A Bright Day's Fishing

As you may have picked up over the years in this blog, I am very ambivalent about fishing. I don't like the damage waste can cause to wildlife, nor do I like how angling clubs obtain waters and make them inaccessible to the public, and / or make them very sterile for nature.

However, it does fascinate me because it is an outdoor past-time and I enjoy watching videos on youtube of anglers behaving in a responsible manner while enjoying their hobby. I also love fish, I love the way that as I walk by the River Devon they are cruising unseen beneath the waters.

Today a couple of anglers were struggling to tempt any from the river on what was actually a really pleasant day outside, a day where the great tits were singing their two tone song like fire engines and long tailed tits flitted in the orchard, really quite close to me.

Why are the smallest birds so unafraid?

So I had a cup of tea outside in the sun, and wandered some more, and finished the day off at cricket practice, bowling at the first teamers and hoping they didn't smash the ball back into my face.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 18.02.18

Along the River: Blasted Fishermen

I was wanting to run out to the North Lock in town today to show you the extraordinary little pods someone has put in for fishermen in the old industrial area on Maltkiln Lane, past where Hoval have been making boilers for seemingly hundreds of years.

It's a wonderful little idea, to have eco-pods for anglers to rest up in while waiting for one of the very large carp that do inhabit this stretch of river. What isn't a wonderful idea is that they have now blocked access to this section of waterfront, especially as I'm sure this is a public right of way down to the old concrete bridge. You will have to make do with pictures of other things.

I find the attitude of fishing societies, rather than the anglers themselves, really tiresome. This is yet another waterfront stretch to which public access has been lost in the name of the sport. I can see that folk are wanting to protect their investments, such as they are, and there is a lot of paranoia about poaching by Eastern Europeans although my Polish friends wet themselves laughing when they saw the signs that went up warning them not to eat swans. But I'm not a fan, they seem to sterilise the banks in the name of access, and sections of old paths like the Nottinghamshire Byway have been blocked.

Newark Argonauts used to share the lakes at South Muskham with anglers, and their colourful sails used to be a lovely sight at weekends, as well as their sweeping, veranda'd clubhouse. Then the fishermen decided they wanted them out, flattened the clubhouse, divided the lake up into smaller waters, and now the place looks like a bland hole full of water. Hardly ever seems to be anyone fishing on it either.

London Road Pond has got more and more areas of the lakeside protected by padlocked gates now, which really irritates me. There's no reason anglers and the public can't co-exist, the Blue Lake doesn't block access and manages to be a nice wildlife habitat too.

You can have fishing rights, but why do you need to block public access?

Si

A Harbour Walk

Our second day in Kirkudbright began with me making another walk along the Dee estuary photographing the ducks once again, followed by a trip into town to visit a very old friend, former lifeboatman and harbour master of the town.

After the tea and Tunnock's tea cakes - how long since I'd last eaten one of those?! - my sister and I decided to let the folks get on with their reminiscing while we took off for a walk along the inner Dee, just down from Tongland Power Station , a hydro plant with a salmon ladder.

The tide had just turned, we were essentially following the tide out as we walked past the new lifeboat station - a rib replacing the traditional design based further out to sea back in my day - and a fish processing plant. Since my last visit it looks as if there has been some kind of attempt to turn this stretch of river into a business park. Across the river from where the cheese factory used to waft its odours onto the town.

No longer. It seems to have been transformed into an eco-housing estate with solar panels reflecting a lowering sun. As we got nearer to the harbour, I remembered the feral cats I used to chase along here as they mooched in and out of the boat sheds, pausing now and then to snap up a morsel of decaying fish. Later semi-official town cats like Caesar the enormous ginger tom who used to roam around the square found their way onto postcards, but no longer.

The harbour was quiet when we got there, most of the boats had left on the 2am tide to go and gather their scallops from the Irish Sea and beyond. It was from here that the Solway Harvester went fishing in 2000, only to go down with all hands and wipe out the breeding male population of the Isle of Whithorn. Ghostly broken shells littered the harbourside like a memorial.

The harbour is not as busy as it was, it seemed to me, with fewer and larger boats tying up alongside.

The town is beautiful. But it is diminished. The streets are quiet, with few young people round, and by 9pm positively deserted. Houses are boarded up. Communications are dreadful. Where can the town go? What is its future?

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 19.10.15

Following the tide

Wreck

Another wreck, beautifully matching the landscape

Dee bridge

Sister inspects the queenie boats

Distant marina

Broken shells

Memorial

Redshank arrived after the tide left

Feeding on the mudflats

Devon Sojourn 2 - Roadford Lake

After exploring the Granite Way and Meldon Dam, we then headed for Roadford Lake, not far from the enticingly named village of Broadwoodwidger and not far from the Cornish border.

