A Day in the Life of the River:
Lysimacha vulgaris.
Yellow Loose-Strife.
Flora Londinensis Vol. I
by William Curtis
mark sankey
Fishing Soc but you never see them fishing’
laughs Mark. ‘You see them down the bottom
there in the meadows. I know all the spots.’
Just the day before, Mark had spent the
day blast-cleaning the gravel. Fish lay their
eggs in November in the gravel beds and it’s
important to get the sediment out in order to
increase the flow of oxygen in and around them.
‘Aquatic weed management is a delicate balance
— take out too much and you risk losing the
invertebrates which are a major food source
for the fish; don’t take out enough and you
risk flooding’ says Mark.
‘The Brown Trout here are all genetically
unique to this river,’ says Mark. ‘We take adult
wild fish out of the river, strip out the eggs
from the females and the milt from the males,
and together they take around two months to
hatch. Then we bring them down to here [the
hatchery], grow them on for another two years
and then release them into the river. We don’t
stock many — we don’t need to, nor would
we be allowed to now because we don’t have
a history of being a commercial fishery. We
would not want to anyway — it would change
the nature of everything.’
The Wykeham Journal 2019 25