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The river closed season debate

Richard Parsons said:
Neil - I don't think Ray's inferring that there's no naturally successful breeding in the Avon and Stour, only that re-stocking replenishes the numbers.

Ray - Perhaps the re-stocking might be unnecessary if the environment was left to replenish its fish numbers naturally?

As with Dave Hall's experience, there's also evidence of successful spawning in my local river, despite it not having an indigenous barbel population.
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Thanks
In that the HA doesn't have the usual problems we have with Boats and dare I say over fishing as with matches, it's a mystery to me as to why the Barbel numbers do need replenishing. I did live in Hampshire for some time and the times I did visit the Avon and Stour they were always immaculate, perhaps then a little too so?
 
Neil Smart said:
Thanks
In that the HA doesn't have the usual problems we have with Boats and dare I say over fishing as with matches, it's a mystery to me as to why the Barbel numbers do need replenishing. I did live in Hampshire for some time and the times I did visit the Avon and Stour they were always immaculate, perhaps then a little too so?
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Just one look at a river doesn't really tell you the story;
given a little rain in the next few days the Avon will be looking great, believe me though with the spring we've had the chalk aquifers are far from healthy.
We've recently had some quite low flow years which should improve populations of coarse fish, it's certainly what anecdotal evidence is pointing at anyway. If this becomes fact then it's quite clear that the floods of the start of the last decade had quite an impact.
Given suitable environmental conditions, which appear, as some suspected, cyclical, fish will do what they need to to sustain their populations.
I noted looking at some SSSI statuses, they're failing due to over abstraction, which will too affect suitable environmental conditions.
Again, I dread to think in these past sensitive years, when fish numbers were relatively low, what might have happened were they targetted at this time of year. They've needed all the help they can get, which wouldn't have been afforded them were the close season abolished.


Regards

Damian
 
Alex Gowney said:
just don't mention the B word.

At the risk of appearing stupid, what is the B word?
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Its not you that's stupid Alex, it's me. It was supposed to be the 'O' word, but I was doing too many things at the same time and cocked up. :eek:
 
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Neil Smart said:
Thanks
In that the HA doesn't have the usual problems we have with Boats and dare I say over fishing as with matches, it's a mystery to me as to why the Barbel numbers do need replenishing. I did live in Hampshire for some time and the times I did visit the Avon and Stour they were always immaculate, perhaps then a little too so?
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The Hampshire Avon has always had trouble with boats, much more that the type you would expect. These EA contraptions have been destroying the Hampshire Avon continuously for 57 years, usually twice a year starting in the close season thru to September, until they were stopped from doing so in 2010 by Natural England and the EA. However, it still goes on on certain areas such as the upper Royalty Fishery and East Mills.
Smaller boats with weedcutting machines attached are still prominent on the main Royalty below the GT Weir, Trammels, Parlour, Greenbanks, and Fiddlers in the last 2 close seasons to where they were used when the barbel and other species were spawning and used again after the barbel had seemingly just spawned in the Parlour and Trammels. Underwater weed strimming and de-rooting was also carried out in 2010 in combination with the machine cutting thus wading and trampling the critical spawning grounds and destroying the laid eggs.
HROXR-EAweedcutting1.JPG


weed2.JPG


14MountainofDumpedprotectedRanuncul.jpg


weedcutting.jpg
 
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It is full of macro invertebrates (food for fish etc) and fish fry which are dumped on the bank and are left to die with the help of being flatened and squashed down by a JCB and then taken away by lorries loads and spread on the fields as fertilizer all for the benefit of the farmers... in more ways than one. The weedcutting machines also chop up, maim and kill adult fish, overturn nesting birds eggs and chicks.
When i first saw this happening some years ago with my own eyes, i reported it to the EA and Natural England as i could not believe at what I was seeing!
Unbelievably, it turned out it to be the EA themselves with the authorisation from Natural England!
The Ranunculus weed that you can see being cut and banked is an SSSI protected species and vital to survival for everything that inhabits the Hampshire Avon.
The weed destruction coincides with the decline of the Hampshire Avon over the same 50+ year period of time, including fish and wildfowl populations.
 
