THIS MIGHT be the Christmas issue but I’m feeling anything but festive. Instead, I am in mourning for the end of the fishing season and the knowledge that it will be six long months before I’m back on the bank. That said, one summer memory brings a shaft of sunlight to the lengthening autumnal gloom.
In late August I caught my first salmon on the Wye, and my first since lockdown. As George, my host, drove towards his beat, the river in the valley below looked picture-perfect. It was only when we stood beside the water, rods at the ready, that we saw how filthy brown it was. This was the main topic at lunch with the rest of the syndicate – that and the lack of fish caught so far on a once prolific beat. Was that awful brown stuff straight effluent/run-off or a chemical reaction to it?
One rod, to the nods of the others, said that the lamentable state of our rivers (andissue in the next election. While agreeing in principle, I rather depressed the mood by opining that, while folk like us might be the proverbial canaries in the mine, we tend to be ‘male (one lady angler), pale and stale (all of us over 50)’ and not given to making a lot of noise. These days our power brokers only seem to want to be seen with the young, impassioned and photogenic. That is the demographic we need if the urban bozos in Westminster are going to act before it is too late.
