The Secret Angler

When the pandemic is over and when we are free to go out and about once more, things, we are told, will be different. The economy will change; well it’s certainly running down, the Government paying the wages of some 9 million furloughed workers, businesses including fisheries shut down with support available for those that qualify. Will the effects be permanent or will everything bounce back in Boris-bouncing fashion?

Will behaviour change? Will we be cycling more and abandoning the tank-sized four-by-fours that hog two spaces in the supermarket car park? Will the relative quiet on the roads persist when the lockdown’s over? Or will everyone leap from their homes straight into their cars and head down the shops, parks, rivers, beauty spots?

What of global warming? If Covid-19 doesn’t get us climate change certainly will, unless we do something about it. Now that we have seen how easily we can be wiped out, will we wake up and do something about the wellbeing of our world? Will we take the prospect of future pandemics seriously? Are we prepared to demand of our inept government, so heedless, so slow to react to the danger, that the country prepares properly for the next epidemic? And there will be a next.

And what of anglers and angling? I’ve already noted the politics of too many fishermen — the politics that insists the climate is not warming, that environmentalism is a left-wing plot, that they are blameless freedom lovers who do no harm. The sea anglers who think it’s fine to kill species of diminishing stocks; the coarse fishermen who use pellets made from sea fish to catch farmed carp in large stock ponds; the fly anglers who catch trout fed on the same pellets, who demand salmon rivers are restocked in disregard of the research that says this is not the answer. And will those same fly anglers continue to consume large quantities of aviation fuel through long-haul flights to cast a line in far-flung countries? The new edition of Salmo Trutta, the magazine of the Wild Trout Trust, has no fewer than three articles on foreign destinations: Charles Rangeley-Wilson, WTT founder and globe trotter, goes to New Zealand, 23 hours flight time away; Theo Pike, another WTT man, has an all-expenses-paid jolly to America; while Adrian Latimer, who has clocked up more air miles than a shoal of flying fish, ends up in Iceland, coincidentally the country whose volcano cleared the British skies in 2010 even more effectively than the coronavirus in 2020.

The way things are looking for the airlines, such trips may at least be a lot more expensive in future. Paying the true cost of pollution? But will the WTT continue to encourage activity that speeds global warming and ultimately damages the trout’s habitat, a cold-water fish? Or will it become truly a conservation outfit?

Interesting questions. Will we be doing anything different?

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Follow @secretangler

The lockdown to restrict the spread of Covid19 is nearly three weeks old. This is hard for everyone, yet does have its compensations — everywhere is much quieter. Anglers cannot go fishing, that is well established, for most of us. Most freshwater fishing is controlled by clubs and it is more difficult to break the rules. Sea fishing is free for all, so sea anglers can get away with it more easily. But there are still a minority which cannot grasp this, or prefers to ignore it. Recently on WSF, transgressions by sea anglers at Shoreham Harbour has been posted.

This caused a hostile reaction, not untypical for that site, by anglers who saw nothing wrong in fishing because, the argument goes, they are still keeping social distance from other people. This is the usual excuse and it seems some coarse anglers are using this to justify going fishing (with some casual racism thrown in):

The reasons why they shouldn’t are perfectly clear.

1. Unnecessary travel is prohibited, enforceable by law. Going fishing is unnecessary travel; it is not exercise.
2. Each transgression of the lockdown increases the risk of spreading the virus to those who will die from it, including the NHS staff (who are most at risk), the people who care for those who get ill.
3. The more people seen breaking the lockdown, the more likely that others will follow suit, leading eventually to a collapse of the lockdown and the pandemic taking off again.

Anglers should not be fishing. Most of us are behaving responsibly, and the replies to the above two posts from Facebook make this very clear. Those who cannot understand the reasons for the lockdown should simply obey the law rather than invent loopholes. They are freeloading on the rest of society and quite possibly infecting others. They may also be delaying a return to fishing for all.