Tag Archives: Pride of Derby AC

This is just a quick, but very important, post. The Angling Trust is urging all anglers out there (AT members or not), to respond to an Environment Agency consultation about their “best practice guidelines” for potentially destructive and controversial Hydropower schemes. The public can add comments to the consultation without logging in to the EA website, which will help sway decisions made about future legislation imposed upon the operators of these schemes. This type of electricity-generation scheme looks set to become more widespread in the UK but through both water abstraction and the fish-mincing turbines which are driven by water flow to generate electricity, such schemes pose a massive danger to both resident and migratory fish stocks and the quality & availability of river fishing. This particular consultation focuses on setting water flow rates & abstraction limits and it’s important that angling, fish stocks and other environmental issues are given utmost consideration when setting these limits. As anglers we need to ensure that opinion swings in this direction, which is why the Angling Trust has offered advice on how to respond to the consultation, to ensure we’re all pulling in the same direction.  Please take a few minutes to read through the information and guidance on the Angling Trust website and …

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I only had time to get out fishing once between Christmas and new year.  I’d had a pike fishing itch to scratch for a while and despite conditions which were far from ideal (after the bout of mild weather and heavy rain), I decided to pike fish on the River Dove. The Dove is a spate river and therefore it’s notorious for the speed at which the level rises and colour increases. So it was to my dismay, but no surprise, that I arrived to find the river coloured and rising! I should have been barbel fishing in conditions like this but my heart was set on piking, so I had left my barbel rods at home! I stuck it out regardless and fished to the conditions as best I could, but I only got a single dropped run all day. A run I didn’t even notice at the time because my float, cast to the far bank, would only stay in the slack water if I let out a big bow of line. Not an issue in itself, however, it was an extremely blustery day and the combination of wind and the flow meant my float was constantly dancing around all …

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