A few days ago, the new combined Trout in the Town team took to the rails to travel from (nearly) opposite ends of the country…

… and converged at Stalybridge for a flying visit to an urban river that’s been much in the news recently.

Paul and I both knew how the lovely little River Tame had been the subject of intense media scrutiny as the most heavily microplastic-polluted river in the world (at least among those tested so far). But we wanted to see this notorious stretch of the lower river for ourselves, and understand from local activist Woz Andrew just how much it meant to him personally.

Woz met us at the station and guided us round the corner to the river, explaining the challenges facing an almost totally urbanised (and still industrialised) waterway like the Tame, and reminding us we’d definitely be missing an opportunity if we didn’t wet a line while we were there.

Water levels were low, and the day was bright and hot, so we fanned up and downstream, fishing our favourite ultralight western and tenkara techniques. We’d all had little grabs and splashes at our flies before Woz finally hooked up solidly in the shadow of one of the bridges, and landed a beautiful trout on a dry fly.

(It’s worth mentioning at this point that catching little baby trout in urban rivers often delights us even more than bumping into big lunkers – their presence shows that habitat and water quality are both good enough to let a proper population pyramid form).

Several more fish followed for all of us, before honour was satisfied, and we raised a traditional can of Stella to this amazing river and its trout that are still surviving against all the odds, and desperately in need of all the help we can give them.

And then it was back onto our trains again, with boots still wet and heads even more packed with plans for other urban rivers that are similarly overlooked and underappreciated. (If there’s a river like the Tame in your life, and you’d like to help get it back on track, please give the Wild Trout Trust a call, or check out the new Trout in the Town Facebook page here).

The full story of our visit to Stalybridge will appear in the first issue of Pete Tyjas’s exciting new Fly Culture magazine, due out later this year… don’t miss it!

(Photo 1: Paul Gaskell, photo 8: Woz Andrew)

Tags: Fly-fishing, Manchester, Stalybridge, Tame, Trout, Trout in the Town, Urban fishing, Urban fly-fishing reports, Urban river restoration, Urban rivers