The Secret Angler

I no longer subscribe to fishing magazines and rarely buy single copies. Sometimes a kind soul will pass on theirs to me when they’ve read it. Otherwise I get just the odd one when I have some time to pass in a café and a newsagent is handy. I don’t feel too good about this; fishing magazines don’t sell in huge numbers and I feel I should support them. But after finding the new issue arrives with the previous barely read, I can no longer justify the cost.

The reason magazines go unread, other than lack of time, is that the content, with the odd exception, is not the best, as I’ve written about before. So often I’ve struggled to get beyond the first paragraph. I find myself moving to the next article only to turn the page yet again with only a paragraph or two read. Why is this? The quick answer is nearly all lack any kind of narrative draw, the quality that prompts you to read on, the interest that carries you to the end of the piece before you know it. This kind of readability is rare and probably always was, although I can’t comment on the very old magazines like Angling and Creel. Maybe they were better. Sales were a little better then. Today I’d be surprised if more than three percent of anglers read fishing magazines.

There can be many reasons why a fishing article is not up to snuff. It could be the author has nothing of interest to say but I think it goes deeper than that. Most topics in fishing have been written about already but it is possible for a good writer to make the familiar engaging. The last magazine I looked at, Trout and Salmon, the best-selling of the fly fishing periodicals, is a mix of instruction and where to fish articles with a bit of soapboxing. By the time I’d stumbled through the content I was struck by how many of the pieces could have been written by the same person. I wonder whether writers on angling read anything but fishing magazines because they all sound so similar.

The skill to write a flowing narrative is uncommon though there are some obvious faults that contribute to a bad article. One of the great obstacles to good writing is hackneyed phrasing. I don’t just mean the obvious screaming reels and bars of silver; nearly all articles are scattered through with those stylistic tics that have you groaning and turning the page: ‘the anticipation was palpable,’ ‘come on in leaps and bounds,’ ‘wet a line’ and numerous others. No one seems to fish for fish anymore, they ‘target’ them as though packing a gun instead of a rod. Distortions to time figure regularly: ‘time slowed,’ ‘it was timeless,’ ‘time ceased.’ It doesn’t — time carries on as normal; trying to capture a moment through lazy clichés is a narrative killer. Latinate words are preferred to the Anglo-Saxon, ‘initially’ a particular favourite (‘Initially I baited with’). Are fishing writers too bombastic to use words like ‘first’? Superfluous adverbs like gently, softly, methodically are used too much, deadening the writing yet more.

If this copycat writing isn’t bad enough, a lack of prose rhythm is evident in so many books and articles. Fluid prose is harder to achieve and requires a good ear. Few seem to have one. So the combined effect of all these flaws is an article that might be pictured as a ploughed field after heavy rain than a smooth path full of interesting things to see. The two current magazines of a more literary bent, Fallon’s Angler and Fly Culture, might be expected to offer articles of a higher standard. The quality is variable, with the added problem of authors trying to write in a literary style and convey a spiritual aspect to their fishing. This leads to a lot of overwriting with plenty of description piled on more description and too many laboured and inappropriate metaphors and themes. Have the contributors never heard of less is more? Discursions on favourite food and drink, especially coffee, films, television programmes and all manner of foot-staring are far too common distractions from the fishing. As Tom Fort pointed out in Fallon’s Angler: many angling authors think they can write movingly, but they can’t. At some point you wonder whether they really believe what they’re trying to say. One reason I like Fort’s occasional articles is because there are no pretensions.

Not all the writers who appear in these publications are bad. Some are very good but appear only infrequently, so infrequently I forget their names. Of the regulars in Fallon’s Angler, Dexter Petley and Chris Yates are the best by some distance. Petley, misanthrope and antidote to the French Tourist Board, is unusual in the life he leads and this is reflected in his writing. He knows how to put a sentence together and always writes with interest, more often about his life, expressed in angling metaphor, than the fishing. Occasionally he overdoes it but his articles are amongst the few you can read straight through. Yates is one of those rare authors with a good ear for prose, even if his subject matter is more everyday than Petley’s. Both are practised writers with several books to their name.

Fly Culture excels more in its photography and tends to specialise in destination fly fishing, a euphemism for long haul holidays (jet pollution included). Many of its writers work in the fishing industry as guides or tackle ‘consultants’. Unfortunately the majority write with the same limitations, although it rings the changes more; there are no contributors with a regular slot, whereas Fallon regulars produce about one third of articles per issue. On balance I think Fallon’s Angler is the better magazine for variety, length and of course its star writers.

The puzzle is why the editors settle for so much indifferent or plain bad writing appearing in their pages, especially given they print some very good work. I suppose the answer must be they don’t think it bad, or there are too few good articles coming in. Or perhaps they know the readership likes to read this kind of stuff: it is said that many people talk in clichés so perhaps they like to read clichés too. Maybe anglers like to hear the sound of singing reels and see the rods bent double in their imaginations. I can’t make it out. I recall an editor praising a contributor as a fresh voice, but that voice relied heavily on expletives and an American kick-ass style. Nothing fresh about that in my view, one kind of tiresome writing replaced with another.

For me the fishing article world is too insular, most of the writers feed off one another and I suspect they read little outside of fishing. To be really good at something you need to put in the hours and learn from good examples, and the good examples are to be found in the wider world of literature. Now I am done with angling magazines except for the occasional impulse purchase. I don’t expect to find much to hold my attention beyond a few nice photographs and the odd proper writer once in a while.

