The Secret Angler

For trout anglers the pandemic confinement is ill-timed. For coarse fishermen it may be fortuitous timing as the season has just ended, excepting all-year stillwater carp anglers, which seems just about everyone these days. For those and for sea anglers anytime is ill-timed. But for everyone it is a dreary necessity that we can’t go out and about as normal. One reason is that social distancing means different things to different people. For too many it meant going to the beach or the park with a crowd, or having a party or a barbecue; to carp fishermen it may mean not telling anyone your best swims or baits (hint: they use boilies). Hence the enforceable edict we all stay at home except for food shopping and exercise.

Plenty of film on the TV News and the evidence of our own eyes tells us that fear of a nasty respiratory illness is not uppermost in everyone’s minds. Traffic stills looks busy on the main roads where I live. At least the hoarding behaviour has eased in the shops. Apparently only 3 or 4 percent of citizens did this. The shortages were mainly caused by shoppers buying a few extra things, all of which amounted to empty shelves, even in perishable vegetables. To me this seems almost as selfish as the mass hoarders. There’s never been a food shortage, just a common sense shortage.

How are anglers behaving? Reading through some of the fishing social media there is plenty of evidence of antisocial attitudes, summarised as ‘Why the hell shouldn’t I go fishing, I’m not near anyone.’ Reassuringly these voices are overwhelmed by those who understand the current need to isolate, that it is the law, and that waiving the rules for one set of people means a quick return to widespread park outings, barbecues, etc. The overall health of the population and the stability of the NHS depends on adherence.

I’ll finish with the post below from the deputy administrator of worldseafishing forum. Sea fishermen are in a position to flout the rules more easily than freshwater, so it was good to read this forthright statement.

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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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