John Bailey gets about. He’s ‘fishing consultant’ to the TV programme Gone Fishing, in which a maladroit Bob Mortimer receives guidance from an occasionally frustrated Paul Whitehouse (DON’T WIND, BOB!) on how to catch fish, when, that is, they are not bantering for the benefit of non-fishing viewers, or cooking up on the bank, or enjoying some luxury self-catering accommodation. Presumably this consulting involves sniffing out some suitable waters with a few fish in them, thus ensuring the bantering isn’t accompanied by blanking.
I found this article from a couple of years ago in which JB, via this job, meets many fishery owners and keepers ‘who matter’. From discussions with these important people he concludes that fishing is ‘at a crossroads’. Implicit in such a position is a choice of directions in which to go, four to be exact if you include the direction you’ve just come from. According to one of his contacts, river keeper Peter Orchard, fewer go trout fishing nowadays — “We’ve got to be flexible in the way we run rivers and be open to new attractions”. One might wonder what these attractions might be. A water slide? A Michelin-starred riverside restaurant? Wandering minstrels? He doesn’t say.
As readers might expect from my earlier post about the matters that exercise John Bailey, his main gripe is stocking policy. From the crossroads it seems he wants to go back the way we’ve come and allow unrestricted stocking, at least in those chalk streams run as a fly fishing industry. Yet the only real restriction since 2015 has been the requirement that only infertile triploids are stocked to prevent interbreeding. These fish rise as well as any trout, as I know from my own experience. But Bailey complains about the Environment Agency’s ‘doctrinaire objectives’. I see nothing doctrinaire about the goal of preserving of wild trout stocks; all the research suggests stocking is detrimental to them but the Test, Avon and other famous rivers may still stock as many fish as they want, so long as they’re triploids. So what are Bailey and all the river keepers worried about?
Then suddenly Bailey stops backtracking. He goes on to praise the wild fishery at the Haddon Estate on the Derwent and the benefits of natural unstocked rivers. But then he about-turns again and renews his complaints against the EA, insisting the organisation is responsible for the decline in rivers and has ‘one policy’ (stocking?) for all rivers. You can’t blame the EA for everything: we’re all responsible for our water consumption and polluting ways, although it’s true that water companies and their financial engineering are in a river-wrecking class of their own. The EA is not anglers’ servant and our licence fees, 1% of total income, do not pay salaries. It is badly underfunded and therefore cannot do the job we’d all like it to do.
John Bailey talks like most anglers, complaining into their beer that all would be well if only everyone listened to their poorly informed opinions. The bees in Bailey’s bonnet will no doubt carry on buzzing, unclear which direction to go. It seems to me that fishing is not at a crossroads but on a one-way street that runs downhill. Political will is needed to arrest the slide but there are many calls on that will and the madmen abroad are not helping.
The Secret Angler 