On 11th December 2005 at 12.30 pm I arrived at the river Colne, close to Huddersfield town centre, intending to fly-fish for grayling, as I had done so many times over the past years. I was greeted by bank to bank white foam. My worst fears had been realized: A pollution incident. The problem with pollution incidents is that whilst they are rare these days; when they happen it is a total disaster. It is as if the river had never recovered from its abuse of the early and mid 20th century. Back to square one.
The urban rivers of West Yorkshire have seen a gradual rise in fortune from being open industrial sewers up to the 1970s, to being prime game fishing rivers today, after a slow, gradual cleaning-up process. I have been privileged to observe this process and rejoiced every step of the way. One day in 1989, now not able to be specified precisely, I stood on a footbridge over the river Colne, a mile from Huddersfield town centre, and to my great surprise and pleasure saw the ring of a trout rise. I was at first dumbfounded and then overjoyed!
I had fished for trout in the river Colne above Milnsbridge and as far upstream as Marsden for many years and had always kept an eye on the river further downstream; always hoping to see signs of life. Now it had happened. Since then the trout have spread further and further downstream as the river recovered its former glory and the state (almost!) in which God intended it to be. Then the grayling arrived; introduced by the Environment Agency into the clean waters above Slaithwaite and, like the trout, enjoying the newly cleaned waters of all the length of the river.
The grayling is a persnickety and particular fish. Conditions have to be absolutely right. If there are grayling in a river then it is most definitely a healthy river. It is a prehistoric native of the rivers that drain into the Humber and has every right to be there. Yorkshire is the envy of many other game-fishing areas for its rightful legacy of the grayling.
One of the reasons the trout and grayling are happy in these urban waters is that the aquatic fly life, on which they depend for food, has spread downstream and become abundant. These are not pesky bluebottles, gnats and midges, but dainty, ephemeral, miniature mayfly. Delicate, harmless and beautiful to look at. They spend months as nymphs living amongst the stones and weeds until it is time for them to emerge as winged adults and fulfil their destiny. These are the creatures the fly-tier and fisher attempts to imitate. Freshwater shrimp and other small creatures of clean rivers add to the rich larder.
As I have fished the waters around Huddersfield I have had to tolerate the appearance of some of the most extraordinary objects. I have lost good fish in a parrot cage, under a plywood board, amongst the spokes of a bicycle wheel and (of course) in a supermarket trolley! It is my belief that in a parallel universe supermarket trolleys are actually naturally aquatic dwellers which prefer the water around bridges!
Anyone standing on a bridge and peering down would be excused for thinking that these rivers are dirty. They are full of litter, especially plastic litter. Food packaging and drink bottles abound as unsightly reminders of our unhealthy eating habits. Farmers' black silage wrapping and plastic carrier bags hang from the water-side trees like Christmas decorations. Bits of motor vehicles protrude from the bank-side sand. But the water is clean! The objects that litter it are unsightly, but harmless. The fish swim around and amongst these man-made intrusions unaware of their origins. The aquatic fly life actually benefits from the nooks, hide-aways and corners they present!
One of my favorite fish locations was where a lorry wheel caused an obstruction to the flow of the river and gave the fish shelter from the pressure of the current. I once used a white tin tray as a marker to stand by in order to make an accurate cast under a tree which the trout favored; until it was washed away in a flood. I would prefer that these objects were not there of course and that the river was in its original, natural, pristine state.
Rivers are constantly used by unthinking people to dispose of unwanted objects and substances. The river has this marvelous quality of movement that carries whichever offending object is dropped therein away, or under, and out of sight. It is like a garbage disposal unit; except the garbage is not disposed of but appears elsewhere. It drifts out of sight of the depositor and offends the sight of another observer further downstream. Solid objects: Unsightly, but not dangerous.
The dangerous stuff is of the same quality as water - liquid, sometimes clear, and its power to destroy is mostly hidden. Under the foam on that dreadful Sunday the water ran clear and clean; but it was poison: it robbed the water of its life giving oxygen and suffocated the fish. Not just the fish died but every living creature in the river was murdered. On Monday, in two randomly chosen locations, 700 corpses of trout and grayling were counted by official ecology experts. So how many were lying out of sight? In the five mile stretch from Huddersfield to the Calder I would say thousands. My experience of fishing the river day to day suggests that thousands of fish were resident and the poison was indiscriminate and total.
I stood looking at the river on the following Tuesday willing a fish to rise, but all were dead. The river was dead. There were no clouds of flies hovering over the water, even the ducks had left and the water flowed, ever onwards, oblivious of its loss.
