Sir Jim Radcliffe the boss and founder of the chemical giant Ineos is launching a major new project to recover salmon populations across the world.
In 2016, fly fisherman Radcliffe bought a 300 sq km area in Iceland, subsequently becoming one of the country’s largest landowners. He said it was for a partnership with the Strengur Angling Club that will help preserve north-Atlantic salmon stocks in Iceland by building ‘salmon ladders’ on key rivers.
Criticism has been leveled at the self-made billionaire as he solely controls angling rights in some of the best salmon rivers in Iceland.
LINK (via: Salmon Business)
Ah yes, yet another member of what I (derisively and, doubtless, deeply and probably indictably subversively in some, backwards into the future, do diddlysquat but commission and produce yet another “hard-hitting” report, Downton Abbey types’ eyes, ) now call the “Run-Away-to-Some-Better-Somewhere-Else Salmon Research Group”.
HUGE on warm words, press releases, committees, annual fundraising (“Bid for a day on a river you will never fish!”) auctions and beneath the glitzy chandeliers, people just like ourselves, Black Tie dinners; MINISCULE on making friends outside of their own tiny, highly excluding bur extremely sociable, fishy and salmon-tail-in-mouth (an ancient Celtic image) social circles and actually getting ANYTHING real and positive done, for the fish or for anybody who really cares for them.
I could go on, but believe you’ve got my drift by now, though will leave you with a somehow resonant line spoken by a character played by John Cleese (before he became a snarling, elderly, small-island tax-exile) in the nice little old movie, Clockwise:
“It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
An email reply from a Welsh pal who, like me, knows a bit about Atlantic salmon, but who, unlike myself, has not caught THAT many of them, as, being 16 years younger than myself, he wasn’t on the British salmon rivers at the (1970s) tailend of their sometimes jaw-droppingly fish-filled heyday:
“Shades of Torgay’s ‘Salmon fishing in The Yemen’ here, Paul. Rich men’s impossible dreams and getting what you want (or buying yourself out of a self-created crisis) by creating / improving habitat when what is really required now is getting out of our cars and planes and massively reducing use of climate-cooking petroleum products like the Graduate’s “Plastics” and petrol [Gas] and cutting Co2 emissions all-round. We can improve the living f—- out of our salmon rivers to make them super fish friendly as much as we want, but if the seas are screwed — which they are, but Governments and Big Business still won’t accept this, or if they do daren’t countenance the colossal political and social changes that will be necessary — we’re stuck with research and huge thick roof insulating reports. No names, no pack drill [English vernacular for don’t supply my name, please] , but tell the Moldy Americans and the watching world this. When America finally sneezes, the rest tend to get a cold. Please give some guys over our way a massive dose one of these ASAP, please, America — I want to catch some salmon and not walk along empty bits of Welsh river where you once had several in a day!! ATB….”
Finally, something that I have often told the emailer above, a guy who has fished twice with me on (for me, at the time) “short” month or so-long trips after sea-trout and steelhead in southern Argentina and Chile: “The rivers during the old much-mythologized heyday were generally in just as bad a state than they are now, XXXX. Tree-clogged and cattle-trampled and farm- and sewage-polluted, but still the fish came. Understand this, then go figure.”