News

The Haddon Estate, through its Peacock Fly Fishing Club, has kindly offered its fisheries on 14 & 15 July this year, as a fundraising weekend for WTT. This is an excellent opportunity to fish for wild browns, wild rainbows and grayling across four rivers including areas usually only open to the Peacock Fly Fishing Club members.

The Estate ceased stocking on the Wye, Lathkill and Bradford in 2004 and since then, has operated a thriving, catch & release wild fishery with strictly bankside, dry-fly only fishing. Nymph fishing and wading are permitted on the River Derwent section. If required, advice will be available from local guides to help you get the best out of your day. To find out more about the Peacock Fly Fishing Club, how the Estate’s fisheries are managed and what they offer, you are invited to join the river keepers for a BBQ at lunchtime (at no extra cost).

A limited number of rods are available at £50 per rod per day so do book soon.

The best place to start, of course, is the Wild Trout Trust auction  but you may not want to wait until the next auction in March 2019!

If you are looking for  club or syndicate to join, check this list.

This list was updated 24/4/18 with new fishing on 'The Carrier' at Easton (Itchen carrier upstream of WInchester) and more fishing on the Itchen at Easton and one of the headwater streams, along with the rivers Test and Teise from the Sussex Piscatorial Society. 

Scottish Parliament’s Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee (ECCLR) has today (5 March) published its Committee report on the environmental impacts of salmon farming – it is extraordinarily damning of the industry and hugely welcomed by us in the wild fish sector. 

Graeme Dey MSP, Convener of the Committee, has now passed the report to the Rural Economy & Connectivity Committee, with a covering letter that highlights a number of very significant issues, of little surprise to us. Mr Dey notes a lack of progress in tackling many of the key issues previously identified [in 2002] and that unacceptable levels of mortality persist.He goes on to describe that the industry growth targets (towards 300-400,000 tonnes by 2030, from around 170,000 tonnes now) “will be unsustainable and may cause irrecoverable damage to the environment”.The report calls for changes to current farming practice and an industry that demonstrates it can effectively manage and mitigate its impacts; the status quo is not an option. Scottish Government’s regulation of salmon farming is also criticised: “The Committee is not convinced the sector is being regulated sufficiently, or regulated sufficiently effectively”.

The Report itemises some worrying attitudes from the salmon farmers, quoting the view of the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation that the “impact [on wild salmonids] is insignificant”, very much against the available evidence. One company, Marine Harvest, is reported as acknowledging “some level of risk for wild fish” but goes on to “reference the risk to farmed salmon from wild fish”.

Two new Trustees have been appointed to the Board of the Wild Trout Trust:  David Lloyd and George Seligman.

David Lloyd will focus on communications, making good use of his background as both a journalist with the BBC and latterly as Managing Director of Financial Dynamics, a leading international public relations consultancy. Since retiring David has been involved with a number of community and youth, sport-based organisations and with environmental campaigning. He is a lifelong, all-round angler. 

George Seligman is the Chairman of the Wessex Chalk Streams and Rivers Trust and has a strong interest in education and the environment, including as a Trustee of Countryside Learning, a charity which educates inner city children about the countryside. He retired as City lawyer in 2012, and now has a farm in the Test valley. He is a trout and salmon angler. 

Floating Pennywort

Floating pennywort is a highly invasive and environmentally damaging plant that spreads from fragments, grows extraordinarily quickly and can blanket a river from bank to bank. It is wreaking havoc on several southern and eastern English rivers, but it spreading north and west. It may not be a problematical plant for streamy trout water, but it will grow very vigorously wherever flow slows. This short video, from Clearwater Photography, summarises the problem and what is being done on the middle and lower Kennet, including some good footage to help identify this pernicious weed:

At WTT, we're keen to ensure that all the advice we give and practical techniquers we demonstrate are underpinned by sound science. It's Jonny Grey's role to keep us abreast of current academic thinking as our Research & Conservation Officer, and he has been passing it on to you in various formats, including the blog.

Here, he gives us an update on two projects that will hopefully bear some fruit this year, primarily because the grunt work has been taken on by two keen MSc students, Abbie & Charlotte, both from Queen Mary University of London.

Interestingly, they both also started out at University of Portsmouth in Marine Biology. To give you a bit of background:-

We are delighted that our annual Get-Together for 2018 will be visiting Gargrave, N Yorks on 19 & 20 May. A few of us will gather informally on the Friday night (18 May) in the locality (please feel free to join us if you can) before a Saturday full of varied and interesting stuff.In the morning, speakers will update us on projects by local groups, work by WTT in the patch, research on fish passes and some good old trout fishing talk.The programme is HERE. In the afternoon, we’ll walk the Aire to look at habitat improvement work, including fish passes.

Saturday daytime costs £10 to include tea, coffee & lunch, payable at the time of booking, with the form HERE. Please book by Friday 4 May 2018.

For those able to stay on, we’ll gather in Gargrave on the Saturday evening before a Sunday sampling wild trout fishing on some of Yorkshire’s fabulous and famous trout streams. If you would like to fish, please contact Christina in the WTT office by Friday 27 April 2018 to help us gauge numbers.

The deadline for the UK River Prize is fast approaching – applications close on 19 February. The UK River Prize provides the opportunity to showcase your river restoration project and receive UK-wide recognition for your work. Selected finalists will attend the UK River Prize Awards Dinner with a chance of winning the prestigious Nigel Holmes Trophy.

The River Restoration Conference theme this year is ‘River Restoration: Engaging with Rivers’ .The conference will take place 24th - 25th April 2018 at De Vere East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham.

The first early career researcher to bravely kick off our series of guest blogs was Jess Picken from Queen Mary University of London but based in Dorset with their River Communities team. She is studying how low flow events shape communities in salmonid rivers - see her first blog contribution, here.  

Almost a year later, and we return to the same location in Dorset but to a different Jess and a different take on chalkstream communities; this time shaped by plants. Jessica Marsh is funded by the G and K Boyes Trust and is based with the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust fisheries team. She is a conservation biologist specialising in aquatic ecosystems, with a primary research focus on enhancing knowledge of threatened populations to better inform management. 

Check out some of Jess's preliminary findings over on the WTT blog.

The Environment Agency is currently consulting on plans to increase permit charges for habitat improvement work in rivers.

Twelve months ago, such a permit cost £50; from 4 January 2017, that went up to £170 (plus a compliance charge of £70); now, even a small-scale project using a few commonly-used habitat improvement methods could face a permit charge of £1500 or more.

We believe that these proposals jeopardise the work that tens of thousands of people are doing to make our natural environment better, very often in partnership with EA and in support of the Agency’s statutory obligations.The proposals do not differentiate between work for the environmental and those seeking to gain from the environment and we would encourage individuals, clubs and community groups to respond, ahead of a closing date of Friday 26 January 2018. The WTT response in full is HERE and a brief model response HERE.

A new report, commissioned by Salmon & Trout Conservation Scotland, tells a damning story about the impacts of salmon farms on wild salmon and sea trout. The first paragraph of the abstract reads

Results from scientific studies on the impacts of salmon lice on Atlantic salmon and sea trout are summarized [here]. Considerable evidence exists that that there is a link between farm-intensive areas and the spread of salmon lice to wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout. Several studies have shown that the effects of salmon lice from fish farms on wild salmon and sea trout populations can be severe; ultimately reducing the number of adult fish due to salmon lice induced mortality, resulting in reduced stocks and reduced opportunities for fisheries. Depending on the population size, elevated salmon lice levels can also result in too few spawners to reach conservation limits.

Damning indeed. The full report is available here