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Countryfile

Neil Smart

Neil Smart

Senior Member
At last!! This very good series is shining a light on the Barbel. Showing now Sunday 19/11...just seen the first bit, and it is on location at Kings Weir highlighting spawning problems. More to come later in the programme. And now a feature on our angling mates, the Kingfisher...:)
 
Thought it was a good piece overall and nice to see a split cane rod and pin being deployed. Excellent to have highlighted the recruitment issues and very telling when that chap moved gravel with his foot unleashing silt in the process. To the naked eye that riverbed could have looked wonderfully suitable for a place to deposit eggs. As Steve says, great work by Andrew who seems to spend more time actually doing something constructive rather than entering keyboard battles on Facebook.
 
did they mention those bloody otters ?
 
they didn't really say what was going to be done to improve spawning though, they did mention narrowing channels but that's all I heard.
 
Jason

Apparently the idea is to narrow the river thus improving / speeding up flow, this should clean the silt out of the gravel and so barbel might spawn again
 
Colin Dapp said:
Jason

Apparently the idea is to narrow the river thus improving / speeding up flow, this should clean the silt out of the gravel and so barbel might spawn again
Click to expand...

Just narrowing the channel would have little effect, once the gravel is clogged with sediment there's little chance of it moving unless you have a flood and the gravel moves. water has this knack of taking the path of least resistance.

I presume they will be jetting it out then then modifying the flow through gravel beds to then keep areas clean.

A few years back I did hear someone from the ea saying that gravel restoration has not proven to be very successful at all and it was something they may not carry on doing.
 
You mean they missed an opportunity to blame something on Global warming? Shocked I am.
Obviously increased abstraction to serve a much larger population than 20 years ago, in the area, wouldn't have been mentioned either.
 
That river looked plenty fast enough to me, and every river i've got in clouds up round your boots just like that,couldn't see a problem with the riverbed, and unless that little barb was a really slow growing 20 year old male, its not the river thats the problem, just a question to those of you fishing this river,is it just barbel or all species that are being affected???,
Regards
 
Can't speak for Kings weir but just downstream at Fishers green a resurgence in Silvers has happened since the Barbel declined.
Discussing this on my club forum it was pointed out that opening the relief channel reduced the flow by around two thirds.
An EA bod once boasted to me that water that used to take 40 days to travel from Luton to the Thames now only takes 40 hours. He was really proud.
Well done EA.
 
Jim Ufton said:
That river looked plenty fast enough to me, and every river i've got in clouds up round your boots just like that,couldn't see a problem with the riverbed, and unless that little barb was a really slow growing 20 year old male, its not the river thats the problem, just a question to those of you fishing this river,is it just barbel or all species that are being affected???,
Regards
Click to expand...

They're saying the problem is lack of small barbel coming through, they still have the brood stock in the larger fish so attempted spawning must be happening but with little success. Barbel need quality gravel which is not compacted with sand/silt so the eggs can sit within the gravel until hatching...pretty much like salmonids. The lack of rain in the south east means a lot of rivers are not getting the winter flush though's like they used to get. Narrowing the channel will help once the gravel has been replaced or cleaned but it has to be done regularly if you have low flows .Chub are not that fussy, they like to spawn on gravel but not solely.

Trouble is barbel are hard wired to return to the same spawning grounds each year and rarely use others, they don't look for what's best so identifying the ones they're using then restoring them is the last option other than stocking.

The video in this link explains it really well

http://www.wildtrout.org/content/how-videos

The Americans take it more seriously and carry it out on an industrial scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L1PFXxFpGU

Unless there is serious change in the weather and water abstraction regulation these are the last throws of the dice to keep barbel in may rivers.
 
Jim the flow looked ok there as its on the weir itself ..if you go a few hundred yards downstream on the members stretch there is hardly any flow at all no rain hasn't helped either.
There is more to it than the gravel being silted it's a number of factors at KW......the water quality isn't great ..might have something to do with rye meads sewage works just upstream...also there is an abundance of signal crays but Andy and the barbel action group are trying to put things right and good luck to them but it's not an overnight fix
 
Good feature overall. At the end of the day it is Countryfile where the emphasis is on little snippets of superficial info, crammed into a few minutes, they never go into any issue in any depth - it’s not what most viewers want. I suspect a whole two feature wouldn’t have been able to highlight all the pressures facing that river.

It projected angling and anglers in a good light, particularly the efforts being undertaken by Andrew and his group. As Howard says it’s great to see anglers doing something constructive, angling needs more Andrew Tredgetts.
 
I guess they featured the Lea as it's close to London and also as yet, it doesn't suffer the impact that otters have had on most smaller lowland rivers.
As for the issue of silt build up, there simply are two reasons as covered by others - a combination of abstraction and the declining rainfall the east has been experiencing over the last ten years.
I live on the Cambs/Herts border, so my local rivers the Ouse and Ivel are running at very low late summer levels now. Last winter we didn't see these rivers even close to breaking over the banks. In fact I don't remember the last time I fished the river in spate...
 
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