THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

die out through natural wastage if people don't want it in a water any more, which brings me very nicely
on to my scientific involvement.
When I teamed up with Rod Taylor back in the 1980's to work on perfecting coarse fish farming
techniques for the then National Rivers Authority, during my initial guided tour of the site, I was taken
into a long poly-tunnel with an equally long narrow pond inside it which contained grass carp.
Apart from feeding them on a regular basis with dandelion leaves and lettuces, we didn't do anything
with them for ages. Then one day a directive from above said that we needed to get them to spawn. So
into the quarantine tank they went, and later, after a great deal of hard work catching them again, into a
preparation tank where artificial lights were set up on a timer to increase the day length by four minute
increments, while at the same time slowly cranking up the temperature to simulate the onset of summer.
This obviously took some time in which we were always careful to lift the lid just sufficiently to throw
some food in and do our regular water quality checks in case they tried to escape, which we managed
well enough. Until that is the day came to anaesthetize and inject them with pituitary hormones to
encourage their eggs and testes to fully ripen.
We're talking here of a dozen fish averaging between maybe five and eight pounds apiece which needed
to be caught in a large landing net and dropped into a bath of MS222 to quieten them down.
Sensing something was about to happen, they started racing around the edge of the circular tank like
wall of death riders, then having built up speed, when the lid was fully opened and the net went in, out
they shot like a volley of polaris missiles.
One actually hit the breeze block wall leaving a small blood stain on it. What a fiasco. We obviously
were doing all within our powers to ensure their wellbeing, but they weren't having any of it.
Eventually we did get them all into the MS222, injected, and back into the big tank for a few days where
normally, injected fish are checked on a daily basis for progress, but not this lot.
When we thought they'd had long enough, we plucked up courage, and with our previous experience to
fall back on, gingerly managed to get them into the MS222 again for checking, where would you believe
it, they all turned out to be males.
The first large scale introduction of
grass carp in the UK as a biological
control agent was to the Lancaster
Canal just up the road from where I
live, where the idea was to have them
control weed growth.
Following on from what was
perceived to have been a success
there, they started to be introduced
elsewhere, attracting the attention of
anglers for a variety of reasons.
Initially it was thought they couldn't
Virginia Rushmer, Grass Carp
be caught on rod and line. But that
myth was very quickly dispelled, as
it's now known that they are
receptive to all the usual baits and tactics employed to catch carp generally, though particle baits it
seems do tend to have an edge, with surface baits also very popular when the weather has warmed up,
bringing the fish well up in the water column.
306