A rant about coarse fishing and river woes

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JTO said:
Just like Chesil Beach when all the townies have gone home after a bank holiday.
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Yep, how people can allow themselves to taint such an excellent fishing mark is beyond me. Had many good nights fishing there (and many long slogs back to the car over the shingle!)
 
bobo said:
Here, many angling clubs have a rule that allows people to take 2 fish home a day, other places they say, “take only what you can eat”.

Pike has to be larger than 60 centimeters before anyone is allowed to kill them and most people will release pike longer than 80 centimeters.

I have caught more than 30 pikes this year but only one below 80 centimeters, and several more then 1 meter, so it can be discussed if we should increase max. length to 90 centimeters.

We can take fish home to eat and still have plenty of fish in our fresh waters. However, any kind of pollution is delt with quickly and companies or privates who release pollution will be hardly punished. I will estimate that 90% of our rivers have drinking water quality. Lakes are mostly clean but it is not recommended to drink the water.

Denmark have around 1,3-1,4 persons pr. Hektar. UK has around 2,5-2,7 persons pr. Hektar, so your county is much heavily populated than ours, so you will have it much more challenging to keep nature clean.



Coarse angling is not particular popular here, certainly not at the degree it is in UK. For this reason many good places for coarse angling have no rules regulating the angling for anything other than pike and Zander. For the same reason many places whit few predator fish but large amount of coarse fish are completely free to be fished. One of my local lakes, Skanderborg Lake, where there have been a few Worls championships in coarse angling, only have rules for angling predatory fish. Only regulations on Coarse angling is that max. amount of feed is 2 kg pr day, pr angler, to keep pollution down.

My family loves fish, and we eat both freshwater and sea fish, but only fish we catch ourselves.

About crayfish, our native European crayfish are getting seldom, as the American Signal crayfish push them out. Last year I took the children to one overnight stay at the river, where we fished for crayfish using 6 crayfish pieces, result 23 kg Signal Crayfish.
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I keep meaning to give fishing in Skanderborg a go but never seem to get round to it.
We have had a lot of problems with algae in Skanderborg lake the last few years. We have had to cancel quite a few of the early season duck hunts there over the last few years.
Do you fish from the shore or do you take a boat out?
 
Bo Diddley said:
North America have much more scope to allow this, and in America you have plenty of patrols checking up on everyone, and stiff fines if you are caught flouting the wildlife & game laws.
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My friend in Canada says the First Nation people catch everything and many rivers are restocked with trout by helicopter annually. (They apparently are allowed to).
 
AGR said:
My friend in Canada says the First Nation people catch everything and many rivers are restocked with trout by helicopter annually. (They apparently are allowed to).
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America and Canada get lots of things spot on with regards to fishing.
First Nation deserve to be able to do such things as fish and hunt. Before the gold rush and temporary destruction of rivers due to sluice use by prospectors the rivers were so full of salmon they could hook them out all day long, and dry them in the wind and sun. The sediment from prospecting ruined many spawning grounds.
 
Apthorpe said:
I would just add that it is an a prevalent error to think that the reason our water companies pollute rivers is privatisation and corporate greed. It is a fact that rivers were very much filthier when the water companies were state-owned and even more drastically under-invested in. I only mention this because there is a section of society which thinks that nationalisation would magically make things better. It won't - state-run enterprises are greater failures than private enterprises operating in a state manipulated pseudo-markets.

I absolutely agree about signal crayfish (and other invasive species). It's absolute madness to have any red tape at all around these species. People should be encouraged to kill them in as great numbers as they can.
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Agreed, the rivers were bad before privatisation, as a young teen I remember a fishing match where turds were floating past and bumping into the line. A river my father some 30 years earlier had learnt to swim in!
The privatised companies have though done a lot of asset stripping.
 
Hello, I seem to remember the problem in the Republic of Ireland with visiting fishermen taking vast amounts of Pike ???
 
