The Secret Angler

Will Millard gets around. According to his website he is an expedition leader, rather in the Victorian tradition, in which he tramps about wild places. He has made television programmes about native peoples down Indonesia way, and closer to home, on the history and geography of Wales. They make for pretty good TV all in all. I’ve watched the repeats of Hunters of the South Seas and liked the first episode, on the Bajau spear fishermen, not quite so keen on the whale hunters.

Millard’s films have the familiar problem of the modern documentary, the presenter from the skies, or the fish out of water. These programmes risk the presenter becoming the main focus while the notional subject, the native people, recede into the background behind the familiar face to camera. The whale episode dallied with this flaw. Certainly the whale hunt scenes were dramatic, but of equal drama seemed to be Millard’s wrestling with his own emotions at the bloody turmoil in the water and the distress at seeing a great creature slaughtered. His reactions are understandable, yet they are not the point of the films and become intrusive.

The real strength of the documentaries is the mirror they hold up to ourselves in our complacent Western comfort. No longer just small subsistence communities taking only what they need, they are subject to the same prejudices and poverty and desire for money we see in our own milieu. The disabled Bajau boy who is an embarrassment to his father, the discrimination practised by the land-living tribes, and, most troubling, the culpability of the fishermen in the bad practices that feed the Chinese traditional medicine market (a euphemism for large scale quackery). Equally unsettling is their naivety over the collapse of fish stocks. Their view is that the seas will always provide, even as catches dwindle and illegal vessels hoover up the remaining stocks. Corruption on a small scale is also evident: the locals join the boats to earn cash.

None of this should really be unexpected. Similar disbelief in evidence exists in educated cultures that should know better, and cupidity runs deep the world over. That the serpent in the Garden encircles the globe is the unintended revelation of Millard’s overseas sojourns.

The way of life of the native fisherman in simple communities is declining and with it their direct role in environmental damage. This will only leave the oceans open to widespread illegal fishing if governments cannot enforce the laws. There is always a market for fish and consumers outside the West, and many within, don’t worry where it comes from. And that is our real problem. The human population is growing rapidly and little action is being taken to address this. There are solutions, principally the spread of wealth more evenly around the world and the provision of education for women in the developed world. How likely is that to happen in time?

Predicting the future is always difficult. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, guesses the odds of our making it to the 22nd century at evens. That might be generous.

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Looking through the Wild Trout Trust spring auction listings, I feel like a kid with a Hornby train set catalogue, full of desirable goodies I couldn’t possibly afford. The auction offers a range of fishing trips, books, paintings and other odds and ends on which we are invited to bid. Proceeds go towards the conservation and restoration work of the WTT.

I have yet to win a bid on the WTT eBay auction. Guide prices suggest bidders need fairly deep pockets, deeper than indicated in fact, since the winning bids are often twice the guide figure. The lowest guide price I can find for a river is £40, which could get you a day on a Welsh river, or one on the River Wear in County Durham. This doesn’t seem too bad, except that one can get a day’s fly fishing for a tenner on parts of the Wear. An especially good stretch perhaps. But worth 80 quid?

The North-South divide is acutely obvious when you browse the South East section. Heading the list of covetable chalk stream fishing is a day for two on the River Test at Mottisfont. If this lot proves as popular as its association with Halford might imply, expect to pay £1900, though that does buy you a day’s fishing for two. Such a sum would buy you a season ticket on many chalk stream beats, although not Motissfont, for which season tickets are as rare as the iron blue. Don’t expect much change from a thousand quid for most of the better Itchen and Test lots, despite the common stipulation that the fishing is to be taken after the mayfly season, when it’s supposed to be cheaper. This is neoliberal fishing in action: the ‘clubs’ who hold the fishing rights to these beats are registered companies whose directors are very wealthy individuals.

The cheaper fishing is confined to the minor streams dotted about the South, usually on short reaches. Some of the lots are very inviting, but from my own prior knowledge, some of the fisheries are not so great. Could be a lot of money for little fishing, particularly if the weather is bad.

The fishing overseas section has been cut back and replaced with ‘fixed-price trips abroad’ — did past bids not cover the costs? In the auction is lower cost fishing on the continent, some of which looks quite attractive, if a long way to go for a day’s fishing. The faraway trips are now part of the fixed-price section — trout in Patagonia, bonefish in the Bahamas, and other long-distance destinations. Now I wouldn’t mind wading some pale blue tropical flat or casting to exotic trout in the Southern Hemisphere, if I had a few grand to spare for three days’ fishing, but is this something any of us should be doing in this climate-changing world? More to the point, is this something the WTT, a conservation organisation, should be encouraging?

Many will say that it’s all for charity, and so what if those with the wherewithal buy up the posh fishing. All the more funds for the WTT’s bank account from those who have the means. Inevitably the WTT’s annual auction emphasises the truth that the finest, or at least the most famous, fly fishing is the province of the very well off. Pay up, board the aeroplane, push those vague thoughts of carbon footprints to the back of the mind, and console yourself that the WTT will be faggoting some stream or other next season.

One has to ask where genuine environmental improvement for the long term survival of the wild trout and indeed ourselves will come from, a future that will surely depend upon reduced consumption. Apparently not from anglers, nor it seems the Wild Trout Trust.

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