- Joined
- Feb 23, 2005
- Messages
- 2,225
- Reaction score
- 3
Second time you’ve said this so let unpick it eh? Across many European countries there are close seasons based on individual species, where you are not allowed to fish for them during a given point.
Half the UK doesn’t have a close season. NI doesn’t have indigenous stocks of dace, chub, barbel and grayling. The salmon/seatrout seasons are enforcing stringently there.
Scotland doesn’t have a close season on the above either, true, but you be hard pressed to find a river up their where they allow you coarse fish during the Salmon Season as salmon/seatrout fishing on its rivers are dominant.
You are clearly unaware and/or are choosing not to acknowledge it that on all AONB, RAMSAR, SSSIs, SBIs, land owned by Government Agency, Local Authority, County Council, Parish Council, Conservation Area designated under Planning Law, Royal Arboriculture Society, Arboricultural Association (Code of Practice) the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, the European Habitats Directive 1992/Nesting Birds Directive there is a General moratorium on work being carried out between the 1 March to 1 September for this very reason.
Where work can’t be avoided, an emergency, there has to be a pre-work survey carried out by a suitably competent person. E.g. Ecologist, Ornithologist, Bird Biologist.
Therefore any club or landowner carrying out such work during this period could well be falling foul of any or all of the above.
Any Work Party Organiser worth his/her salt should know all this and adhere to all of it. And if they don’t they fully need to avail themselves of it to avoid dropping themselves and the club in the courts.
Outdated as much as you think the CS is, the Conservation Laws of the UK are not! Any club landowner who disregards them, does so at their own peril.
So Titus would you like to tell us all the clubs who are not compliant with the laws please?
The reason I repeated myself is because Ray clearly did not see it the first time round.
You could start with the biggest club in the land, PAAS, very keen on the chainsaw are that lot. I have also been on plenty of barbel society work parties where tree mangling is carried out, on one of them someone thought it would be a good idea to use a big log tied to a bit of rope and thrown into the crook of a limb on a crack willow, the idea being that the combined weight of several people hanging on the rope would snap the limb and remove the obstruction. Thal little adventure resulted in the Secratary at the time being airlifted to hospital so dont try preaching to me about the great and the good and what should and should not be done, just because you have no idea who I am does not mean I have not been around a bit.
As well as those two examples every club I have ever been a member of holds work parties between April an the end of May and to the best of my knowledge none of them have ever sought permission from anyone.
You said "NI doesn’t have indigenous stocks of dace, chub, barbel and grayling" which is true but they do have plenty of bream, roach, tench, rudd, pike and (god help us) carp, which all seem to do fine in the absence of a close season.
With regard to Scotland you started in with some anecdotal opinions about where you can and cannot fish during the salmon season. As soon as you start talking about the salmon and trout seasons I swich off as that is irelevant to this discussion which only concerns the coarse season. However, seeing as you have brought salmon and sea trout into the discussion it is worth mentioning that they alone of all the game which is hunted are the only ones who are specifically targeted as they head for the spawning grounds which makes the conservation argument a bit difficult to defend.
The continent does have a few close seasons for certain fish species but they tend to be centred around the ones they traditionally eat and not the chub/ide/orfe type and certainly not barbel.
I have also yet to see any of the retentionists answer my main objection for it's retention which is the undeniable fact that due to changes in angling practice in this country i.e the universal adoption of catch and release (even among our game fishing brothers who are fishing for wild fish) the conditions which prompted it's adoption no longer exist.
The thing which really surprises me about this is the energy which you, as an educated man who clearly cares deeply about the environment, are willing to put in trying to protect something which probably makes very little difference to the welfare of the rivers as a whole when your obvious knowledge, passion and talent for rhetoric could be better utilised fighting something which really does cause a problem such as over abstraction, creeping urbanisation, building on floodplains, red signal crayfish, myton crabs pollution from road runoff untreated effluent, polluted groundwater or any number of other menaces to the rivers and the future of our sport.
Dinner last night was spectacular thank you Ray.
If the fish in our rivers were pursued relentlessly I would probably be standing with you but the fact is for a large portion of the coarse season as it stands it is not possible to get near many of the rivers and even of you did you would be wasting your time,
Comparing the coarse fishing season with any other field sports season is also a bit like comparing apples with pears as the glaringly obvious difference is we do not kill our quarry but return them alive which is not the case with other sports.
Last edited: