It took several minutes to get into position and feel comfortable. All the time, the fish went on rising and moving steadily upstream towards the tree, narrowing the angle where my fly would have to go. To have any chance, the leader would have to overshoot the fish and be squeezed into the space between the water and the branches. It would take a driven cast, all wrist, to create the tight loop I was going to need. And I would have to take care with the back-cast to avoid the alder that grew over the water behind me. I studied the situation and looked back at my friend. ‘Thanks a lot, Mike,’ I remember saying.
It must have been on the fourth or fifth attempt that the breeze suddenly strengthened. In mid false-cast I took account of it. I tightened the loop still more. I applied yet more wrist. I let the final back cast straighten and then drove it forward.
It did not come. There was an odd sensation, impossible to describe, but something, somehow, somewhere seemed to grate. In the concentration of the moment, I assumed that I had snagged the alder. I have snagged trees a thousand times. Foolishly, I did not bother to turn. I flicked the rod again, expecting either the fly to come free or the branch to give and cushion the movement. I have done that and seen that a thousand times, too.
Nothing. No give. Absolutely no give, but again a grating feeling and this time a sound. I turned and instinctively looked for my line and fly. The line was well clear of the alder and to the right. The fly was on the barbed wire fence that I had forgotten about. My eyes followed the line back from the fence to my rod. I saw the oddity of an angle in the silken curve, two rings back from the tip. I saw the cane splintered and light shining through the long, loved fibres.
For a long time, I could not take it in. I suppose the realisation of what I was seeing, the pain of it, was somehow dulled, the way that the shock of an injury sometimes can be. Then, all the things I had loved about the rod – its exquisite beauty, the occasion it commemorated, the scores of magical moments I had experienced with it – rushed through my mind in a torrent.
Mike said it was two minutes before I spoke. I simply stood there uncomprehending, staring at one of the three or four possessions I treasured most in the world, now utterly ruined. I know we all have such moments, but that gives no comfort. It was – it still is – terrible.
AS SPORTS GO, angling is well-provided with media. Coarse, trout and sea anglers all have several magazines apiece and fishing as a whole has long supported two weekly newspapers. Together, they help us to keep abreast of developments in and around the waterside and to stay on top of new tackle and techniques. By and large, they serve us well.
But not always. Every now and then an editor has a rush of blood to the head. Then, it is as though he loses all sense of proportion. It is as though he sees angling and our small world as the whole world – or else he consciously disregards the wider world completely. Neither is a great idea, but for the most part this matters little. In the main, no-one in the wider world cares much about what anglers think and say – and why should they?
When angling editors go overboard about something which the public holds dear, though, everything changes. Then, real problems can arise – some of them profoundly damaging.
PRETTY well every issue of every publication in Britain is bought by news agencies as a matter of course, angling publications not excluded. Journalists – mostly freelance journalists who live by the column-inches they can generate and the air time they can clock up – read them in the hope of picking up a snippet here, a story there. Insofar as angling is concerned, they know that the British public is besotted with the furred, the feathered and the cuddly and if some angling editor’s rush of blood appears to put him at odds with this, then the telephones ring, news editors get busy and a view that was originally aimed at an angling audience alone hits several million breakfast tables overnight.
This is why, whatever concerns might exist in angling’s media about creatures other than fish – and concerns do arise from time to time – a cautious and measured response is wisest. The temptation to rant to readers for the sake of short-term impact, needs to be tempered with a realisation that outside eyes will be watching and that long-term damage might ensue.
We have seen it over the years with swans and otters– and with cormorants in particular. All three, at one level or another, can have an impact on our sport but the article that begins with pointing this out, that moves on to an indignant ‘something should be done about it’ (always, note, by someone else) and that then demands that populations of whatever it is be controlled, is destined to become ‘Anglers demand cull of swans/otters/cormorants/ babies/old people/the halt and the lame’, or whatever.
It is then that the perceived, short-term editorial satisfactions of ‘making a stand on behalf of our readers’ as fishing editors love to put it, can lead to huge and lasting damage outside angling. Then it is not swans/otters/cormorants or whatever that is most likely to end up in the dock, but angling itself.
Because of one particular incident I want to focus on cormorants, but there are a couple of points on swans and otters to be made, first.
Swans (dealt with at more length elsewhere) can create two problems when, as sometimes happens, they descend in their scores and their hundreds on a short length of water. The first is that they can make fishing, even the simple act of casting, physically impossible. The second is that they can so denude the water of the plants on which they feed that they devastate the cover and bug life on which fish depend.
Given the right of swans to exist, their grace and beauty, the affection in which the public holds them and the power of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, any approach to problem flocks has to be measured and thought out. It may well be possible to get the public to recognise the birds’ impact on fish and fisheries, but that progress will only come through education and negotiation and it will take many years to achieve.
The same principle applies to otters, which have made a dramatic recovery after numbers collapsed in the second half of the 20th century. This recovery has been stimulated by the release into the wild of artificially reared cubs over a period of years. Through natural breeding and because there is so much virgin territory to be reoccupied, numbers have gone up significantly.
Otters eat fish, but they also have huge territories and so the impact on a given section of a river is likely to be small. It is a different story on lakes, especially if an otter occupies a holt near a commercial stillwater fishery stocked with carp and rears her cubs there. Then, significant numbers of carp – some of them costing thousands of pounds apiece – may be taken, the quality of fishing is likely to decline and the owner’s livelihood may well be threatened. The answer is not for anglers and editors to demand impotently that ‘something be done’ (as some have) but for us all to recognise that the otter, like the swan, is an iconic species much loved by the public and that, if push ever came to shove, the public would unhesitatingly back otters against smelly old fish and those who support them.
The only sensible course of action for anyone concerned for fish and fishing is to accept that the otter is here to stay – I, for one, am delighted about it – and for fishery owners to take whatever steps they can to protect their waters. If fencing and the like cannot be afforded and no public funds are forthcoming to help build them, then the loss of fish will need to be offset through the prices charged: and if the market will not stand that, then the fishery, like any other enterprise caught by changing market conditions, is likely to close. We may think that brutal but the public is likely to see it as simply a fact of life. The only safe and effective solutions to concerns about swans, otters or any other form of wildlife are ones that public opinion will support.
Enter cormorants. If anglers want to see the potential for damage that can be caused by editors getting it wrong, let them consider the impact, many years ago, of a rant against cormorants in a national angling newspaper.
In 1996 a