Life of a Chalkstream: December 2023

Life on a Chalkstream

8th December 2023

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· Environment Agency fails the test

BBC Panorama exposes EA failure to regulate

· Fruits of the river

· 25 years of surfing

· More of the wet stuff

· Quiz

Dear ,

Who has the most thankless job in Britain? For my money it is a man called Garth who had the misfortune to be put up as spokesman for water company United Utilities, who were eviscerated in the BBC programme Panorama on Monday night.

The theme of the 30 minute investigation was how, thanks to the inadequacies (to use a kind word) of the Environment Agency (EA) and loopholes in the reporting system, pollution events that any normal person would consider significant, are downgraded to insignificant. This is important because, by wiping the slate clean, the Environment Agency appear to be doing their job i.e. keeping our rivers and coastline free of pollution whilst the water companies get cash bonuses in the form of higher charges to consumers, for hitting their clean water goals. I will not recite all the details of the show but to give you a flavour of the type of goings on at waste plant level, a water company can guarantee a pollution free ‘pass’ for a waste outlet by turning off the pump when the EA inspector arrives who then records the absence of flow as a pass. You really could not make it up.

Now, at this point, the question we really have to ask is who is most at fault. The water company for gaming the system or the EA for allowing the system to be gamed? Before I answer that let us back track to a significant legal ruling in the High Court three weeks ago. This is how the story goes ……

Watch BBC Panorama The Water Pollution Cover-Up on iPlayer with reporter Joe Crowley

In Yorkshire there is a small stream called the Costa Beck, home to the Pickering Fishing Association (PFA). Lovely though it is, the Beck also has the misfortune to be home to the Pickering sewage treatment works which in 2019 discharged 400 times into the river, followed by another 250 discharges in 2020. These, along with other failures, meant the Costa was failing for fish under the Water Framework Directive regulations, regulations based on 2017 legislation that is intended to protect our rivers. This fail status was enough to spur the EA into action who, after consultation with the PFA, came up with a plan to save the Costa Beck.

Hurrah, you might think but the Pickering anglers felt differently seeing the EA consultation as window dressing and the subsequent plan as a box ticking exercise. The High Court judge agreed characterising the approach as one of “smoke and mirrors”, noting that the EA programme of measures could not reasonably be expected to achieve the stated environmental objectives. As the angling club argued, the EA was in effect planning to fail. It is thought that the important Pickering ruling will open the door to similar challenges across the country.

So, what is the answer to the question? Do we pillory Garth and his water company bosses? Of course, we do. Sure, they are for the most part acting within the letter of the regulations but as to the spirit of those same regulations, they are, frankly, taking the p**s. You and I, though occasionally people like the Pickering crew, can do little about water companies but the Environment Agency certainly can. It has 12,000 employees, a budget of £1.3 billion and a raft of legislative powers that would make a dictatorship blush.

The Graph of Shame

However, the only thing getting worse quicker than the quality of our river water is the quality of the organisation tasked with protecting those rivers who are in full retreat as the graph illustrates, with Environment Agency water quality samples taken declining from 159,691 in 2013 to 41,519 in 2021. As I have often said here, and elsewhere, the Environment Agency seems to have neither the will nor the ability to fulfil its role. It should go.

Fruits of the river

I have never been a great lover of trout as a food item, except perhaps smoked. One of the most revolting meals I ever cooked was a recipe culled from Field & Stream magazine, that I created with huge hope, for a bolognaise sauce that substituted beef mince for trout. The term cat food does not even come close to how truly inedible it was in both smell and texture.

So, it is with a certain amount of scepticism that I bring you news of an apple brandy from the Tamworth Distillery on New Hampshire, USA who have created a Smoked Trout Flavored (sic) Brandy, the flavour provided by a scoop of roe from a brook trout, the native fish of the state.

You have been warned!

Tamworth Distilling

25 years of surfing

Here at Fishing Breaks we celebrated a little anniversary last week with the 24th November marking twenty five years since I registered the domain fishingbreaks.co.uk, with the web site following shortly after.

Looking back, it seems hard to believe that you might ever doubt the power of the internet, but I was not an earlier believer. In fact, it took a client called Simon Lewin, a very early web site designer to get me over the line. Such was his passion for the web and my early scepticism that he, sensing my reluctance to weigh over hard cash, offered to build the first Fishing Breaks web site in return for fishing. It paid for itself within three days of its launch just before Christmas 1998.

The best the internet archive would offer up!

Of course what we know now is that obscure activities, such as chalkstream fishing are ideally suited to the web. In the first eight seasons my real problem was finding clients; there is only so much advertising in magazines such as Trout & Salmon you can do but the internet allowed your clients to find you, which was a gamechanger as was that adjunct to the whole technology process, namely email.

If you are under 45 years of age this will be more of a history lesson, but there was truly a time when fax, landline phones, answering machines and, heaven forbid, letters were the route to nailing down a successful fishing trip. But goodness was it time consuming. I knew the location of every public phone box in the Test valley to remotely access the answering machine back at the office aka home whilst out on the river either guiding or river keeping. Email changed all that, a seamless conversation done at the moment of your choosing, with time to deliberate and enjoy the anticipation of what was to come. The online booking system, though still a little impersonal for my liking, followed in 2008.

More of the wet stuff

You probably don’t need me to tell you this but we are in the midst of a very wet sustained run, with the south ahead of the north in this respect by some margin. This is definitely unusual, with river levels at the start of December more what you would associate with February or March of a super wet winter. The rain has come early and hard, with October double the average and November somewhere approaching that.

At Nether Wallop Mill all our sluices and hatches are fully open, at least two months ahead of schedule. At The Parsonage we mercifully, ended the grayling season 30/November. This is what it looked like on Wednesday and below the Wallop Brook yesterday!

The Parsonage

The Wallop Brook when one stream becomes two

In some respects this is bad news, but only in the sense that our scheduled river bank repairs and restorations are on hold, certainly for months but probably until the autumn of next year. But, in every other respect, let it rain, let it rain, let it rain. It is liquidity in the bank of fishing for the season to come.

Quiz

The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter. It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.

1) Brandy has an age grading system one grade being V.S.O.P. What does V.S.O.P. stand for?

2) On who’s debut studio album did the song Let it Rain appear in 1970?

3) BBC first broadcast Panorama in a) 1953 b) 1963 or c) 1973.