“It’s one thing to lose a fish, quite another to lose a fishery”
HOW many of us go fishing for ‘whatever comes along’ these days, I wonder?
If previous generations were quite happy to drown maggots for anything that pulled the float under, today’s lot are marked by a laser focus on nailing specific objectives.
I have a slight confession to make here. I quite enjoy hedging my bets, or at least tackling up for the likely interruption of my chosen outcome. Fishing for perch or roach on a fishery with big carp is a great example. A lot of the time I am more successful on the smaller fish tackle than with boilies and bolt rigs!
What alarms me slightly, however, is how few fisheries deviate from the ‘big carp only’ or ‘stocked to the hilt’ formula . Imagine my slight dismay, therefore, to find one of my favourite local specimen lakes all but devoid of the cracking roach it once held.
Regarded as a mere nuisance by management, they’ve been netted and moved on without a second thought.
This is sad enough in itself – but even worse when you find out on the very day you set your stall out for those now missing roach! Well, I say that, but what I always liked about the place in winter was that I could fish scaled-down speci rigs and smallish baits.
Sure, I’d take a 2lb roach above almost anything in angling. But I’m not a species snob either – and what’s not to love about the chance of catching an ‘accidental’ carp that might weigh over 20lb? With slightly stepped-up hooklinks and a through actioned rod, you’ll get most of these fish in, especially in cold, snag-free water.
And that was pretty much the script. After setting up in good spirits, my heart sank at news that the roach were being systematically eradicated.
However, just as I was wondering whether to leave, I had a stupendous bite. Several minutes later, just as a seriously weighty fish approached netting range, my barbless hook pinged out. This really wasn’t my day.
With supreme irony, the carp angler on the other bank was still to have a run, and yet his son had just set up a float rod to catch… you guessed it, roach! He was having more success than me, too, finding some little fish that obviously evaded the nets.
Where do I even start with this? Every fishery expert I know will vouch for a mix of species rather than a monoculture, for water quality let alone varied fishing.
Nor should we lazily paint carp anglers as a single group of baddies. A lot of them fish for other species and will happily put a perch or roach rod out.
Do we really want a landscape dominated by flat, boring swims and single-species lakes?
It’s one thing to lose a fish, quite another to lose a fishery.