Hydropower - Environment Agency Consultation ends March 2nd

This is just a quick, but very important one.  The Angling Trust is urging all anglers out there (AT members or not), to respond to an Environment Agency consultation about their "best practice guidelines" for potentially destructive and controversial Hydropower schemes.  The public can add comments to the consultation without logging in to the EA website, which will help sway decisions made about future legislation imposed upon the operators of these schemes.

This type of electricity-generation scheme looks set to become more widespread in the UK but through both water abstraction and the fish-mincing turbines which are driven by water flow to generate electricity, such schemes pose a massive danger to both resident and migratory fish stocks and the quality & availability of river fishing.

This particular consultation focuses on setting water flow rates & abstraction limits and it's important that angling, fish stocks and other environmental issues are given utmost consideration when setting these limits.  As anglers we need to ensure that opinion swings in this direction, which is why the Angling Trust has offered advice on how to respond to the consultation, to ensure we're all pulling in the same direction. 

Please take a few minutes to read through the information and guidance on the Angling Trust website and follow the link to respond to the EA consultation, which can all be found here:  http://www.anglingtrust.net/news.asp?section=29&sectionTitle=News&itemid=1496

Be quick though, the consultation closes on Saturday 2nd March.

Fish deaths caused by Hydropower turbines

I'm all for us producing "green" energy from non-fossil fuel sources; it's an issue the whole world needs to address immediately, but surely when a means of generating power is damaging to the environment in other ways, it can't be considered "green"!  Killing wildlife, preventing migration, disrupting natural river flows and potentially drying up spawning grounds, in my view is neither "green", "environmentally-friendly" or "sustainable".

As anglers, we need to stand united, vehemently against the construction of these hydropower sites, which produce a preposturously low amount of electricity.  The Environment Agency has identified 26,000 sites nationwide which are suitable for hydropower installations.  So even if you don't think this issue affects you, it WILL be considered at a river near you!  Even if all 26,000 proposed schemes are introduced, their combined output will constitute less than 0.5% of the country's electricity needs!  There are far more viable alternatives which aren't nearly as destructive.

Towards the end of last year the Angling Trust's legal arm, Fish Legal, won a landmark case on behalf of anglers to stop the construction of a hydropower scheme on Sawley weir on the river Trent.  The fishing on this section is controlled by Pride of Derby, of which I've held membership for over a decade.  I'm delighted that Fish Legal were able to take on this case on behalf of the club and its members, and won.  This action alone has justified my Angling Trust membership, which I have taken out every year since the Trust was formed (I was an ACA member for years before that). 

It shows the power and influence that a unified body for angling can use and although everything the Trust does may not be in every anglers' personal interest, the many benefits to angling as a whole are clear to see.

There will be a lot of companies looking to make a lot of money from these hydroschemes so they will be very determined to get them pushed through, but if we are vocal against it and stand together, we can stop them.

Winter Blues - Pike and Barbel Fishing

I only had time to get out fishing once between Christmas and new year.  I'd had a pike fishing itch to scratch for a while and despite conditions which were far from ideal after the bout of mild weather and heavy rain, I decided to pike fish on the Dove, which is a spate river and therefore it's notorious for the speed at which the level rises and colour increases.  So it was to my dismay, but no surprise, that I arrived to find the river coloured and rising!  I should have been barbel fishing but my heart was set on piking, so I had taken my barbel rods out of the van before I left home!

I sat it out regardless and fished to the conditions as best I could, but I only got a single dropped run all day.  A run I didn't even notice at the time because my float, cast to the far bank, would only stay in the slack water if I let out a big bow of line.  However, It was an extremely blustery day and the combination of wind and the flow meant my float was constantly dancing around all over the place, the drop-off was forever rising and falling and my alarm was sounding every few seconds.  That was frustrating enough, but when I reeled in and found my decent-sized roach was badly slashed but the teeth marks were all between the hooks, needless to say I was gutted!  From the size of the marks on the bait, the pike was probably a good one.  It must have picked the bait up sideways but failed to turn it around head-first before it moved off.  Maybe the movement of the line going down from the float spooked it or something.  I'm 99% sure that if I'd had a proper take I would have known straight away because the drop-off did ping off in the wind the odd time, just not on that cast!  Regardless of that, I decided to try and find somewhere more sheltered where I could fish without fear of unwittingly deep-hooking a fish.

I gambled on a move to the Pride of Derby complex, to try on one of the lakes there for the last couple of hours.  However, when I arrived at the gates, this was the sight that greeted me:

The heavy rain had pushed so much water into the Trent that it had flooded the entire adjacent lake complex.  This seemed like a bad thing until I considered that the floodwater would probably mean I was the only angler there.  I was in a van, and thought I might have the height to drive through the water to get to some high ground that I could fish from.  So, not one to be put off from a fishing trip easily, I unlocked the gates and gingerly inched the van into the water, hanging my head out of the window to both monitor the depth and spot the edge of the track; one place I definitely didn't want to end up was on the surrounding underwater grass, or I'd be stuck there until the waters receded!  Unfortunately my pluckiness didn't pay off, the water got so deep that I feared I might damage my van, so I had to slowly reverse back out of the venue.  Had I had my thigh waders with me I could have walked to a peg, but they aren't part of my usual winter kit so they were at home!  I thought about driving back to the Dove, but the combination of the poor piking conditions and by now, falling light, meant I decided to call it a day.  Sometimes you have to know when it's time to quit.

I did bump into James Gould and Stu Walker (who's been filming "Caught In The Act" and previously "Barbel Days & Ways" with Bob Roberts) during the day.  They were barbel fishing and I conceded that this was where the smart money was on such a day.  Why the hell had I taken those barbel rods out!  Both chaps were really friendly and I even got a flattering "It's Andrew, isn't it?  I've read some of your stuff..." from Stu, but I then felt pretty stupid because I recognised him too, but I couldn't quite remember where from, or what his name was.  D'oh!

Despite my feeling that the conditions had been ideal for barbel, I got in touch with Stu & James later and found that they had just the one fish between them all day, which didn't show until after dark.

Before that mild & wet spell ended, I got in an after-work session myself and this time set my stall out for barbel.  I'd soaked some boilies in a spicy, fishy mix and done similar with some luncheon meat in preparation.  There wasn't a fish within a mile that could have avoided smelling my baits!  It was pleasant to sit out in, despite not casting out until 8pm, and despite seeing the odd fish rolling and conditions seemingly perfect, I didn't get as much as a twitch on the rod tip.  So, maybe there just wasn't a fish within a mile!