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Anglers always seem to be unhappy about fishery rules and management, especially salmon anglers who brood over falling catch returns, worse in recent years.

The majority of British salmon fishermen want two things — fewer rules and more stocking. Trout & Salmon magazine has lately printed two articles along these lines. One by Dani Morey, a Spey guide, is upset about the proposal to introduce compulsory catch and release in Scotland because, she believes, releasing fish is doing nothing to improve stocks; it’s making her ‘blood boil’. This begs the question of what stocks might be like if there had been no catch and releasing. She further undermines her position by pointing out that 95% of salmon are released anyway. What, then, is the big disadvantage of making it 100%?

According to Morey, it is to waste time, just as repeating fishery research wastes time, though she does not expand on the nature of this research. I suspect this is more of a concern for her ghillieing business. Mandatory catch and release may put off a few punters who haven’t got the conservation message. Yet she does have a point about wasting time and futile activities which apparently do nothing to improve salmon populations. Certainly there is little being done to improve salmon stocks, even though we know how to in some cases. Banning open sea cages in aquaculture would be a very good start. Alas, economics trumps the environment, even now.

What else might improve salmon populations? According to the T&S December interview of Bob Kindness (cue corny puns in the byline), liberal stocking from hatcheries is the answer. He runs one on the River Carron on the west coast of Scotland. Naturally this is very popular with anglers and prompted polemics in fishing magazines and online articles. The benefits of hatchery supplements to wild populations have been studied in several long term projects, especially in Ireland and the US. I have seen data that show a stark difference in the behaviour of wild and ranched salmon. The clear conclusion is that indiscriminate stocking adds nothing to wild populations, and may harm them. Only in specific situations using tightly controlled breeding may supplementary stocking help.

Kindness makes bold claims for his work, reminiscent of those of the Avon Roach Project, though stocking a salmon river is potentially more damaging. He cites high survival rate of hatched fish, hardly surprising for tank-reared fish, but offers no figures on the number of hatchery fish that return. He admits they won’t survive at sea as well as wild fish but believes survival in the hatchery tanks more than compensates. It doesn’t: the observed survival rate is 8% that of wild fish. Neither does he understand the concept of biological fitness. Curiously he supports aquaculture which is implicated in reducing salmon and sea trout populations in Scotland and Norway. Like aquaculture, hatcheries use feed derived from marine species, to the overall detriment of wild fish.

Though Kindness is a friend of aquaculture, he is not so well disposed towards the work of scientists on the Atlantic Salmon Trust tracking project, perhaps because scientists have understandably criticised his hatchery work. The AST is one arm of the Missing Salmon Alliance which I’ve previously written about. As I wrote then, the MSA seems little more than a vehicle for waffle. An important factor in salmon numbers is survival at sea but it is a mystery what is happening and where. The AST’s tracking project is an attempt to study smolts as they move downriver and into the open sea; one study looks at the east coast (Moray Firth), one at the west. At least this is something concrete amongst the flannel of the ‘Likely Suspects Framework’ (frameworks seem to be part of the bullshit that infects even science these days). It’s potentially an important project; using some fancy technology it is possible to track smolt progress, at least on the early stages of their journey. Some commentary on progress is on the AST website. In year 1 of the Moray Firth study they appropriately took a ‘positive leap’, finding that half of smolts died while still in the river. They don’t say whether this might be a recent phenomenon or just the way things always have been. Now in year 3 they are looking at the effect of pinch points — man-made obstructions like hydroelectric dams.

The west coast project has not been going so long and there is little to report other than to note that smolts follow many routes northwards. I’m not especially impressed with the progress shown but it is early in the work and perhaps it will yield some important results. More details on the website would be welcome.

More substantial is the research by Dutch scientists in 2016 which I’ve not seen mentioned in any of the fishing magazines (though I don’t buy regular copies). They looked at the Rhine catchment and used historical data on fish prices to infer salmon populations all the way back to the Middle Ages. Their conclusion is that salmon may well have been highly abundant a few hundred years ago but went into decline as water mills and the like were established. An interesting plot compares the UK distribution of salmon with engineering in rivers. The inference is that all the rechannelling of southern rivers centuries back impacted the salmon. It’s a compelling study; the number of lochs, weirs, dams, hydro schemes about now may be a literal barrier to re-establishing good salmon populations, notwithstanding fish passes. There is an interesting coincidence in Thames history. Salmon runs up the river vanished in the early 19^th century, which is about when the 45 weirs from St Johns down to Teddington began to be constructed. Teddington was the earliest. No fish passes then. Other factors, particularly pollution, may have done for the salmon, but it fits with the Dutch findings.

What of the future? Persuading landowners to remove their ornamental weirs on my local river is difficult enough. Anglers enthusiastically blame predators — seals, cormorants, otters — and demand more stocking. Habitat and environment restoration will be expensive, especially now it’s been postponed for so many years. Will all those polluting 4x4s anglers are so fond of be given up? Foreign fishing trips too? Do you believe in global warming? I’ve seen the mists of denial drift across so many pairs of eyes. In the meantime there are always hatcheries to trouble wild stocks and guns to shoot cormorants or anything you think you can get away with.

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