Secret Angler

Some years ago I knew an engineer who designed power tools; that is, he sat at a drawing board where he conceived and drew the parts of machines, eventually to be manufactured into working products. He hated the way the term engineer was used to describe washing machine repair men and other sundry mechanics and technicians.

Grandiose terms to describe ordinary jobs and actions have become more common. Words like operative, executive, analyst are uninformative but sound important. Similar pretensions are part of angling too. The self-regarding like to talk about designing floats, flies, rigs, when at best all they are doing is tweaking ideas that have been around for decades or even centuries. Nowadays there are those who call themselves rod designers, typically anglers who are either employed full-time by a tackle company or as ‘ambassadors’.

This raises the question of how you make a fishing rod. If you search around the internet for information you’ll find videos which explain that rod design starts off with a rod blank, the tapering tube of carbon fibre (in modern rods) that is the fishing rod (without the rings and handle). How the blank comes about is not revealed but this is where the real design happens.

Rod blanks are made by cutting sheets of carbon fibre to specific patterns, rolling these on to a tapering steel rod called a mandrel and baking in an oven. The origin of these patterns and the shape of the mandrel are not explained in any of the sources I’ve looked at. Clearly an understanding of the modulus of the different materials is required, i.e. how it deforms under stress, along with other properties. Knowledge of mathematics used to calculate rod wall thickness and taper for a given application must also be a prerequisite.

Do those fishing names who claim to design rods have this knowledge? Almost certainly not. Anyway, I think that rod blanks are often produced in specialist factories; the tackle makers order blanks to some general bendiness specification. (Some such as Harrison Rods do both; their website points out that the term ‘rod design’ is often misused.) There must be a lot of trial and error in this, which is where our fisherman rod ‘designer’ comes in. Really they are not designers beyond coming up with very general statements of requirement — a certain length, soft or stiff or somewhere in between. A rod is manufactured and the prototype handed over for some waggling and casting. They are rod testers, not designers. Even more they are rod marketers. Names sell rods.

Those anglers who can genuinely claim to be rod designers are the handful of craftsmen like Edward Barder who build cane rods. But even here I suspect rod tapers are the product of careful experimentation and long experience rather than a complex computer-aided process.

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In the March issue of Trout & Salmon, regular columnist Dani Morey questions the motivation behind Salmon Scotland’s Wild Fisheries Fund (WFF), a sum of money offered to salmon conservation projects. She is right to do so. The cash on offer for 2026 is £230,000, a modest figure indeed compared to the industry’s turnover of £1.2bn . Money is only granted to short-term practical projects (academics are excluded), many of which are small beer like mink traps and bank restoration, none of which will have real success in restoring salmon numbers. Some questionable projects are funded, like Bob Kindness’s stocking scheme on the Carron. He is often referred to as a biologist but he has no qualifications or expertise in salmon populations. Real biologists tell us he is doing more harm than good.

Salmon Scotland is a trade body that represents aquaculture companies. One of its roles is to defend and promote the industry, not least through using its website for propaganda, claiming sustainability and importance to ‘global food security’ when both are obviously untrue. Aquaculture has serious impacts on the environment, and farming fish is an inefficient use of the marine species that go into aquaculture feeds.

Can we believe that aquaculture feels some guilt for its environmental impact and wishes to atone by supporting work to help wild stocks? I should coco. The WFF is just another side to the industry’s propaganda, a form of greenwashing to convince the gullible that it cares for the rivers and oceans. It’s the same approach as Thames Water’s when they funded the Wild Trout Trust’s conservation awards, all the while loading the utility up with debt and distributing the cash as dividends up the complex chain of holding companies that its owners engineered. Hence the terrible state of the underfunded sewage treatment infrastructure and TW’s own finances.

Large corporations nearly always behave like psychopaths . Their first and last focus is on profit, no matter the cost to the environment or other people. History is replete with heinous examples: tobacco’s long denial of the harm caused by smoking, big oil’s deliberate obfuscation around global warming even though obvious to the bosses, and more recently, the contemptible actions of the Post Office, abetted by Fujitsu, towards its subpostmasters. Companies are without emotion or feeling, and one has to conclude that the suits who run them at the very least put such human attributes aside at work.

One has to view Scottish Salmon’s WFF in this light. The aquaculture companies’ only goal is to survive and prosper, regardless of environmental costs. Through a combination of misleading advertising, influence over regulators and economic imperatives, aided by a bit of greenwashing as a sop to those who condemn the damage they do, they are in a constant war against conservation.

Morey wonders whether what really matters is the benefit to wild salmon that could accrue from this dirty money. The amounts are a drop in the open-sea cages. Any benefits are negligible, especially measured against the harm of the aquaculture industry. More good will be done by voting with our mouths. I don’t buy any farmed fish, salmon or otherwise. If you like to eat salmon, Pacific wild salmon bearing the Marine Stewardship Council stamp is available.

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Author: Secret Angler

Designer designers

The greenwashing psychopaths