Oliver Burch's Game Fishing Monthly Report - December 2024

Our rivers during the last days of November and the first days of December were characterised by a gradual run-off after widespread flooding caused by Storm Bert.  Conditions were not really right for fishing anywhere, but some people tried and a few were pleasantly surprised. RE from Cwmbran was packing up after a blank day on Middle Ballingham and Fownhope No 8 when his rod tip gave what he called“a 3 foot twitch.” This turned out to be “my biggest barbel ever.” So never write off the possibility of a fish at dusk.

Christmas week was a strange one of still air, warmer than usual, and almost continuous fog, so thick that many commercial flights were cancelled. The rivers were gradually clearing as the levels dropped. I was pleasantly surprised to read a report from Seth Johnson-Marshall about the Rectory. This beat is more usually known for its salmon, but it produced some really good barbel and chub fishing during December. Several barbel of 12 pounds and one of 14 pounds were landed. Lyn Davies took a couple of our friends from the committee of the Pontardulais Angling Club up to Abernant and I gather everybody caught grayling, although the water was still high. For sure, there will have been more fishing over the holidays, but at the time of closing the letter the reports are still filtering through the system. I will catch up with those in January! 

The December edition of Trout and Salmon carries a very technical and useful article by Don Stazicker about the mechanics of fishing nymphs along the bottom: “Getting down to the Grayling.” If you are interested in fishing heavy nymphs, whether new to the game or experienced, you would do well to read this one. Stazicker is a great de-mystifier and with a series of tables and diagrams he explains the different options for weighting combinations of flies, fishing them, and the manner the flies will be presented to the fish, whether sight-nymphing or with indicators or by feeling for the take. Don’t expect long lists of different nymph patterns here; Stazicker emphasizes that what really matters is how heavy the nymphs are and how they are persuaded to sink. If it helps, he is quite prepared to pinch split shot onto the leader – which may shock some, but why not? The Americans do it all the time.

The same magazine carries an article by Colin Macleod about the Willie Gunn salmon fly and how it has been kind to him over time. I was a bit shocked to read about a younger angler who won’t use the Willie Gunn because “it’s an old man’s fly.”  Well, I suppose it is now and I would be the last one to discourage modern experiments. I guess it’s true that every generation has its favourite flies. No doubt in the fifties when the young lions were busy devising hair wing tubes, Waddingtons etc, the old men of the time were still using built-wing flies dressed on big singles, probably sticking to individual favourites according to locality such as Jock Scott and Durham Ranger. In Wales it might have been the Haslam. My personal advice is that if you want to fish all the new Scandinavian patterns and have fun tying them up, then by all means go right ahead. Just don’t forget about the proven successes of the past and that orange, yellow and black are colours which will almost always tempt salmon, if they are going to be tempted at all. In short and if ever in doubt, tying on a Willie Gunn, with or without a gold body, and of appropriate size for the conditions, is unlikely to be a totally wrong decision on any river anywhere.

A couple of “conflict of interest” cases involving angling came to a decision point this month. Hereford and District Angling Association’s application to create 28 more coarse fishing platforms west of Greyfriars Bridge was rejected. Natural England recommended against granting planning approval as there are already 22 created fishing places and objections had been lodged from walkers and kayakers.

In the Forest of Dean where flood prevention work is taking place to protect downstream villages, a compromise was reached over the future of the Cannop Ponds where the pair of 200 year-old dams have been ruled unsafe. These reservoirs were originally built to supply water to Parkend ironworks. The upper pond will be drained off to create a marsh and wetlands with a nature trail. The dam of the deep lower pond by the stone-works will be reinforced along with filling voids in the spillway, after which the lake will remain as before. Meanwhile some gabion banks have been removed from the brook below Parkend to encourage natural meanders. This is the bit we fish under the WUF Wild Streams scheme. Personally I don’t mind the nature trail idea too much, although the modern tendency to keep turning our landscape into theme parks is difficult to understand. I will miss the upper pond, where I once used to see huge carp gliding through the reed beds, although the angling club tell me that members are much more interested these days in fishing the lower pond. Incidentally, upstream of the two ponds, but fed by the same brook, is a strange concrete tank which used to provide water for Cannop Colliery’s pit winding steam engine. The discharged water was therefore warm. During the fifties it was still known as the Lido and we used to paddle and swim there…until the typhoid bacillus was found in it and our mothers stopped us. Today it is full of silt and flag iris. Over on our Forest Pool with its trout fishing, we now have a metal post in front of the main dam. This carries a sensor which should provide an instant warning should the levels increase. There are three more old dams impounding water further up the valley and houses presumably at risk below. Should the water level suddenly rise, a red light goes on in an EA office apparently somewhere in Yorkshire. What a wonderful modern age we live in!

