The Secret Angler

I remember long ago being at a club meeting where a biologist from one of the river authorities, all eventually amalgamated into the EA, gave a talk. One of the members stood up and demanded to know what the river authority had ever done for anglers. Bereft of knowledge, short on reasoning, this guy with red face and sandy hair persisted with his sense of outrage that his licence money was actually paying someone to do a job he mistakenly thought offered no benefit to him. Representatives of this attitude are alive and voluble today, particularly in online forums for anglers. As I have written here before, ignorance is considered a virtue, predominantly by the older men that form a majority on these sites.

Amongst the occasional racism that demeans these forums — hostility towards gypsies (TFF), language that insults the disabled (FF.co.uk) — bigotry has extended lately to science projects. The implication is usually that the research is worthless and scientists are just being kept in employment. On flyfishing.co.uk, one of the worst for this sort of prejudice, the complaint has been that the Salmon Tracking Project, run by the Atlantic Salmon Trust (AST), is killing off its experimental subjects (smolts) with the tracking tags inserted into the body cavities. If this were true, the project would indeed be worthless. The AST, however, is run by Ken Whelan, a reputable scientist. It is difficult to see how he would be involved in such poor research. And assuming implanting tags is a regulated procedure, it is also difficult to see how such work would have been licensed if tagging were considered to damage fish. As a matter of fact, the use of acoustic tags has been going for a few years and the evidence suggests the fish are not harmed.

A wider question concerns the state of Atlantic salmon stocks. Information on this must come mainly or solely from catch returns. These are volatile, with big jumps up and down from year to year. The figure below (from Marine Scotland Topic Sheet 68) shows that 1SW catches showed an upward trend until 2010, then fell sharply. (MSW catches have been bumping along the bottom for years.)

In England and Wales there is a similar pattern, although the small improvement in MSW catches is interesting. The figures are estimates, however.

Murmurings and complaints of dwindling salmon stocks have been heard for many years, but the last decade has seen a big fall; 2018’s catches in Scotland are a record low. Same for commercial catches. The AST’s tracking project is attempting to discover where salmon mortality is occurring. Early results suggest that smolts are dying before they even reach the sea. On the west coast of Scotland salmon farming has long been implicated in the demise of salmon and, especially, sea trout. Fish lice are always a significant problem for aquaculture; infestations of wild fish passing the cages and the toxic effect of chemicals to control lice are both considered to harm wild stocks. Escapes of farmed fish are a more insidious threat. Large breakouts are not rare. Private Eye recently reported on an escape of 74000 fish from one of Mowi’s farms off the Isle of Colonsay. The scientific literature makes clear that farmed escapees hybridise with wild fish, which themselves are reproductively viable. The impact of gene merging, although variable between populations, is believed to have bad consequences for wild stocks.

Remarkably these conclusions are doubted by certain members of the flyfishing forum. Despite their lack of qualification to dispute the findings, they plough on with denigration. Challenged, they resort to jeering and abuse. Why they feel it in their interests to do this is never clear. I suspect it is part of the populist hostility to the concept of the expert, the specialist who is well educated and works hard to understand complex processes. Ignorance is preferred, knowledge is dismissed. So long as they rave on forums it matters little. But when such views gain common currency serious trouble can arise for us all. As we’re seeing at the moment.

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About 11 years ago I published my last fishing article, I think in one of the fly fishing monthlies now defunct. As I explained in an earlier post, I gave it up because the money was poor and I had to chase editors to give me a decision. Another reason was a sneaking feeling that the articles were a bit boring because I got bored writing them. So I have sympathy with Tom Fort’s view, expressed in Fallon’s Angler 18, that it’s better to go fishing than write about it. He believes all fishing writers soon run out of things to say.

I’m not sure this is the reason most fishing writing, as Tom finds, is no good. It’s true there is only so much to be said about fishing, especially in those articles on technical matters which really are tedious in their repetitiveness. With the literary or one-with-nature kind of article, the problem is not necessarily because they’re full of description. The recognisable examples he gives — ‘protesting reels’, ‘water still as glass’, etc — are awful because they are hackneyed. They’re borrowed phrases from hundreds of other fishing articles.

Thinking about popular fishing authors, the one that comes to mind is Chris Yates, who has appeared in every issue of Fallon’s. He’s been writing his epistles from the waterside for many years. Despite the repetition they are generally a good read and most of us don’t mind reading about another crucian landed, or another carp ‘ghosting’ past. Sheringham, Tom Fort’s favourite author, covers similar ground in many of the essays that make up his books, yet they are a fine read because they were written from within himself, and he knew how to turn a sentence. In the annals of fishing articles, very few have known how to do that.

Do new young writers bring something fresh? Maybe, and maybe not, especially if they fashion their style on older writers, which most do. I’m not convinced that youth offers that much different, though there are always exceptions. I’d rather read the old lags like Tom Fort himself. I used to read with enjoyment his pieces in the Financial Times, not a paper widely read, I suspect, by many anglers. The FT angling readers were most likely the kind whose fishing was limited to a week after salmon in Scotland each year, provided it didn’t interfere with the grouse season. The problem with an angling column in the broadsheets is the lack of interested readers. Keith Elliot’s pieces in The Independent were written mainly for a wider readership. There’s no fishing column in the FT now.

Honesty is rare nowadays but honesty is what we get in Tom Fort’s article. Who can get away with pointing out that many anglers are illiterate, or semi-literate, incurably incompetent and stupid? Or that their motive is gain? Or that most anglers can’t write for toffee? Tom Fort, apparently. And he’s not troubled that some lightweight editor might consider him too ‘negative’ (I’ve had that experience) or too offensive. My kind of writer!

I expect the traditional fishing article replete with rod-bending action and regurgitations will continue to fill the pages of most fishing publications. Perhaps there is an opening for me once more:

The rod hooped over and the reel protested loudly as the fish made its bid for freedom …

Interested editors may contact me at the link above.

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