As soon as I arrived at the lake the first thing I thought was how much it reminded me of Rutland Water back up in my part of the world. It may not be as large, but the feel of it, with the cafe and shop, bike trails and sailing school is very reminiscent. But at Roadford, you feel very high up, wind turbines dot the horizon and there is the sense that the sky is not that far away.

The winds blow the training dinghies about the water as we have tea and cake. The world's tallest man stands in front of us and looks at the world's smallest puppy, a baby meerkat sized chihuahua.  A giant metal sundial glitters in a lowering sun.

A bird hide proves the birds are hiding. But there are plenty of butterflies, and a big hawker flies over my shoulder like a strafing Spitfire. Muddy ground hints at the autumn to come.

A child screams eerily in the trees. The dense woods surrounding the lake might be very scary at night. But in the day, it was lovely.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 

The calm waters

Sailing woes

Damselfly

Splashing at the edge

Small tortoiseshell

The butterfly seeks a different world view

Very tatty meadow brown

Silver sundial

Chubby hoverfly

The Perch and the Posh Houses

I had rather grandiose plans for today; after cricket yesterday, where I had been couped up at mid-off for 45 overs, I felt the need to really expand my horizons and go for a twenty mile job/hike, probably up the hill at Kelham to explore round there. But, I wasn't awake until 10am, and felt distinctly lethargic so I reluctantly (of course) decided to restrict myself to a run.

A very slow run.

I trotted round the Willow Holt meadows, scaring up clouds of meadow browns and ringlets, and loped past revellers on a busy riverbank around the marina. Tsk, drinking in pubs on a lovely day while I was running! Some people have no dedication.

It was a standard sort of summer run along the river, although the wind seemed to be keeping the damsels and dragons out of the sky. It wasn't deterring the fishermen however; both the avian kind in the form of elegantly statuesque herons on the river's edge and flying cormorants, and also the human sort, wielding their rods over the choppy waters.

It was when I finally found my way round to what I always think of the posh houses as the path re-enters Newark under the bypass, that I found the day's master angler. The houses aren't particularly expensive, but their river frontage makes them terribly desirable I suppose. Except when it floods, as it has done in 2001 and 2011, cataclysmic floods that caused thousands upon thousands of pounds of damage.

And it was at the back of one of these houses that another fisherman, a house owner using his private little stretch of river, was engaged in a rod bending struggle with a fish trying to tangle itself up in the reeds to avoid capture. The rod must have been a flimsy one, because when the fish appeared it was no Jeremy Wade type "River Monster"with man eating potential.

However, it was a very large perch, not far off a kilo in weight, and in beautiful condition with its striped body and orange fins shimmering in the afternoon sun.

I congratulated the angler, and made my way back into town.


Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 19.07.15

Meadow brown on Farndon Road

Yet another small skipper

The dreaded himalayan balsam now out in Willow Holt

Meadow cranes bill?

The yellow margin

Small tortoiseshell

Enjoying a thistle

Red admiral on the river bank

Wings closed

Mega perch!

Beautifully marked

The Bottomless Lake

Memories of Crete again today, prompted by visitations into my mind of this...

Lake Volusemni, the so called "Bottomless Lake" by Artimy Pavlov, Wikimedia Commons

...The Bottomless Lake.

The Bottomless Lake lives in the Cretan holiday resort of Aghios Nikolaus, and the above view is one I've never had of it. I was usually found, on the two family holidays we had in the area, sitting with my dinky little yellow and black fishing rod just where the short canal joining the lake to the harbour enters the lake.

The Bottomless Lake isn't really bottomless. Some boring English nautical fellow took a sounding and found the depth as being around 60 metres. Which is still incredibly impressive for a body of water that my memory reckons is no larger than a football pitch, but destroys the local legend somewhat. You can imagine the bottomless lake as being an entrance to Hades, where evil souls are tortured with deathless drowning before emerging into endless fires and the mocking laughter of the three headed dog Cerberus.

Sisyphus and Damocles look up from their own ordeals only briefly to look the newcomer in the eye with knowing sympathy.

I fished in the Bottomless Lake. Not at the bottom, I didn't even have 60 metres of line on my reel, just four lead shot and a piece of bread on a hook. On an earlier holiday in Elounda along the coast I had fished for grey mullet with some success, although I caught only small ones. They still went down very well fried with lime juice, although my stepfather in his own display of Underworld cruelty made me bone and gut them myself.

Much bigger mullet lived in the Bottomless Lake, as long as my arm or so. But you could never get them within a mile of a fishing hook, and indeed here I never caught any mullet at all, or any of the saddleback bream that were also common in Cretan waters, I only caught those gloppy bug eyed little rock gobies and blennies, ugly, slimy Marty Feldmans of the sea.

