Here in south-west England, trout fishing closes at the end of September… so the Urbantrout team thought we’d better get out on one of our favourite local streams for the last time this year.
In the end, curiosity won out over familiarity, and we took a side trip up a tiny industrialised tributary we’d been meaning to investigate all season.
Most of this stream was deeply tunnelled in a tangle of trees, and the rocky bed was steep but silty, so you’d sometimes be surrounded by little explosions of sediment as you spooked trout out of unfishable pocket water, almost in touching distance, before you’d even seen them there.
But nothing quite prepared us for wading round a shallow bend to find a car, apparently driven into the stream and buried in silt above its wing-mirrors.
It was only when we got closer that we found it was really just the roof and tailgate, chopped off halfway up the pillars the way you’d turn a normal hot rod into a Mad Max dune buggy, and somehow driven flipped into the water, who knows how many years ago…
The tunnel of trees got even tighter, and the light started to go, so we took a quick decision to hike up the hill and back to the main river, leaving the rest of our upstream exploration until next year.
Just like ending on a good fish, it’s important to leave yourself something to wonder about, through the long winter months of the close season…
(Title credit: apologies to Charles Rangeley-Wilson, original author of Silt Road)