AGR said:
Agreed, the rivers were bad before privatisation, as a young teen I remember a fishing match where turds were floating past and bumping into the line. A river my father some 30 years earlier had learnt to swim in!
The privatised companies have though done a lot of asset stripping.
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They haven't. Not least because the assets were incapable of being stripped. What they have done is overloaded the companies with debt and extracted too much cash. While they were doing that they were also investing very much more money than had been invested under national ownership..
They've failed quite badly, but nothing like as badly as nationalised water companies would have and indeed did. There is some defence in the fact that the government systematically lied to them about what investment would be needed - and they hadn't provided for the 10 million recent immigrants.
 
Bo Diddley said:
America and Canada get lots of things spot on with regards to fishing.
First Nation deserve to be able to do such things as fish and hunt.
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I don't share your view. The fishing and hunting legislation is in place for a reason. Circumventing it, in unsustainable way (AGR said rivers need restocking, so it's not hook'n'line being used...) is no way forward.

Few years ago, "Sami people" (they were no real Sami, nor are most that are counted as such and enjoy the privileges, and the rest won't live in traditional way either) challenged fishing legislation in Finland. Few young women went to fish against the restrictions, and reported themselves to police. So now there court ruling that they can fish regardless of the legislation, at least "in their native river" (it has no definition for that and there was no clause to prevent them doing it elsewhere).

Actually I'm waiting until they get the idea to find some oldtimer and tell him to go hunting against the law. They'd probably get ruling it's allowed also, and if they won't the oldtimer won't probably miss his guns for long...
 
tarponhead said:
Agreed but what about game fish? I guess you mean coarse fish- can’t think why you’d want to eat coarse fish but I remember seeing rows of coarse fish for sale in Birmingham markets - the Bullring. I have eaten perch in Ireland - too many bones, so I’m a sea angler for food. My coarse fishing days are probably behind me for all the reasons you state.
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Ditto! With so many of our waterways being so polluted I would not want to take a chance on eating any "freshwater fish" caught in our waterways, especially one caught on our local canal which more often than not looks like black coffee and all sorts of "rubbish floating on the surface" and if you snag the bottom while lure fishing you simply do not know what you are going to drag up attached to your hook! :banghead:
 
Bo Diddley said:
Fingers crossed they hop into the car and head to the beach, cast out a line of Mackerel feathers and fill their carrier bags. There are limits on quantity and size of even Mackerel caught with rod and line from our shores, and yes, there are people checking anglers along the beaches.
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Sadly there aren’t limits to quantity of mackerel kept, there definitely are size limits (south coast 20cm, elsewhere 30cm) but these are often ignored and rarely policed.
There are size and quantity limits on bass (2 fish per angler per day, 42cm) and this seemingly has been effective with the south coast bass fishery pretty good again now. I’ve been checked on my boat about once a year and really they are interested in bass. Other anglers and rod-and-line commercials are quite good at policing it which is possibly the bigger threat to anyone transgressing the law.
 
Essexsussex said:
Sadly there aren’t limits to quantity of mackerel kept, there definitely are size limits (south coast 20cm, elsewhere 30cm) but these are often ignored and rarely policed.
There are size and quantity limits on bass (2 fish per angler per day, 42cm) and this seemingly has been effective with the south coast bass fishery pretty good again now. I’ve been checked on my boat about once a year and really they are interested in bass. Other anglers and rod-and-line commercials are quite good at policing it which is possibly the bigger threat to anyone transgressing the law.
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Yes, correct.
A couple of years ago when I last went mackeral fishing from Cley beach, Norfolk, we had a minibus full of Chinks turning up every night and keeping every mackeral they caught, we had the foot patrol checking, and they soon got told.. they stopped coming.
I'm off Bass fishing for a couple of hours tomorrow afternoon/evening, as the tide comes in over the rockpools at Hunstanton, not sure if the Bass are there yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
 
Bo Diddley said:
Yes, correct.
A couple of years ago when I last went mackeral fishing from Cley beach, Norfolk, we had a minibus full of Chinks turning up every night and keeping every mackeral they caught, we had the foot patrol checking, and they soon got told.. they stopped coming.
I'm off Bass fishing for a couple of hours tomorrow afternoon/evening, as the tide comes in over the rockpools at Hunstanton, not sure if the Bass are there yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
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Hope you find your silver!
 
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