catch fish. So all fishermen want more fish in the rivers. And yes, they want clean rivers. And yes, they want well-maintained ecosystems. All these things make fishing easier and more enjoyable. But it doesn’t take long for a fisherman to reach a point where they don’t just want those things for themselves – they want them so that future generations will be able to get the same pleasure that they have, and they want these things for the fish.

Fishermen become deeply attached to the rivers they fish. It becomes a sacred place. It’s a haven and a retreat. They know the contours of the bank like the face of an old friend. They have their favourite trees, they know the point to see to get the most out of the setting sun, and they can walk every single inch of it in their dreams at night. And what happens when you have a place like that is you want to protect it.

One of the problems we have in the UK is that the two main players involved in river management tend to be at loggerheads. On one hand, you’ve got the academic players – the marine biologists and environmentalists – who want to see habitat improvement done naturally, for fish stocks to return of their own accord, and to leave these areas as natural as possible. And on the other hand, you have the anglers and the people who work on the rivers. They want all those things as well, but they also want to be able to have fish in the rivers so the businesses that rely on them can keep going.

There’s a big battle here between the people working on the coalface of the rivers – the gillies, the guides and the anglers – who want to stock rivers with, say, salmon from the existing brood stock. The genetic integrity of salmon is crucial because, it’s argued, they’ve got to return one day to this same river. But the environmental and academic groups, who seem to be in control of the overall river system, will say, ‘No, we’re not going to stock the river. If we make it right, they will come back.’ But they’re not going to come. They aren’t there.

There has to be a compromise between wanting fish to be living in our rivers and wanting rivers made absolutely perfect for fish. Because unless there’s fish in the river, you can have the best spawning area you like, but if there’s no fish around to use it, it’s pointless. There’s nobody home.

The anglers argue that our rivers aren’t untouched natural habitats – they’ve always been managed to one degree or another. Take the Test – some people call it the longest stock pond in the world. The chalk streams across Britain are nothing if not a managed environment, and they have been for centuries – like most of our countryside. Even the wild ones that we think just exist, they don’t. They do not just exist.

Fishing rights on most of the rivers in this country are split up into small stretches, with the riverbed technically owned, controlled and looked after by an individual owner. While some are private individuals, many are owned by trusts and fishing clubs. The money these owners receive from issuing permits to anglers usually goes straight back into the upkeep of their stretch of river. And a lot of work goes into preserving and protecting our rivers. If these rivers are in a good natural state – or like the Thames, the Tees and the Tyne, rivers that were formerly heavily polluted that have come back to sparkling, glittering life – it’s only because people have worked really hard to get them there.

In a way, when it comes to the survival and improvement of the habitat and fish species, I’m sure a lot of the eco-groups begrudgingly admire the fishers. There have been a lot of angling groups, along with the Angling Trust, who’ve taken polluters of rivers to court, and anglers are conscientious reporters of strange sights and invasive species. And fishermen are the guys on the ground. They’re the watchdogs, looking over and fiercely protective of the fish and the river habitat.

The key thing is fishermen know these places – their route, their particular beat – better than anyone else. They’re down there more often than anyone else, which means they’re the best-placed sources to note any changes. They notice if the water is changing its rate of flow. They can see changes in the surrounding environment. And they’re aware when the fish numbers are declining. But they’re often the last people to be listened to, because their knowledge doesn’t come in a folder with a load of footnotes, and they’re seen as being self-interested because there’s a rod in their hand.

We know the rivers and the fish have had it hard in the past. They’re having it hard again. I just hope we can halt some of the pressures on them. Many of the things that we allow to happen are much, much crueller than fishing. Fishermen might have a self-interest but they’re also always fighting the fish’s corner.

We’ve saved our rivers before, and I hope we’ll do it again. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe.

Bob: The locations are one of the best things about our fishing trips.