The Secret Angler

Over the many years I’ve been fishing on shore and riverbank, I have encountered very few women anglers. On trout streams I’ve met only two; I know or have known two or three female guides and fished with one; I once met two women at a fishing hotel, whose advice I sought as they had local knowledge; and I once knew two who went coarse fishing with their husbands. On the sea shore I’ve met none. A very small total considering the numbers of women who apparently go fishing now, author magazine articles, work as fishing guides. In fact this blog has more women followers than I’ve seen out with a fishing rod. If you go to small ponds and lakes classed as family-friendly venues, with a tackle shop, toilets and other facilities, you are likely to see more women fishing, but overall it is still rare to run into any when you’re out on the water.

Despite the increase in women who fish, they still form a small minority of anglers in Britain; environment agency data suggest a proportion of about four percent. (In America numbers are much higher — women make up 37% of all anglers over there.) Why so few women? Not simply the yuckiness of maggots and worms I suspect. The traditional man’s world thing about fishing must certainly be a factor. This can range from old biases towards women all the way to downright misogyny. Some while ago I highlighted the misogyny and bigotry of some anglers on forums where they feel they have carte blanche to vent their nastiest opinions. Pikers Pit and Flyfishing.co.uk were some of the worst offenders, though both seemed to have cleaned themselves up since then. Flyfishing forum allowed some nasty racism that prompted the victim to report the matter to the police. Nothing like the threat of legal action to bring about the ban of the perpetrators, although the victim was himself banned in a move typical of these sites. Pikers Pit was notorious for allowing abuse of women (and anyone else that upset the trolls of this forum), notably the television journalist Laura Kuenssberg, distorting her name to spell an obscenity. Why her? Well, you can count on a high profile, well educated, well paid and intelligent woman to raise the ire of ignorant males. Following this the Pit allowed posting of pornographic images of women. But as I say, the site seems to have cleaned itself up and banned at least one or two of the nastiest proto-fascist members referred to in an earlier post. Perhaps those decent members who took them on, also banned, sacrificed themselves in a good cause. Not all the Pitters are scumbags.

So quite possibly it’s the worms and maggots who also wield fishing rods rather than those in baitboxes that discourage women from taking up the sport. Much fishing is done in isolated places, on rivers far from roads, on beaches at night a long walk from the car. A woman on her own would obviously feel vulnerable. News reports in recent years illuminate the problems all women have to deal with daily. Serious attacks are infrequent but it’s the continuous lower level crap that must be tedious at best, sapping over the long term. A male angler could only have some understanding of this if he fished as a child in a dubious area such as an urban canal. Some years ago a young woman sea angler, a rare creature I think, described on a forum how she was crudely propositioned one night fishing on a pier. An uncomfortable experience to say the least, one no woman should have to tolerate. Unfortunately such experiences are not particularly rare, as an article by Jess L Gantos in US magazine, The Drake, suggests. She laments the sexism she encounters on the bank and in tackle shops. When in remote locations, safety is prominent in the minds of female anglers, a stress they could do without. To be clear, that is safety from certain male anglers, not bears and other dangerous wildlife. Aside from that, she has to put up with patronising attitudes, rudeness, as well as the sexual advances and probing questions to discover whether she has a male companion nearby. Not the kind of experiences for an enjoyable day on the water.

But women are standing up to male chauvinism on the waterside. Amie Battams makes droll videos, notable for their double entendres, that put down some of the prejudices she finds out there. She has also written to the exclusive London club for gentlemen fly anglers, The Flyfishers’ Club, asking them to admit women. Marina Gibson, guide and casting instructor, has done this too. Whether women will be allowed to join remains to be seen. The Garrick is perhaps the new paradigm. As a point of interest, I’ve been offered membership to the Flyfishers in the past, and tempting though dining at one’s club while contemplating Skues’s old fishing rod might be, I could not justify the subs. Besides, Tom Fort’s book Casting Shadows suggests reasons why membership is not such a privilege.

Men, some anyway, need to change their attitudes. I would like to see more women fishing. I’ve heard experienced female anglers say they have a different approach to men. I can believe it. Actually, I prefer to see women behind the counter in tackle shops from whom the advice you get always seems to be freer of the hubris and bullshit you tend to get from men. There seems less of the lofty expert attitude. Let women fish freely without having to look suspiciously over their shoulder. It doesn’t matter how many fish so long it’s as many as wants to.

So if you have, umm, a traditional attitude towards female anglers, perhaps reconsider your approach should you meet one on the bank. Treat her with courtesy and respect. Be civil. Don’t be a dick.

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I’ve maintained my resolve not to buy any more fishing magazines but a kind friend passes on to me his copy of Trout and Salmon. In the February edition the editor, Andrew Flitcroft, comments on the decline of the Atlantic salmon to the point at which it has been declared ‘endangered’ in Britain, which means at risk of extinction, although the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) has yet to update its website. I think it possible that salmon in the catchments in central southern England are already functionally extinct, which means there are too few remaining for stocks to recover and maintain their genetic diversity.

