Moving Fish to other waters as a Kid

[Blunderer]

When we were kids we seemed to have a complete fascination with moving fish from one water to another. Because our waters (in East Lancashire) were so limited, we had a fanciful notion that we could stock waters ourselves and create our own little fishing havens which noone knew anything about. It never really occurred to us that the reason that some of the waters we tried to stock had no fish in was because they were not healthy enough to support them!

I remember filling keepnets with perch and moving them from millponds to the River Irwell, which at the time contained only trout and minnows and was polluted every couple of years. The poor buggers.

I remember moving trout in carrier bags to the little stream behind my house. Poor sods again.

We even put perch into the cattle drink by a pond once. Then we caught then the next day and put them back!

The most stupid scheme we came up with, but never actually carried out, was to bring a net of bream to an underground reservoir we had found in the hills, to create our own weatherproof fishery!!

We also totally stocked a mate's new pond with fish we had caught.

I know it was a stupid thing to do but as kids we knew no better. Did anyone else do the same thing or was it just us???

 

[Wolfman Woody]

The thing about Lancashire at that time was that it was run by North West Water Authority when the WAs were set up and still they had no fisheries policies or licences anyway, so stricly speaking it wasn't illegal.

We used to fish the park lake that had a problem of silting up. To solve this they created a dam above it and fish we used to catch from the lake, we tranferred to the dam. This was doign the fish a big favour since the dam was a better lake than the lake itself.

Now, that lake has got tench, chub, carp, roach, prams, scaffolding, shopping trollies and all sorts in it.

I was on soem private land last year and the horse trough the farmer had put in had 4 goldfish swimming in it. Heavens knows what they thought the first time they saw a horse's nose coming at them.

 

[Frank "Chubber" Curtis]

I think most of us that started fishing at an early age back in the 50's and 60's were guilty of the same thing. I know I was.