THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

The Wild Trout Trust does a lot of work with small upstream stretches and wild fish populations, often
located well away from urban and industrial inputs.
Paul Gaskell's work on the other hand, as the project implies, takes him right into the thick of the urban
jungle, where the objective is to make urban and metropolitan environments attractive to brown trout,
then make them accessible to anglers.
In many ways, both directly and indirectly, the two organisations are inter-linked. For once water quality
issues are addressed by organisations like the Environment Agency and are not only brought up to an
acceptable standard, but maintained at that standard, invertebrates and fish will very quickly respond
and recolonise them.
A prime example of this is the River Mersey which I worked on with the National Rivers Authority
during the 1990's. A time period when you would have struggled to find a worse example of historical
pollution in Europe, and where it took a lot of people plus a lot of effort to peel back the many layers
of indifference and neglect.
Like the often used onion analogy, you remove one layer only to find another and another. But
eventually you get down to core, and within thirteen years, the Mersey went quite literally from running
sewer to running salmon coming in from the seaward end, while at the same time, coarse fish and brown
trout from isolated residual pockets in the higher reaches were able to penetrate ownstream.
So it can be done. But in the case of the Trout In The Town project, local residents and businesses also
need to be on-board, and stop seeing rivers and their banks as natural free dumping grounds.
Local anglers too by pressing for better access, with schools also getting in on the act by promoting a
wider understanding of the aquatic environment.
After recording the interview with Paul on the banks of the River Irwell near Bury, we headed back to
the car park where he donned his waders, got out his tackle bag, and prepared to grab an hour fishing.
The Irwell, despite being a vastly improved river, in places looked at best a tricky venue to fish due to
the many huge boulders and rapid sections surrounded by tall trees. But one which I was assured had
enough small pools containing enough small trout to demonstrate how urban angling can work.
Central to this was the technique of tenkara fishing, which by coincidence I'd recently been given a full
demonstration of by Tenkara UK director, the late Mike Roden, on the upper River Ribble. We were
shooting a demo video for his website and for YouTube which we followed up with an audio recording,
after which I was given a tenkara rod to use and practise the lessons learned.
Unfortunately, not knowing we were
about to embark on an urban trout
tenkara session, I didn't have it with
me. So I watched Paul picking his way
up river from pool to pool enjoying a
spot of wild trout fishing that was open
to everyone. And therein lies one of the
fundamentals of the Trout In The Town
project.
Accessibility and appreciation for
anyone and everyone wanting to grab
an hour or so say at lunch time, or after
work, which is where fly fishing, and in
Anthony James, wild Brownie, Red Tarn
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