What is being done about this impending catastrophe, along with all the others like rising river pollution and rapidly changing climate? Well, there’s been an uptick in bluster and bullshit. I’m not referring to the assorted cranks and morons on the likes of Twitter projecting their disinformation, conspiracy theories and spittle. I mean the people who are supposed to be taking serious action — governments, science institutions, charities like Wildfish and the Atlantic Salmon Trust. Words like ‘mandate’, ‘resources’, ‘regulators’, ‘urgent’ are fired from a lot of indignant blunderbusses to little effect.

The Scottish government has a Wild Salmon Strategy. Can we all sigh with relief, knowing the salmon’s future is safe in its hands? I’m afraid not. A document that begins by referring to ‘vision, objectives and priority themes’ is clearly going to be riddled with bullshit, the art of saying a lot of nothing as an alternative to doing anything. This is most obvious in this sentence from the ministerial foreword: This will require the Scottish Government, Agencies, the charity and private sectors to work together and coordinate action to prioritise the protection and recovery of Scotland’s wild Atlantic salmon populations. Pompous waffle never achieved anything but time-wasting. Once the document gets down to the nitty-gritty, we get the observation, Mortality at sea appears to be a major factor in the widespread decline of salmon across its North Atlantic range. Whoever wrote the strategy is pussyfooting. Marine mortality is the overwhelming factor.

According to a review of causes of salmon decline, which I’ve previously referenced, parr production and smolt migration is holding up well. But once at sea, the fish die. The mystery concerns the nature of the mortality. What is doing for the salmon? The Dadswell review argues against climate change being the cause on the grounds that natural variations in the past did not impact salmon populations overall. It also points out that predation is unlikely to be any higher now than before salmon began to decline rapidly around the mid-1980s. Seals are a particular bete noire for anglers at present, as the pages of Trout and Salmon show much too often. Aquaculture clearly has some effect on smolts leaving estuaries, especially when numerous cages lie along migration paths. Yet salmon stocks are also failing in catchments where there are no farms in the vicinity.

In the end we are left with the two most plausible reasons for salmon mortality at sea, lack of food or human predation. There is not much data on the abundance of Atlantic salmon prey; Dadswell, however, points out that salmon can switch between prey species and starvation is a less likely cause of collapse than IUU fishing (illegal, unreported and unregulated). When legal commercial salmon fisheries began to be closed down from the 1980s on, a rise in stocks was expected. Instead the declines continued in many catchments; even in those that showed a recovery, the downward trend soon returned. This is consistent with the hypothesis of sustained IUU fishing. Outside a limited area there is little or no surveillance or enforcement in the Atlantic Ocean. In contrast, Pacific fisheries are closely controlled and monitored. Stocks of Pacific salmon are healthy.

Despite the persuasive logic, this conclusion is not being taken seriously. The Scottish Strategy only mentions illegal exploitation briefly with no reference to open ocean fishing. In fact it passes over this part of the salmon’s habitat altogether: Relative to the wider marine environment our understanding of pressures and ability to take action is greater in freshwater and coastal environments. Taking action over potential illegal fishing out at sea is difficult, certainly, but focusing on freshwater and coastal environment will achieve nothing if IUU fishing really is the problem. Even the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation (NASCO) confidently asserts that commercial fishing has been regulated away, with no mention of possible IUU. Many other marine species are threatened by legal and illegal fishing; it would be remarkable if the salmon were not. But try finding the regulatory measures on the NASCO website will lead you to broken links.

So expect little useful action from the Scottish government. Neither should we expect much of the Atlantic Salmon Trust, fretting over smolt numbers in a couple of estuaries, far from the real problem; nor of Wildfish which similarly worries about salmon farming and river barriers (which have existed for long before the collapses of the last forty years); nor of the Missing Salmon Alliance, which strikes me as a vehicle for bullshit and little else.

The future of the Atlantic Salmon therefore looks bleak. They’ve already disappeared from rivers in Southern Europe. Even the northernmost populations that run Norway’s and Russia’s rivers are showing early signs of decline. Until it can be shown that IUU fishing is not the cause of the collapse, this should be the main focus. This can only happen at government level and charities like Wildfish should be lobbying hard.

At the end of his editorial, Flitcroft writes, Without anglers, the decline of wild salmon would be more severe. This is the sort of piffle that anglers love to come out with. He claims that anglers noticed the declines first, but fish populations, along with other wildlife, have been surveyed for many years. Anglers make more noise than most, true, usually taking aim at sources that may have little bearing. All the sounding off has done nothing to arrest the waning returns to rivers. The same issue of T&S has a feature of a salmon fishing trip to Iceland. In the past I’ve read about trips to Norway and, for those with the dosh, to Russia in pursuit of salmon fishing. Presumably little regard is paid to the pollution that goes with foreign travel. Anglers and editors like Andrew Flitcroft like to claim that we are the guardians of nature, yet consumers of nature strikes me as better description, especially those who travel far. The incessant clamour for restocking, ironic considering all the fuss about fish farm escapees tainting the gene pool, is guarding their own ‘sport’, not nature.

We can only make a small difference individually but that’s still worth doing. Pester your MP to raise illegal fishing with the government, get rid of the 4×4 CO2-belcher, cancel that flight to Argentina. And stop complaining about seals, cormorants and all the rest. They probably have little to do with the decline in our fishing, and have nothing to do with the heating of the climate. We are now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction with salmon right in there. We’re all responsible for that.

Follow @secretangler

The Secret Angler

Different for girls

The bullshit approach to salmon conservation