NEWS EXCLUSIVE How the hottest spring for more than 100 years has affected fishing

After a record-breaking sunny spring, anglers could be set to reap the benefits...

WITH most of the UK enjoying an unusually dry and cloudless period between March and May, angling experts are forecasting a boost in fish numbers and weights.

“It’s the earliest spawning season we’ve ever had on the farm,” top fish breeder Simon Scott, who co-owns VS Fisheries carp farm in West Sussex, tells us. “By getting the spawning done early we should see some fantastic weights later in the year.”

Continuing warm and dry weather is also likely to boost stocks of smaller coarse fish species. May was the UK’s sunniest calendar month ever recorded, while meteorological spring – March, April and May – was the eighth-warmest and fifth-driest in recorded UK history.

The Met Office’s Dr Mark McCarthy tells us: “The sunshine figures for spring would even be extremely unusual for summer, and only three summers would beat spring 2020 for sunshine hours.”

The impact on fish

Many anglers have reported earlier-thanusual spawning on lakes and rivers, and an abundance of visible fry.

“I remember, when I was young, carp often wouldn’t spawn until the end of June or the beginning of July, but now you hear of them spawning in April,” Simon continues.

“This year we had no winter to speak of at all, so the carp never went into any kind of torpor and they were ready to go as soon as it got warmer. By getting the spawning done early it gives them a longer growing season and a long run into the autumn to feed up, so we should see some fantastic weights later in the year.”

So, could continuing warm weather see fish spawn more than once? Highly unlikely in this country, according to Simon.

He said: “Individual females will only spawn once, although males will try at any opportunity, so what you might see is different stocking batches in a lake spawning at different times – however, the individual females will only do so once.”

The river outlook

Alan Henshaw, who leads the Environment Agency’s fish-breeding programme in Nottingham, is also carefully monitoring the effect of this lengthy sunny period.

“The first species to spawn are dace and grayling, but they are largely triggered by light levels and lengthening days at the end of February and the beginning of March, and we didn’t see much of a difference with those this year.

“We then had a break until the end of April and into May, when the roach, chub, bream and barbel spawned. We’d had a warm burst and they probably spawned a week or so before we would have expected, but it then turned cooler and there was a break in the spawning.”

He adds: “When you have low or normal river flows it’s good for fish recruitment. The fry have a very limited ability to swim and can be washed away from their natural food in high flows.

“Sunshine is the basis of everything, so when you get good days of sunshine you get production of algal blooms and phytoplankton, and the fry will be looking to feed on what’s eating the phytoplankton.

“By getting the spawning done early it gives them a longer growing season”