Each Year the fish farms can't keep their trout contained and they escape into our nature. The fish doesn't belong there, but can be quite fun to catch.
Thankfully, those escapees are in the Baltic Sea, not the Atlantic around my home, Britain. There was an escape of rainbows from a small farm on a tributary of a then major sea-trout and salmon river in west Wales in the early -mid 1970s. The escapees, a mix of 3- to 6-inch juvenile rainbows, were flushed out to sea (or, at least, out of sight and out of mind) by the same post- heavy rain, main river flood conditions that permitted their escape from tanks on one its tributaries.
Out of sight and mind at least until the escapees, now 12 ounces to a 1 pound in weight, ran the river a few months later with the late-June runs of indigenous shoal sea-trout and duly became a “fish a chuck” for me one night when I was flyfishing for both shoal and the occasional much larger sea-trout above a well-known local weir above an even better-known set of west Wales waterfalls, Cenarth.
For a few weeks that summer, those rainbows seemed to follow me around – I had twenty or so of them one evening when fishing a prime pool and a couple of runs twenty miles upriver. I filled a freezer with the better ones and fed the rest to the cats on the farm at which I was living.
Then there was the farm escape on a major, though small-sized English chalkstream in the early 1990s. The Chairman of the very old private fishing club that controlled the best of it, asked me over for a day’s fishing with him at this time. I asked him about Fishery Rules (“Stricctly Upstream Dry Fly before July 1st, when small-fly Upstream Nymphing is permitted) and if fishers were permitted any fish any they had caught – if there was a Bag Limit. The elderly Chairman, a fine Edwardian Era-born English gentleman, a master of quiet and sometimes very humorous understement, merely said “Normally it’s a brace of fish, Paul, but today it’s ten thousand. We have a plague of rainbows from a farm upriver.”
He invited me back to the very private, very exclusive fishery, to wage war on those thousands of escaped rainbows “They’re eating the river up, Paul.” on a 7-days-a-week basis (“If you can do it”) for the next month. I must have had at least a thousand. All of them on Upstream Dry Fly too, so as not to upset the Club’s mostly elderly, by the Halfordian Rule Book, Members (who, a number told, “I have never caught so many trout as I have this season.”).
So … rainbows…
Fine fish in their native waters, but…………
There’s more to Angling to than having your string pulled by fish, especially ones that shouldn’t be there, I have thought ever since the 1970s incident and my by-the-sackload month in the early 1990s.
Thankfully, those escapees are in the Baltic Sea, not the Atlantic around my home, Britain. There was an escape of rainbows from a small farm on a tributary of a then major sea-trout and salmon river in west Wales in the early -mid 1970s. The escapees, a mix of 3- to 6-inch juvenile rainbows, were flushed out to sea (or, at least, out of sight and out of mind) by the same post- heavy rain, main river flood conditions that permitted their escape from tanks on one its tributaries.
Out of sight and mind at least until the escapees, now 12 ounces to a 1 pound in weight, ran the river a few months later with the late-June runs of indigenous shoal sea-trout and duly became a “fish a chuck” for me one night when I was flyfishing for both shoal and the occasional much larger sea-trout above a well-known local weir above an even better-known set of west Wales waterfalls, Cenarth.
For a few weeks that summer, those rainbows seemed to follow me around – I had twenty or so of them one evening when fishing a prime pool and a couple of runs twenty miles upriver. I filled a freezer with the better ones and fed the rest to the cats on the farm at which I was living.
Then there was the farm escape on a major, though small-sized English chalkstream in the early 1990s. The Chairman of the very old private fishing club that controlled the best of it, asked me over for a day’s fishing with him at this time. I asked him about Fishery Rules (“Stricctly Upstream Dry Fly before July 1st, when small-fly Upstream Nymphing is permitted) and if fishers were permitted any fish any they had caught – if there was a Bag Limit. The elderly Chairman, a fine Edwardian Era-born English gentleman, a master of quiet and sometimes very humorous understement, merely said “Normally it’s a brace of fish, Paul, but today it’s ten thousand. We have a plague of rainbows from a farm upriver.”
He invited me back to the very private, very exclusive fishery, to wage war on those thousands of escaped rainbows “They’re eating the river up, Paul.” on a 7-days-a-week basis (“If you can do it”) for the next month. I must have had at least a thousand. All of them on Upstream Dry Fly too, so as not to upset the Club’s mostly elderly, by the Halfordian Rule Book, Members (who, a number told, “I have never caught so many trout as I have this season.”).
So … rainbows…
Fine fish in their native waters, but…………
There’s more to Angling to than having your string pulled by fish, especially ones that shouldn’t be there, I have thought ever since the 1970s incident and my by-the-sackload month in the early 1990s.
Happy New Year, Chummers.
One pedantic correction to the above: the Non-Texas English Chalkstream Dry Fly Massacre happened in the early 1980s, not ’90s as stated above.