Is silt slowly choking the system in the Fens?

Did the shrimp boats sit this high and dry in the Fisher Fleet at low tide a few years back..? I'm not so sure they did.

The tidal river's silting up so badly in Lynn that the council is looking to buy an amphibious vehicle to replace the ferry that runs from King Street to West Lynn.

The report to councillors makes quite interesting reading when it comes to the state of the Ouse - scroll down to the first agenda item here.

What's all this got to do with pike fishing, you might ask. Well the tidal Ouse is the end of a system of rivers and drains that stretches far inland. In recent years, siltation has caused problems in the Delph, when water wasn't cleared off the Washes because of the shrinking window when it could be run off via Welmore Sluice.

Reading between the lines regarding the recent renovation of the Relief Channel tail sluice, the Channel's going to be increasingly relied upon to discharge water, as it by-passes the silted up stretch of the tidal between Denver and Eau Brink. This could prove a blow to hopes that fishing on the Channel might improve once the gates were de-silted which allow the Ely Ouse to flow into the tidal between tides.

Things are changing fast out there. Not even the rain we've had over the wettest summer for nearly a century has been enough to scour the tidal. The tide comes in with more force than it goes out, meaning the flood brings in mud faster than the ebb can clear it.

Disaster might not be looming toworrow. But the tidal river governs how the entire system operates. And sooner or later, there's going to be a tipping point when it comes to actually getting water away. Take the new pumping station at St Germans, which can now move water out of the Middle Level  at all states of the tide.

This relieves the immediate risk from the Middle Level, but where does the water go against a rising tide - back upstream, adding to the problems of siltation upstream in the tidal, between St Germans and Denver.

This might make the Welney and Ouse Washes more prone to flooding - what they were designed to do, some will doubtless argue. But what happens as the tidal Ouse between Denver and Welmore becomes more silted, reducing the scope for clearing water off the Washes.

Click here for schematics which show how that part of the system works. See what I mean..?

Last 20lbs pike from the Fens caught on film

Talking about the Ouse and my miserable failure to catch a twenty downstream of Queen Adelaide had me rooting through my old pictures to find one of a 20lbs pike from anywhere on that part of the system. I knew I'd had a few back in the dim and distant, when the river was throwing up a lot more of them than it has in recent seasons.

Here's one from - struggling to remember exactly when - the back-end of the season some years ago. After poncing about here and there all day, my partner in crime and I adjourned to an obvious feature where a degree of stealth was required.

I can't recall much else about the capture, other than it was probably the last fish of any size I caught which was photographed on film. Nowadays, thanks to digital cameras and phones that take pictures, we happily snap away all day.

A few years back a film would often last me half the season. Despite the fact I was once a photographer, this did not guarantee a clear, sharp shot of your latest twenty.

There would also be a nervous wait to see whether the pictures had come out, or whether they'd be fogged, wrongly-exposed or fall victim to some other catastrophe, like your mate cutting your head or half the fish off.

Worse still, if you used slide film, you had the added possibility of the pictures getting lost in the post to and from the lab - or, as once happened to me, getting someone else's slides instead. I can remember pictures of a low-twenty, that morphed into someone's office Christmas party by the time they landed on my doormat.

The girl photocopying her, um, charms brightened up my day. But I'm guessing the person who took them wasn't too impressed when he opened the envelope and found pictures of me with a fish. When I wrote and complained, I got a free roll of slide film.

Best river for pike fishing in the Fens

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how different cliques of pike anglers view different waters in the Fens. Their experiences sometimes lead them to draw conclusions which are completely at odds with each other's - how one man's meat is another man's poison, if you like.

Take the Ouse, a river which has been good to me on a handful of occasions over the 15 seasons I've fished it, dealing me a bum hand far more frequently than a decent fish or two.

I've never caught a twenty downstream of Queen Adelaide. What few I've ever caught from the river have come from one or two areas with little in common, other than they were throwing up a few good fish at a time when I was fascinated by the Ouse and spent a lot of time trying to get to to grips with it.

Just as I started thinking I'd got my head round the river, it went off the boil for me. Some big fish came off another stretch I was targeting a few seasons back. I knew I was fishing bang on the money, right swims, right method. But could I catch it - the fish nudging 30lbs that was knocking about the same area..? Sadly not.