The eyes of the world were on the little country of Lebanon again as the contest between Israel and Hezbollah played out during the early days of December. Truly Lebanon is a most unusual or unlucky place, which seems to reel from one disaster to the next. There is a Lebanese identity and there is a sense of Lebanese patriotism which emerges at times, and very much a Lebanese sense of humour. And yet the communities which go to make up this theoretically democratic state are more different and divided than in any other place I know. Perhaps a period of rule by Vichy France was a bad start for the Lebanese independence which followed World War 2. The plan bequeathed by the departing colonial power was to allocate a fixed number of seats in the new parliament for each community, dependent on their population figures. This is the so-called Taif Agreement. Britain tried the same idea for the Greeks and Turks of Cyprus when granting independence in 1960, and it didn’t work out there. The history of modern Lebanon has been marked by continually recurring armed conflict.

My last working trip to Lebanon was in the late summer of 2007. It was supposed to be pretty much routine field work checking on programmes which, despite their descriptive title, could by no stretch of imagination be designated as “emergency intervention.” Instead I was to look at a long-term assistance programmes already implemented by western donors through local partners, assess their impact and write reports. I always liked open air field work and thought that the couple of weeks involved would make a pleasant interlude.

The first job was in the South, an area mostly populated by Shia Muslims and towards the Israeli border. The Mediterranean countryside is pleasant, very much like parts of mainland Greece or Turkey, with whitewashed houses scattered over low hills. The project was simple enough: one of providing access aids for disabled and elderly people. I had a list of all the beneficiaries; the monitoring part of the work involved selecting a sample at random from the list, checking that the bath grab rail or wheel chair ramps had been installed as claimed and then with the aid of my interpreter having an interview with the family to take their view of the assistance received. To be quite honest, in this relatively comfortable community of car-owning farmers, I was getting the impression that the project had been vaguely useful rather than absolutely vital. But such is the nature of many long-term overseas aid programmes.

The day and the work would have been easy enough, if our presence had not constantly attracted the attention of neighbours, who had no interest in the programme I was looking at but instead wanted to drag me off to view evidence of Israeli bombing the year before. This, they assumed, was what international visitors wished to see. I think I saw some damaged windows and dislodged roof tiles, nothing very dramatic by that time, but the point was that this particular westerner was not particularly looking for material and photographs for an anti-Israel propaganda campaign. Everybody, including my interpreter, seemed to find this most strange.

By the weekend I was sitting at a café on Beirut’s Corniche, watching the smart and the beautiful on their evening stroll. From the Corniche at least you can see why Beirut is still known as the Paris of the Middle East. It’s amazing how much money is in Lebanon and in some places it shows. In Beirut you will find thriving dealerships for Bentley, Maserati and Ferrari.  Of course there are less privileged areas, including South Beirut where Hezbollah sits, and people will point out where the front lines were during the notorious 15 year-long Civil War. There is also a kind of resilience among the educated classes inhabiting the sea-front cafes and restaurants. Most Beirutis you talk to have a certain tolerance for, and even sometimes expectation of, conflict.  “Ouff!” the urban Lebanese will remark with a rueful grin at each latest set-back the world puts in his way, as if it was no more than a gentle punch in the solar plexus.

