Life of a Chalkstream: Your verdict on the greatest fishing film of all time

Greetings!

Modesty aside, I don’t think I missed out much when I compiled the list of six greatest films or TV shows of all time. A few people chimed in with that early Friday evening staple of the 1960’s and 70’s, Jack Hargreaves’ Out of Town. However, it was, I felt, with its wider countryside writ, not sufficiently angling specific though it did run to over 400 programmes and spawned a spin off with Ollie Kite, he of Kite’s Imperial fame.

Jumping forward to the 1990’s Screaming Reels is remembered by many though, to my shame, I had entirely forgotten the programme existed despite participating behind the camera in the first series when George Melly, who I’d guess we’d call a jazz legend, came to fish on the River Test at The Parsonage.

Now I remember it, a dour, post-Mayfly June day in what looks like the very start or back end of the weed cut. This was my first experience with televisual buggering about which often relies on one obliging fish to provide the money shot. But could we find that one fish? Of course not. Up and down the river we went until, at what The Parsonage regulars will know as The Shallows, that obliging fish rose.

George Melly on the River Usk

Now, if George Melly was still with us today, I’m sure he’d admit he was not the fastest on the draw so between the fish rising, me changing the fly, Melly plus camera crew getting into position and then getting out some line out it all took forever and I feared the fish had long disappeared. But I need not have worried for, as Melly false cast downstream to get his line out, low and behold an entirely different trout grabbed the fly and was eventually netted. You can watch the show, Part 2 of Series 1, here ....

As to the results of the poll it is fair to say that A River Runs Through It won by a country mile with Passion for Angling an honourable second.

1. A River Runs Through it 40%

2. Passion for Angling 22%

3. Mortimer & Whitehouse 16%

4. John Wilson Gone Fishing 13%

5. Old Man and The Sea 5%

6. J R Hartley Yellow Pages 4%

Poll ran October 7-17^th with 391 responses.

What is changing our climate?

This is not a quiz question! What body of water carries, every second of every day, twenty times more water than the combined flow of all the rivers in the world into the sea in that same second? The answer is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Yes, I’d never heard of it either, but it is part of the circulation of warm and cold water around the Atlantic Ocean, part of which is our Gulf Stream which brings heat from the Gulf of Mexico across the Atlantic to Europe and provides us Europeans with our mild climate.

This gigantic system of ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean constantly carries water from north to south and back again. This circulation is subject to strong fluctuations and has weakened since the 1990s. Since it also transports large amounts of heat, this weakening can also have consequences for the Earth's climate, and experts are debating whether the changes observed since the 1990’s can be attributed to climate change.

The answer is that nobody knows. However, what is known for sure is that from one decade to the next the AMOC varies from weak to strong and has done so for centuries, and probably thousands or millions of years in what the team from GEOMAR, a group of scientists from France, Germany, UK and the US call in the paper for Nature Reviews Earth & Environment the ‘natural decadal rhythm’.

The paper goes on explain how the GEOMAR supercomputer VIKING20X is running complex modelling to examine in greater detail the trends of AMOC to determine what is natural, namely the climate changing because that is what is naturally does or whether the changes are unnatural in part or whole due to human activity.

I suspect this might turn out to be unfashionable research as any conclusion that veers towards the former rather than the latter will run into a barrage of hostility.

Another eel mystery solved

The Atlantic seems to be on my reading list this week as an article in Nature magazine published research that conclusively proved that the European eel migrates across the Atlantic to spawn in the Sargasso Sea.

Previously it had been proved that migrating eels travelled from European rivers to the Azores, but it was only in 2019/20, when 23 eels where radio tagged in Azorean waters, with 6 of them tracked all the way to the Sargasso Sea, that we knew for sure. In truth I don’t think there was really any doubt that eels made this final leg of the journey, which covers 1,500 miles, taking up to a year but now it is indisputable.

Northern coastline of the Azores

Of course, what we don’t know is whether that level of mortality, with 23 becoming 6, is normal in the eel migration. The population has crashed by some 95% since the 1980’s attributed in part to factors occurring during the marine phases of its life cycle. The problem could equally lie in the outward migration of the tiny eel larvae that spend up to three years drifting on the Gulf Stream (that again) before reaching European shores and spending the next 15-20 years in freshwater rivers, lakes, ditches and ponds before that return trip via the Azores.

Maybe the weakening of the Gulf Stream, as reported by GEOMAR, means the tiny larvae perish before they even reach Europe? The timing of their population decline certainly fits. Or maybe freshwater pollutants are killing them? What is certain is that the eels in the chalkstreams of the 1990’s were so populous as to go unremarked. Throw the guts of fish into any river at that time and they would be ghosted away by an eel long before the fish remnants ever reached the riverbed. Today, they drift away unmolested like so much tumbleweed.

A sign for the times

It is twenty years since we last had the scaffolding up at Nether Wallop Mill, so I took the opportunity to put right something I didn’t do back then.

The mill has not ground a grain of corn since the 1930’s but the proud sign of the miller F. Vincent remained on the slate hung end of the roof until I did the extensive renovation in the early 2000’s which entailed a redesign of the roof line. At the time I did try to save the slates, but it was jigsaw doomed to never be remade. However, this time around I was determined to do something and after much discussion it was decided that Nether Wallop Mill would take the place Mr Vincent. After all he is just a line in the history of this mill that is recorded in the Doomsday Book.

Nether Wallop Mill c.1900

At the same time, I took the opportunity to buff up our trout weathervane. Now that made the signwriting look easy. A local metal finisher took the copper back to its original finish but to preserve the bright lustre you need a process called double pack lacquering.

I am sure the classic car aficionados amongst you will be familiar with this process – I was not. But after a series of fruitless calls a la J R Hartley I tracked down a classic car restorer in north Hampshire, unexpectedly a keen fly fisher, who rushed the job through in exchange for a day of fishing. Who can argue with that?