This is an issue that’s kept UK-based river restorationists awake at night for years – but never with quite enough evidence to convince regulatory colleagues that toxic bioaccumulation of arsenic, mercury, PCBs, endocrine-disrupting flame retardants and other contaminants probably works the same at the apex of our inland waterways’ food webs as it does in […]
Archive for the tag 'Urban fishing'
November 2 2012
Film night: Toxic bioaccumulation in post-industrial rivers… are urban fish safe to eat?
October 18 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Thursday 18 October
Gravel cleaning, cake and urban fishing: just another World Rivers Day in south London Even more London stuff: the Wandle’s first finished rock ramp fish pass, Thames 21’s Cleaner Thames Challenge, and the Wandle Trust’s call for education volunteers Love your river: hosted by Thames Water and the River Chess Association, double Olympic rowing gold […]
October 13 2012
Urban fly-fishing: Discovering Dublin
Flipping through the pages of this month’s Trout & Salmon magazine, the headline hit us first: yes, it’s a totally-urban-fishing-themed advertorial for the Irish Tourist Board! Here’s a flavour of the copy (alternatively, click the image above for the full hi-res version): Less well known (than the Liffey) are those local urban waters the Dodder and the Tolka, which […]
October 5 2012
Urban river restoration: Restocking Yorkshire’s Colne
Here’s one we missed earlier: news of the latest very welcome stocking of 4,000 juvenile grayling into Yorkshire’s River Colne between Marsden and Milnsbridge. Readers of Trout in Dirty Places will probably remember that this is the stretch of the Colne which has been hit by an almost unbelievable sequence of pollution incidents in the […]
September 28 2012
Film night: Carp in the Bronx
OK, so no adipose fins were implicated in the making of this movie. But here at urbantrout.net we have the deepest respect for any fish caught anywhere in the concrete jungle… maybe most of all if it’s hooked, played and landed on a fly-rod. Via Orvis News, Moldy Chum and The Marble Trout come 3 […]
September 24 2012
Urban fly-fishing report: Rea Brook, Shrewsbury
Urbantrout reader Spencer Clayton fishes many Borderland rivers including the Teme and Onny – and after reading chapter 21 of Trout in Dirty Places earlier this year, he’s been inspired to start exploring Shrewsbury’s magical little Rea Brook too. At the end of last week he sent us this great catch report and selection of […]
August 31 2012
Film night: Fish pass clearance by SPRITE (plus a quickfire tenkara masterclass!)
Fish Pass Clearance by SPRITE from Paul Gaskell on Vimeo. For the second time in as many months, a dozen SPRITE volunteers have been out in the midday sun, clearing around 8 tonnes of sand, branches and other debris to get the fish pass on Sheffield’s Niagara Weir working again… … raising a very valid […]
August 21 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Tuesday 21 August
The one with the HB Games: Olympic-themed Wandle Trust volunteers get stuck into this year’s crop of Himalayan balsam Salford Friendly Anglers call for scale samples after a likely sea trout comes to net on the Roch … whilst the slightly oddball diversions of their clubhouse get rave reviews from the Telegraph Second-time TRIBUTE: via the Fly Forums, […]
July 14 2012
Urban getaway: Winchester
With most of the Wandle running high, coloured and functionally un-fly-fishable for weeks (thanks to persistent pulses of urban runoff from surrounding square miles of roads, car parks and paved front gardens, to say nothing of randomly-clustered diesel and cooking oil spillages), one or two Wandle Piscators needed a break. So we took one …
July 4 2012
Urban fly-fishing: 10 top tips in Eat, Sleep, Fish
Having spent the last couple of years travelling around the UK, visiting the Wild Trout Trust’s Trout in the Town chapters and investigating the state of our urban rivers at the start of the 21st century, I’ve come to the startling but joyful conclusion that there’s probably now more water in and around our towns […]