In Lebanon the huge gap between rich and poor is very evident, between designated Lebanese citizens and the descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 who after 76 years have hardly any civil rights, between right wing Christians and fundamentalist Muslims, between Sunni and Shia, Druze and Alawi, between Maronite Catholics and Greek Orthodox, even between the Army and the State. Governing structures are more dynastic than democratic. In an attempt to keep order, around 10,000 UN forces have been present and monitoring for decades in the south of the country. Ireland, Italy, the Scandinavian nations and about every other country you can think of have been the long-term contributors of soldiers to UNIFIL, the so-called “interim force” of peace-keepers. Everybody is painfully aware that Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is in every way more powerful than other groups, including the Army. There has been armed conflict of some sort almost continually in Lebanon since independence, to the extent that it has become almost normalised. A weak and divided state invited manipulation by the neighbours, in particular Iran and Syria, and Israel too at times, although admittedly Israel’s interventions were in response to attacks across the border. A particular low point came during the Israeli incursion of 1982 against the PLO, during which the Israeli Defence Force let Falangist Christian militiamen into the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. This resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Muslims and remains a black day in the history of the IDF.

Monday morning saw us driving north along the coastal highway. On the outskirts of the city we passed a couple of policemen on the central reservation, casually lighting cigarettes while they waited for an ambulance or a truck. The body of a traffic accident victim lay between them, an old jacket pulled roughly over its head. Beirut didn’t look much like Paris at that moment. Still, it’s a fine drive north on this road once out in the country, almost like the south of France with white apartment blocks rising against the blue sea. We were due to look at some programme opportunities in North Lebanon, targeting some conservative villages high in the hills along the border with Syria. We had a local contact to meet in the city of Tripoli.

However, there was a diversion at Tripoli, due to a situation which had arisen since this visit had been planned. It was another of those local conflicts involving a designated Palestinian refugee camp, which would eventually become known to history as the Narh el Bared Camp War. This was by now in its final phases. Narh el Bared is, or rather was, a crowded suburb of Palestinian houses and apartment blocks, built north of Tripoli on a hill jutting into the Mediterranean. According to the long-standing agreement struck between the Lebanese Government and Yasser Arafat’s PLO, Palestinians would always live in defined areas and in these areas would be responsible for their own security. In the jaded opinion of Middle East watchers, this was an agreement allowing Palestinian militias to militarize their own society and stockpile weapons for use against Israel, while giving the state the opportunity to keep Palestinians indefinitely with refugee status and away from the benefits of middle class Lebanese society. Between the Narh el Bared camp and the Tripoli outskirts was a police checkpoint and a Lebanese Army post. Services in the camp were supplied by the internationally funded UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which even in those days was regarded by most observers as deeply penetrated by hard-line Palestinian national staff.

What had triggered the present conflict was an armed bank raid in Tripoli carried out by extremists from Fatah al-Islam in the camp. Lebanese police had chased them back inside the camp during a running fire fight which killed several of the bank robbers. A stand-off then ensued between both sides at the camp boundary. A couple of nights later, Fatah extremists came across and slaughtered 27 young Lebanon Army recruits sleeping in their barracks. Some of these were beheaded. The Lebanese Army response was understandably enough to lose its temper. Following a series of hard-fought ground incursions attempted by Special Forces, the Army massed heavy artillery on the flat-topped mountain above Narh el Bared and simply shelled the camp for the next 6 months. 30,000 Palestinian women and children, indeed most of the civilian population of the camp, had been allowed to evacuate and were now housed in collective centres around the city. We went to look at some of these, which were more like the kind of displacement situation I had seen in Balkan wars: families housed on lines of mattresses packed into school class rooms and sports halls. The Red Crescent seemed to be doing a reasonably good job in the circumstances. I also went to see the UN security officer, thankfully an international, who explained that in his view the conflict was in its final days. A few hard-liners were holed up under ground beneath the ruins of the camp, but they had already sent out their own women and children. They were not expected to surrender.

