Wykeham Journal 2019 | Page 31

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