We wrote it off in the end, my mates and I. One big fish in one big, daunting river, we seemed fated not to catch. To add insult to injury, I lost a big fish off one of the few runs I ever managed on that part of the Ouse one freezing February afternoon, as ice formed across the river.

Yet others were quietly catching with a different approach, completely at odds to ours. It seemed so obvious I kicked myself, when one of them candidly explained it to me after I quizzed him about pictures I'd seen that looked like the area we'd been fishing.

The first time I tried their method, I had seven or eight fish to mid doubles from a stretch I'd given up on in a single morning. No monsters, but I thought I'd cracked it all the same.

I told a mate, we went back the weekend after and blanked. I tried the same swims several times as the season wore on without success. At the start of last season, I had a lanky double on the bank first chuck doing it their way. That turned out to be the only run I managed in half a dozen trips up and down that part of the river.

By then, another water was screaming fish me, fish me. That turned into another long haul, but at least we finished the season with a couple of twenties each.

Towards the end of it, I bumped into one of the guys who'd done well on the Ouse. He hadn't had a run on the water we were fishing. But he'd had a couple of twenties on the river - from the bit we'd long since given up on.

You should try down there, he said. People say it's hard, but it's loads easier than here.

Click here for a 20lbs pike from the Ouse caught on film.

There's aliens in the bridge swim at Ten Mile Bank

I know I shouldn't have started talking to one of the colourful characters I sometimes attract when I'm sitting by the river. A little voice inside was going: "Don't - it only encourages them..."

After the usual nice day/yes it's a nice day/caught anything/no not yet preamble, he moved so close I thought he was trying to sneak in my Igloo suit, looked up and down the river to check no-one else was in earshot, and asked: "Hev you ivver seen anythink, you know, like a bit, um, wierd when yew bin fishin' 'round here..?"

Not really, I said. Some skinny dippers once when I was tench fishing. Bold as brass they were. Otherwise, no - can't see Mulder and Scully rocking up down here any time soon.

"Well that's funny you should say that," he said. "Because you'll nivver guess what I see the other night when I was riding my ole bike home from the pub - that was hovering right over that railway bridge that was.

"It was one of them h'alien spacecraft. That look just like the ones what you see on the telly.  C'ept it had like a trunk, like a h'elephant's trunk or something like it.

"And it was dangling down touching the wires. I reckin' they know there h'int no trains last thing at night in the week. They come down and nick the 'lectric off British Rail to charge up their spaceship, I reckin tha'ss what they dew.

"No wonder our bills keep garn up all the time."

It's the 21st Century. Tens of thousands will be born or die today. Major events are happening on the World stage. War is looking increasingly likely with Iran. The Eurozone debt crisis is making politicians look to re-shape our relationship with Europe.

At Ten Mile Bank, I've just met a man who swears he's seen an alien spacecraft.

Is there pike on Mars..? linky

Ouse sorry now

 

You'd have to go a long, long way to beat today on the weather front. Shame the fishing was pants.

I ended up on a bit of river I must have driven past 1,000 times but had never got round to fishing before.

So when the drain I fancied turned out to be covered in blanket weed, I decided to give it a go. Sometimes, when you have a feeling about a certain swim or piece of water, you end up catching.

No-one had told the fish this today, and as the afternoon wore on towards dusk, the only activity had been an eel shredding one of the baits and a crab trying to sneak off with the other one.

Blanking when the weather's dire sometimes has a kind of inevitability about it. I genuinely thought I was going to bag a couple today, the swim just had everything going for it.

For some reason, the river's a good bit shallower than it is a few hundred yards upstream by the telegraph poles. Instead of plunging into 20ft or more of water down the middle, there's a gentler drop into 15ft. 

That means the sluggish flow picks up a bit. I thought that might mean the roach would be there, meaning there'd be a few pike about.

As the sun dropped behind the floodbank, the river came alive with silvers topping. Of maybe they were rudd. When the sky turned blood red, I reached for my phone and took a picture. 

Tick, tick, ticka-ticka-ticka. A run at last, or a crab strong enough to pull a 10" joey along and take line off the Baitrunner.

It's still going like a good 'un as I pick the rod up, wind down and miss it.