Next morning, having met up with our contact, we headed north again on the dual carriage-way passing above the devastated camp. It seemed to be nothing but a giant mound of ruins. Some smoke drifted in the clear sky above, but all seemed quiet until a heavy machine gun began to chatter somewhere behind us. It was no time to linger, so our driver put his foot down and we headed for the hills beyond. As we travelled our contact gave us an insight into the complex network of tribal and family connections which govern the northern villages. The people are Sunni Muslims, notably tough and rather prone to the long-term quarrels which seem to affect mountain people the world over. Many of the men were away because service in the Lebanese Army is the main source of income for the region. As I recall, we were discussing requested interventions for rural income generation, including bee keeping. There are still some remnants of the old cedar forest for which the country is famous up there, and by the end of the afternoon from a ridge we could look far down into the dusty plains of Syria.

A few days later on our way back through Tripoli I called in on the UN security officer once more. Narh el Bared was quiet now, the last terrorists having died in their bunkers. Additional violence including bombing in Beirut, fighting at the Ain al-Hilweh camp and attacks on UNIFIL soldiers in the South had ended. The security officer had been up to look at the weapons stockpile which had been found in the camp. He described it as quite extensive, including such items as anti-aircraft artillery mounted on trucks. Narh el Bared, it should be remembered, is partly surrounded by the sea which makes it easy to accept deliveries by night. Talks were now going forward between the Lebanese government and Palestinian representatives. We both expressed a view that a sensible outcome might be if Lebanon would share some of the benefits of citizenship with Palestinians, in return for which Lebanese police would take over responsibility for security in the camps…an impossible dream, as we both sensed…this was the Middle East after all.

Fast forward to early December 2024 and what might happen in Lebanon next?  Much had changed since the last Israeli incursion in 2006, but much was curiously the same. US and French diplomacy had apparently persuaded Israel that the total destruction of Hezbollah would be impractical and as a minimum to accept the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces north of the Litani river, which is about 20 miles up from the border. In theory that should relieve communities in northern Israel from bombardment by heavy artillery. Israel would concurrently withdraw IDF forces from Lebanon.  Civilians on both sides should therefore be able to return to their villages and farms near the border. However, this has all been tried before and over the past 18 years the UNIFIL has completely failed to ensure the agreement made in 2006 to demilitarise this southern zone. The United Nation’s Interim Force in Lebanon has become seemingly permanent. This time the Lebanese National Army is also expected to play a part. Israel will likely feel it imperative to push Hezbollah further north still if the ceasefire arrangement does not work. Meanwhile, as the ceasefire held for the moment and Israeli bombing of Lebanon was apparently halted, the businessmen of South Beirut waited patiently by their ruined offices and shops for Hezbollah’s representatives to show up as usual with bags of reconstruction money.

Instead, and quite unexpectedly, the civil war originally encouraged in neighbouring Syria by the UK and others under the ill-judged “Arab Spring” initiative back in 2010, suddenly flared up again. A group of Islamist militiamen hardly any-one had heard of took the major city of Aleppo from Assad’s government. Hama fell with little resistance as the rebels moved on south towards Homs and Damascus. Pundits were taken by surprise and rumours abounded. Who were these fast-moving men crossing the desert on motor cycles and with light artillery mounted on pickup trucks - soldiers of the Free Syrian Army, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or who exactly? What were their objectives and who supported them? Syrian Kurds, apparently seeing an opportunity, also began to advance from their territory in the north-east.

In the end hardly a shot was fired in anger. Assad’s regime in Damascus fell on 8th December as his soldiers stripped off their uniforms and began walking home. The last Syrian Air flight 9218, believed to be carrying Assad and his family, left the airport to turn over Homs before heading west to the Mediterranean and switching off its transponder. Rebel leader Abu Muhamad al-Julani began at once making moderate statements from Damascus designed to reassure both the former regime’s structure and the neighbours: “Let there be no acts of vengeance. Those who flee should not be pursued.” He promised a peaceful transfer of power to a civilian interim government and a democratic election in the spring. The existing Prime Minister would co-operate in the handover. The Orthodox Archbishop was appointed Civil Governor of Aleppo. Millions of Syrian refugees around the world began to celebrate. However, there were early and probably inevitable signs of danger: anger provoked by the opening of Assad’s dreadful prisons, the burning of the Iranian Embassy, looting almost everywhere. There were reports of fighting between the Syrian National Army and Kurdish forces in the NE. 