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Ray Walton said:
It is full of macro invertebrates (food for fish etc) and fish fry which are dumped on the bank and are left to die with the help of being flatened and squashed down by a JCB and then taken away by lorries loads and spread on the fields as fertilizer all for the benefit of the farmers... in more ways than one. The weedcutting machines also chop up, maim and kill adult fish, overturn nesting birds eggs and chicks.
When i first saw this happening some years ago with my own eyes, i reported it to the EA and Natural England as i could not believe at what I was seeing!
Unbelievably, it turned out it to be the EA themselves with the authorisation from Natural England!
The Ranunculus weed that you can see being cut and banked is an SSSI protected species and vital to survival for everything that inhabits the Hampshire Avon.
The weed destruction coincides with the decline of the Hampshire Avon over the same 50+ year period of time, including fish and wildfowl populations.
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Indeed, Ray. That ranunculus is supposed to enjoy the same protection as otters do. Obviously ranunculus isn't very cuddly.
 
Now then, now then, less about the Special Forces Otters.

Anyone who has known the Avon for more than five minutes will tell you that weedcutting has long been demanded by: 1) the Estates and their salmon fishers and, above all, 2) the farmers and landowners.

1) required fishable water for their flies, Mepps and Devon Minnows; 2) expected their meadows not to be flooded willynilly (unless done by themselves in the days of the meadow-drowning carriers and channels to get early-spring grass).

Today, of course, there is 3) Communities of people living in the loads and loads of new and often very expensive houses that have proliferated in the past thirty years. Flooding these out with a flash flood after some megastorms (that could very well break this present, freakish, spring drought) dump their load onto sun-baked ground, only to see said load run off as if across concrete straight into a weed-choked river...

I like fish, weeds, bugs etc, too, but..............
 
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All very valid points Paul, but surely there must be a better way? I refuse to believe that this wholesale massacre of everything in the river by these crude, archaic monstrosities is the only way of solving the problem.

Cheers, Dave.
 
THEN weed was cut by a wading gang on Basic Agricultural Wage wielding scythes .

NOW it must be cut as cheaply as possible and by anyone (increasingly rare breed, now) you can get to do it, anyone willing to plough down a river on a water-borne mover then either move on to the next bit, or clock off. Never mind the quality, feel the width...
 
I realise that it is done this way for economics reasons Paul, it's just that these things in Rays photos were invented when Noah was a lad....surely they can come up with something better in this day and age? If the farmers are the loudest voices in support of the whole thing, let the boffins who develop their agricultural machinery come up with something more advanced. Some of the technology in use on the large farms of today is astonishingly complex.

Up until fairly recently, I didn't give angling politics a second thought...Just went fishing in a very Tom Sawyerish kind of way, assuming those that enjoy such things would keep things running very nicely without me, thank you very much. To my shame I still don't get involved...but at least now I am aware of the fact that there are some very worrying things indeed going on.

One of the saddest things for me was to discover that the EA were not the comic book super heroes defending our angling rights that I had so innocently imagined. It turns out that they do not always have the best interests of anglers at heart at all...far from it in fact! Worse still was the realization that the health and wellbeing of our waterways was frequently low on there list of priorities as well :( ....now that REALLY hurts!

I suppose when one looks at the daily reports of the mind boggling mess the bungling, inept politicians that are running our country (World?) are making, then it would be a little unrealistic to expect the EA to be any different. Unless of course the top executives of the EA were being paid more than the prime minister...hold on though, that would put them in the same category as bankers, and THEY....no, I am not going there, WAY too depressing :D

Sod it then, just issue them with sticks of explosives and let them do a PROPER job :D

Cheers, Dave.
 
Weed being cut or not growing as is the case in the rivers Severn & Teme has in my opinion contributed to the decline of many species of fish in the both said rivers and of course removed cover to help protect the fish from predetors..When i first started fishing the Severn and Teme as a young lad both rivers had plenty of weed and in most places you could see Barbel flashing on the gravels inbetween the weed beds and the Roach fishing was very good..Is it just coincidence that Roach and other species have become less in numbers since the majority of the weed has all but dissapeared?
 
Certainly in the Wensum a year or two ago, the EA did not cut the weed and conducted a fry survey to see if there was any correlation. Roach fry numbers were found have benefited though their numbers did not survive.
 
It's a bit like how Neil The Hippy in The Young Ones would have dealt with having a haircut - "Just a trim, a bit of tidying-up, man. Not a total scalp. Yeah?" - this is how well-managed bits of chalkstream (usually expensive trout beats) are cut even now, sometimes privately by the owners and their staff, but, just as often, I have been told, in close on-the-bank association with the people operating the E.A. cutting boat. Having said this, it does seem that the larger, broader, deeper Avon really does get a scalping, whilst its neighbours, the Test and Itchen, are given much less of an "all off" treatment.

It's a big problem - too much off and you mess with the river and its occupants, too little and you could have a much-feared, multi-property, millions of pounds, flooding incident on your hands.
 
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