Just in case you missed all the social media chatter a few weeks ago, I thought it’d be worth mentioning again that my review of Mark Everard’s important new book River Habitats for Coarse Fish has now been published on the Fallon’s Angler website.

As I said in my introduction…

In these days when all the funky river menders are talking about catchment-scale processes, natural flood management, and even rewilding with beavers, it’s feeling rather rare to find a book that’s just about fish. More to the point, it’s even rarer to find a book that’s just about coarse fish, and that’s exactly the point of this one.

Here in the UK, I think we can fairly say that river restoration for the benefit of salmonid species has made most of the running for the last 20-plus years.

There’s probably a whole tangle of reasons for this. Many coarse fish do use habitat in similar ways to trout and salmon, but they grow more slowly, so it can take a discouragingly long time to see results – and anyway, the Environment Agency has always been liberal with annual stockings of little chub, dace, roach and barbel from Calverton fish farm.

Maybe, too, it’s because lots of the problems affecting the barbel and bream zones of our rivers are actually much more systemic and culturally ingrained than problems in the troutier headwaters. As Mark writes in River Habitats for Coarse Fish:

Even classic art from the nineteenth century portraying idyllic river scenes often depicts destructive forces. One such well-known example is John Constable’s 1819 painting, The Hay Wain, in which the wagon that gives the painting its title is being driven along the bed of a river, cottages and roads are built right up to the bank top, wooden-shuttered banks displace the natural riparian habitat, the floodplain is converted for agriculture, and the banks are excessively trampled by stock. 

In fact, many classic English landscape paintings depict bucolic vistas in which rivers are disconnected from their floodplains (often with some bank reinforcement or trampling) and the river channel is plied by heavy boats, blocked by weirs, mills or locks, or is otherwise in a condition that may be culturally meaningful yet is very far from natural. Our modern perception of rivers, even in such classically idyllic depictions, differs substantially from the truly natural environments in which fish evolved.

Today, thanks to the modern catchment-based approach to river management (spawned by the European Water Framework Directive) everyone’s looking at our waterways in a much more holistic way, and scientists and anglers alike are starting to apply the knowledge that coarse fish often want to move around river systems just as much as better-known migratory game species.

For instance, I’ve just read this timely article by my colleague Chris Gardner at the South East Rivers Trust, in which he reveals his research on a school of bream that clearly wanted to migrate staggeringly long distances in very short spaces of time:

During my PhD in 2006, I tracked the movements of 80+ adult common bream (4-7lb) over four years in a long 40 km reach of the Lower River Witham, a very uniform fenland river in Lincolnshire. My bream were tightly shoaled and relatively immobile in a deep tributary off the main river at the upstream extent of the reach during the winter, moving short distances of, on average, about <5 km a month, up and downstream.

In the spring, they became highly mobile moving on average 30 km a month utilising the entire length of the river available to them, with one individual moving over 120 km in a single month! At this time they were visiting shallow tributaries off the main river, before using these for spawning in late May / early June. Once they had spawned, they spread out and spent the rest of the summer in the main river foraging, again moving on average 20-30 km a month up and downstream. In the autumn they moved back upstream to the deep tributary for the winter. This same yearly pattern was observed throughout the study.

As we spend more time studying more species, in river catchments which are increasingly friendly to the free flow of fish, I’ve no doubt that we’ll discover even more stuff like this to astonish us. And in the meantime…

Just like most of those the trout-focused manuals that came before it, River Habitats for Coarse Fish is designed to empower ordinary anglers with the knowledge and confidence to start making a real difference to their own river, and thus to their own fishing. If you have any interest in either of these, it’s my strong recommendation to get hold of your own copy today… and maybe buy a few for your fishing pals as well.

After several successful outings on his own home waters earlier in 2011, during which I’m almost certain I mentioned a little river in South London once or twice…

… it was pretty much inevitable that my West Country fishing partner in crime Dominic Garnett would eventually take the bait and visit the Wandle for the first time to investigate the results of our river cleanups and restoration work.

So he did, at the end of November last year. And he seemed to enjoy urban fishing so much that he’s written it up for this week’s edition of the Angling Times (as I’ve just announced over on the Wandle Piscators’ blog).

For a couple of hours, halfway through that chilly late-autumn day, I had to put my Wandle Trust Chairman’s hat on and leave Dominic to his own devices whilst I attended a reception celebrating a long-overdue award of section 106 funding to Merton Abbey’s Chapter House.

Solo angling in the edgelands didn’t faze him in the least, however, and by the time I rejoined him somewhere below Connolly’s Mill, he’d just released a real trophy, a rare Wandle perch…

… and was deep in conversation with a couple of local kids about favoured baits for barbel and the river’s plethora of silver fish.

As I’ve probably also mentioned before, Dominic’s own book, Flyfishing for Coarse Fish, will be published in April 2012 by Merlin Unwin alongside my own Trout in Dirty Places, and we may even organise one or two joint signings.

Stay tuned for more as it happens… and go grab that copy of AT in the meantime!

(All photos: Dominic Garnett)

Traditionally, when an author finishes writing a book, he thankfully slams the door of his garret and clatters down the rickety stairs to the fleshpots of the nearest big city… there to get utterly amnesiac on Guinness, absinthe or whatever qualifies as the local obliviator of choice.

By contrast, back in September, all I wanted to do was go fishing. Better still, I knew exactly who I wanted to go fishing with. 

Dominic Garnett is a West Country based angling blogger and writer for Angling Times, Total Flyfisher and other magazines: I’d already got to know him whilst researching urban fishing opportunities in Tiverton, and quite coincidentally he’d just submitted his own manuscript, Fly Fishing for Coarse Fish, to our mutual publisher.

So I was pretty sure my first serious foray onto a canal was in safe hands…

As it turned out, conditions were practically perfect for sight-fishing flies to trophy roach, rudd and hybrids in the almost-still water of the Grand Western Canal: perhaps a little too much cloud and wind, but the low, clear water concentrated the fish and gave us good visibility whenever the sun was blazing down like a floodlight.

Our usual long, light fly-rods conferred huge advantages in reaching out over the marginal fringe of reeds between the canal and the towpath, and size 12 – 14 black and peacock spiders were really the only flies we needed. I’d tarted mine up with tiny glass beadheads in front of soft black hackle, whilst Dom got the same effect with heavy Kamasan B100 hooks:

As their upturned lower lips might suggest, rudd seem to prefer chasing their food up through the water column, rather than following it down… so the main design requirements amounted to generic lifelike bugginess and a slow sink rate.

Competition would sometimes kick in between the better fish, and they’d take with a noticeable gobbling action: once you managed to hook them, the fights were short but decisive, and a long-handled landing net was essential for banking these larger specimens…

… together with waist or even chest waders and an intrepid attitude which rapidly lost me my mobile phone somewhere in those reedy jungles.

Still, it had already tried to get away on at least three other separate occasions, so it was on borrowed time anyway.  And in the end, Virgin Mobile didn’t even laugh at me when I told them I’d dropped my ancient handset into a canal.  (They deal with delinquent demob-happy fishing writers all the time… right?)

Update: a few weeks later, Dominic came up to the Smoke to spend a day with me on the Wandle… read his account here!