Taw Fishing Club Hosts Lapford School Pupils on a ‘Come and Meet Our River Day’
It is perhaps judicious timing that I am writing this Taw Fishing Club (TFC) blog on the day that the British Government has released Sir John Cunliffe’s Review of England & Wales’ “broken water industry”. This government commissioned report recommends the biggest set of reforms to the water industry since privatisation. Environmentalists including fishermen and women, wild swimmers and a host of people who love our rivers and waterways know firsthand how dramatically the quality of our natural water resources have declined due to manifold forms of abuse including sewage & industrial pollution, agricultural runoff and over-abstraction.
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TFC specifically includes an environmental mandate. With the support of the Environment Agency, Angling Trust, Wild Trout Trust and others, we promote ecological improvements on our waters and strongly encourage our fishing members to participate in these activities.
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Along with virtually all fishing clubs in this country, we are concerned that young people (as well as women, minority ethnic groups and special needs communities) are poorly represented in our fishing community. Flyfishing is now an ageing and ‘at risk’ pastime. In the absence of the enthusiasm and engagement of successive, future generations, flyfishing will go the way of the dinosaurs. And, critically, if our next generation do not really understand why our rivers, lakes and seas need protection, ecological abuses will continue unopposed.
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It is for these reasons that the Committee of the Taw Fishing Club decided at its last AGM that it would approach local schools in its mid/north Devon Taw catchment area and invite them to spend half a day learning about their local river, its wildlife, … and, at the same time, why men of a certain age can often be seen standing in the middle of a river waving a stick over their heads.
Good intentions turned into actions this June with some dozen or so 10- and 11-year-olds from Lapford School, accompanied by two teachers, joining three TFC members on the river Taw below Coldridge Bridge . The ‘ringmaster’ was Gerald Spiers from the Devon School of Flyfishing. Gerald is an expert fisherman, tutor and naturalist. As befits many summer days in Devon, the event was accompanied by steady and continuous rain.
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Over a two-hour period, orchestrated by Gerald, the pupils were introduced to the concept of the natural cycles that are a flourishing river. They were then shown examples of river fly activity. Armed with large plastic trays, magnifying glasses and turkey basters (excellent for sucking up nymph specimens for closer observation), they investigated freshly taken, riverbed ‘kick net samples’ for the larvae of stoneflies, mayflies, caddis, damsel flies, freshwater shrimps and a range of other fast-moving invertebrate most of which are important sources of food for fish including wild brown trout. The students collectively managed to identify a range of local river fauna using the Riverfly Monitoring Invertebrate ID chart. Everyone’s concentration was absolute. You could have heard a trout rise!
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The students were also shown how to look at the ‘turbidity’ of a water sample by using a clear plastic tube and Secchi disk. They tested the local river water themselves. Encouragingly, the water of the Taw at Coldridge appeared very clear registering an excellent reading of >240.
During a crowded two hours, Gerald manged to let each student try their hand at casting a fly from a flyrod. Interestingly, the female students intuitively understood better than their male peers that technique and timing trumps muscle power. Joah Madden, TFC’s river warden, then took groups of students on a short walk along the riverbank and through a jungle of Himalayan Balsam to reveal a tree which had seen its trunk nearly gnawed through by local beavers. This discovery stimulated a lively discussion with the students on the impact of wild beavers being introduced into UK river systems after an absence of some four hundred years.
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At midday, reality intruded and after several goodbyes a troop of children in wet anoraks and wellingtons clomped back over the field to their waiting bus. What stands out in my memory of the event was the very real enthusiasm from all the children in learning about our and their local river. Despite the rain, I saw no-one who was not fully engaged in identifying rapidly swimming insects, asking a million and one questions about the river and its inhabitants or trying to place a fly line effortlessly ahead of them in a straight line.
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The event was a clear success. Joe Skinner, one of the two Lapford teachers, reported back to us the excitement of the children after their river visit. Lapford School have asked the club if we would be happy to provide another visit for more of their pupils. Importantly, we have every confidence that these students when teenagers and adults will not just stand by and accept that our river must be polluted and must inevitably decline. We have just helped in the creation of the next generation of citizen scientists and guardians of our environment.
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Taw Fishing Club will continue to arrange further school visits in the future. They are both a pleasure and a responsibility.
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