The reactions of some of the neighbours to Assad’s departure was a rapid clearing up of unfinished business. Turkey appeared to have been on board with the project and the Russians showed no sign of being willing to re-open an air campaign on behalf of their protégé as they had done in 2010. They were busy in Ukraine, so asylum for Assad and his family was as much as they could offer in 2024. Doubtless they hoped to retain their warm water port and military base near Tartous but the Russian fleet was moved offshore as a precaution. Iran could offer no help, having been hard pressed by Israeli air strikes. Hezbollah, similarly in trouble in Lebanon, pulled out all its forces from Syria. To the advantage of Israel, the new situation in Syria would make it very difficult for Iran to continue convoying weapons and support to its proxies in Lebanon and Palestine. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sent to Damascus his greetings and hopes of peaceful neighbourly relations, but simultaneously ordered the IDF forward some kilometres further into Syria along the Golan Heights announcing the need to improve Israel’s defensive position. Simultaneously Israel launched a massive air campaign against Syrian military bases and magazines, particularly targeting suspected chemical weapons stock-piles. The Syrian fleet at Latakia was destroyed at its moorings. The outgoing US administration’s Pentagon which has retained some 2,000 American soldiers training with Kurdish Forces in NE Syria declared that it would “defend US interests.” This involved launching B52 strikes against some 75 remaining ISIS targets in Syria with impressive results. The incoming Trump administration on the other hand made it clear that there was no intention to involve the US armed forces any further in Syrian affairs and their mandate would be to watch from outside.

The UK and other European nations, after initial and perhaps naïve jubilation at the regime change, decided to suspend the asylum process for Syrian nationals until the situation became clearer. There was much concern about importing more terrorism into Europe. Some of the 3 million refugees in Turkey were making their way back, but most were awaiting developments. Another 1.5 million Syrian refugees are hosted in Lebanon and looked after by UNHCR, so that, added to the Palestinians, 25% of the Lebanon population now has refugee status.  Return is a one-way journey; a withdrawn asylum claim is difficult to revive. “There are a lot of moving parts here,” commented one American analyst trying to understand likely developments. The head of the International Organisation for Migration declared that Syria was not yet safe enough for return.

The prisons were opened to family members looking for the missing. Arrest lists of former regime criminals were apparently being drawn up. Would minorities such as Alawites, Armenians, and Yazidis be safe? Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the somewhat mysterious leader of the HTS, reverted to his civilian name of Ahmed Hussain al-Sharaa and offered himself for interviews with the international press in which he promised a transition to an open democracy with full rights for women and minorities. Western leaders decided that in the circumstances it would be more convenient to ignore or revoke his previous international status as a terrorist. I even began to get past my strange suspicion that al-Sharaa was being played by Sacha Baron Cohen. At Manbij in the North, fighting was still going on between the Syrian National Army (backed by Turkey) and Syrian Kurdish forces (supported by the USA). Would the new regime, whatever it was, be more or less hostile to Israel than Assad had been?

On the other hand, might it go the other way? Despite all the uncertainties, by the end of 2024 there were signs of returning normality in Syria. Shoppers were back on the streets. Damascus Airport re-opened to civilian traffic. International players may have been late to the party, but there was a new flurry of diplomatic initiatives around the region. Was it possible that this could actually work out well; that the New Year would resolve problems and tamp down some of the burning fires? Between Israel and Hamas in Gaza: ceasefire? Between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon: ceasefire? Between Israel and Yemen: ceasefire? Between Israel and a new regime in Syria: ceasefire and even mutual recognition? Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so, the cynics will think. Turkey was looking pretty pleased about events; Iran and Russia very much less so. A diplomat of the outgoing Biden administration admitted with a smile: “The United States had this fall in our lap.” There has been unjustified optimism before and the Middle East has been unstable all through my lifetime. But perhaps, with a huge amount of luck, the outcomes imagined above might make a basis for a New Year Wish List?

Season’s greetings to everybody!          

Oliver Burch

http://wyevalleyflyfishing.com