But from what I remember, you wouldn't want to eat any of the fish from these waters in any case. The long sea front of the resort used to have a tidal sweep of used toilet paper about a mile long that the windsurfers used to hurtle through in a frenetic cholera death wish. And then the harbour was full of bluey oil slicks from the Playboy cruisers and rusting ferries, deep and cold sea urchin waters somehow far scarier to me than invisible bottom of the Bottomless Lake.

It was about our only Hotel holiday that one, and in the fog of increasing years, not as good as I thought it was at the time. I never swam in the sea or played with other kids on beaches made scary by the local hornets.

It was all sit down meals and swimming in the rooftop pool, a gloomy pit of Weil's Disease that surely one day must have featured in a "That's Life" story about holiday drownings.

I'd rather have swum in the Bottomless Lake, and met the fate of Titans.

Si

Words are copyright CreamCrackeredNature, image as credited

Cycling in the So Called Indian Summer

This morning I ran at Parkrun as usual, and it was chilly and slightly misty. The swallows of the week before hadn't bothered to come out for a fly over the football pitches; everything felt very reminiscent of my old school cross country runs.

And then in the afternoon, after a guilty sleep, the weather was warm I decided a small bike ride was in order along the cycle path. The primary mission involved the buying of biscuits, but this was a scenic route.

So, there is still life about. A southern hawker dragonfly was patrolling alongside London Road lake, many white butterflies, and a brown hawker alongside the river, bronzed wings catching the low autumn sun. The liveliest thing I saw, however, was at the end of a fishing line. A group of young lads who I initially thought were Eastern European but were actually local, had hauled a pike out of the river opposite the Barge pub.

Always curious about fish, I went and had a look, my initial assumption that they were Poles meaning I figured the fish was destined for the pot. I spoke to the lads, but they were a bit on the rough side, and when I tried to take a picture of the fish, they youngest one started demanding money, the cheek of it!

They then weight it through it's gills, as one of them shouted "kill it! kill it!" He then started punching the fish as it hung on the hook.

This left me feeling rather down. I don't really have an axe to grind against fishermen, I find seeing fish fascinating. But I'd rather the fish were taken to eat, or put back straightaway, rather than being tormented by a bunch of idiot kids. It reminded me of when I saw a kid stabbing a fishing hook through a frog, shouting "It's what the French do!". Ugh.

Ugh.

And more Ugh.

I was wishing the pike would punch the kids.

A Cretan Idyll

I ran this morning, but the icy east wind was back again so living things had sensibly retreated back into their shelters. As I wish I had.

So instead, I will write about the holiday on Crete I had back in about 1983, in the village of Elounda. I remember it perhaps better than anyonf my other childhood holidays because I kind of began to explore independently - albeit with the folks never far away with sister in her McClaren pushchair.

I remember seeing vultures for the first time, soaring on the thermals by the cliffs over looking the new road to Heraklion and my first visit to Knossos that would be so influential on me many years later. On our first night, we walked around the village, and I remember seeing cuttlefish in the harbour, fins sweeping the water in the darkness. I was told dread warnings about the poisonous sea urchins that made your feet swell up to the size of basketballs if you trod on them. The inland villages smelt of all the oregano growing on the hillsides, wildflowers everywhere.

There was a broken fishing boat sat on a stony beach, and I remember sitting on there for many an hour, until a scary looking pipe fish scared me out of my coawardly wits. I took my revenge on the fish by catching and eating them. Me and two other kids fished for hours, from 7am some days, on this little stone peer by a tiny sandy beach the size of a front lawn that was full of burrowing stinging bees that naturally I trod on and screamed like a girl. I had a rod, they had traditional Cretan handlines, and we fished with bread for these grey mullet that filled the clear seas. In fact, as soon as they sensed the bread, they would go mad like piranas. We caught plenty, the biggest no more than 8 inches, and gutted and fried they tasted great with lime dressing.

The local experts caught much bigger ones fishing with a whole loaf wrapped in tiny hooks. The biggest were well over 18 inches long. When fishing was poor, to avoid bordem, we would deliberately catch the greedy fat ugly blenny slash goby things that sat on the sea bad and swallowed the hooks.

I also caught a few small sea bream - there were Gilt Head swimming about in a foot of water you'd pay a tenner for at fishmongers at least. And what I remember as being clown fish but probably weren't, they had the right colour though. And there black and white striped fish I always called zebra fish, that weren't zebra fish either.

All the while, I strove to avoid the terrifying local hornets. Black, with yellow stings and red eyes, to a child they were straight out of hell. The locals caught them in half full 7 Up bottles to stop them scaring customers away from their little shops and kiosks selling the "Ion" 20 drachma chocolate that melted the second you bought it...

My favourite holiday, in a lot of ways. And when we went back, a few years later while staying in Aghios Nikolaus, the water was murky with the oil of affluent greek yachts, and all the fish had gone. I was so sad...