Somebody call David James Duncan!
Wait, it’s not that river Why.
“All of a sudden the beauty and the silence of the Wye Valley is shattered by screaming, yelling individuals in canoes out on a jolly, with numerous bottles of cider and beer.
LINK (via: BBC)
Quite a river, the Wye. Once England’s (as opposed to Wales’s or Scotland’s) finest Atlantic salmon river, with rod-caught salmon catches well into the several thousands annually. As an early 20s fisher in the 1970s I accompanied a great Wye salmon-fisher whom I had met when he was visiting my own, local, Welsh salmon river 100 miles to the west, had taken fishing and shown him “How we do it here”. Those Wye Days he gave me as a “Thank you” were memorable, with the first being super-special: within an hour of starting fishing on lower-middle river “beat”, I was netting a 38-pound salmon for him, a fish of a lifetime from any river, in any era, anywhere. He told me to persist – “They’re about today, Paul … you’ll have one.”
I did. One of 18 pounds, which he duly netted for me.
Then, during the 1980s, the runs of Wye salmon declined and the salmon-fishers (plus the Big Money Boys among them) moved away. The river, still looking gorgeous but now comparatively salmon-less, got itself some new sets of users, among them the people you are reading about in the BBC News piece above.
A PS to my comment above.
A few hours after writing the above, I learned that the Wye is having its best run of spring-run salmon for around 20 years. So there will suddenly be lots more anglers looking to fish the river again and on its banks, only to find that canoe and kayak flotillas have appeared in some of their long fishy absences. Others, those new to the river, will surely be finding the New Plastic Hatch a hindrance to their connecting with their first Wye salmon and so are making a news-story noise about it.
I always hate when I get on a great fishing spot and get everything disturbed like that.