Oliver Burch's Game Fishing Monthly Report - January 2025

Let’s deal with the Christmas holiday reports first. You will recall that strange week of still airs and warm fog, during which we rarely saw the sun. The rivers were clearing and levels falling during a stable period of high pressure, but the grayling catches from the Wye system were not up to much. JG from Bristol took 4 grayling on nymphs from the Irfon at Cefnllysgwynne.  NG from Camberley was another who had 4 grayling, in his case from Dolgau using Craig MacDonald’s Duracell Nymph and Sawyer’s Killer Bug. These are both proven flies although I’m sure he won’t mind me suggesting that it isn’t the pattern which matters, but getting the weight right, which clearly he did! JH from North Nibley had better sport on the Taff Bargoed Angling stretch of the Taff from Fiddler’s Elbow to Abercynon, catching 17 grayling on nymphs, although he commented on the amount of rubbish along the banks. So much for urban fishing! Meanwhile there were some good coarse fishing days on the lower part of the Wye. SL from Alcester fished at Middle Hill Court and captured 4 chub along with 5 barbel to 11 pounds, 15 ounces: “Fantastic end to 2024.”   Other successful anglers at Middle Hill Court were RE from Cwmbran with 1 barbel and 10 chub, and GP from Basildon with 10 chub taken on feeder.

Then late on New Year’s Eve it began to rain and continued to do so for another 15 hours, more than enough to put all our rivers back into flood. Nevertheless, PT from Kidderminster reported 9 Lugg grayling from Eyton on the 3rd, while LM from Builth Wells reported a couple of barbel along with chub from the Rectory. We had a hard frost and some snow by that time, so the barbel caught in the cold were certainly a nice surprise. I spent the next few days trying to avoid floods. I have to comment at this point that the main Severn is bigger, uglier and even more problematic in times of high rainfall than the Wye and Usk. In mid-winter the flood plain is often at risk of filling from above Stourport right down to Gloucester and beyond. Driving along one particular stretch of the A417 from Gloucester to Maisemore, you look over to the side and get the impression that the river is brimming next to you at elbow height. Sometimes it is rather more than that, because a flood coming down from Wales and the Midlands meets the incoming high tide right here. I drove down it the other morning, but could not get back on the same road after lunch. The high water and very cold weather combined brought most of our fishing to a halt for a while. We were too busy de-icing cars, avoiding floods and listening to doom-laden weather warnings to be very active.

Considering that by now the rivers were dropping to good levels and running clear, catches were quite meagre and a number of anglers blanked, while others had to content themselves with two or three grayling or coarse fish. Most exhibited a rather admirable and almost Kipling-like stoicism in their reporting comments. “A good start to the year…It’s called fishing, not catching,” wrote PT from Kingstone who had caught just a couple of 10 inch grayling from beautiful Abbeydore on a Gold Bead Hare’s Ear. Ah, then you will be a Man, my son. Similarly NP from Cardiff who with 2 friends had a modest 7 grayling on maggots and nymphs from Cefnllysgwynne and commented mildly: “Very enjoyable day on a lovely beat. Fishing hard due to clear river.” Not so CD from Ystrad Meurig, who after a successful day with chub at Fownhope 5 on the 20th, blanked while fishing Lower Canon Bridge on the 22nd. He felt he should have been allowed a “look and see” walk along the beat a few days before booking: “…so not a stretch that is going to hold fish in a clear, low, cold winter river…Shame really…I took a gamble …and lost…so there’s 30 pounds and a day of my life I’m not getting back.” The WUF, writing on behalf of fishery owners, quite reasonably responded that it would be very difficult to organise reconnaissance visits on private estates for people who may or may not buy a day ticket. My own advice would be to now and then buy an experimental ticket and explore, which is great fun. If you are looking for something like certainty, then stick to places you already know or ones with public footpaths…which seems rather dull to me, I must admit. Meanwhile PJ from Swansea Vale contented himself with a couple of grayling from Ty Newydd. SP from Worcester blanked with the nymphing rod at The Leen, although he felt that trotting might have produced a few. And next day MK from London did indeed try the The Leen with the trotting rod and some red maggots. He pronounced it a good day despite the mixed weather and apart from some out of season trout caught 3 specimen Arrow grayling, all over 2 pounds. The lack of smaller fish might be a cause for concern.    

By now the high pressure was leaving us at last as the weather broke up in advance of Storm Eowyn. MA from Worcester with a friend were clearly the Kipling reading types. They fished high up the Wye valley at Craig Llyn on a day which “…started and ended with biblical wind and rain, not best for fly fishing…three grayling…then early lunch and bovril.” RL from Neath with a friend fished nymphs unsuccessfully at Cefnllysgwynne, but with the Irfon now ranging from 0.80 to 0.73 metres and muddy, the odds must been stacked against them. I normally regard 0.60 metres at the Cilmery gauge as the practical limit, unless you are trotting maggots perhaps.  Storm Eowyn was a record-breaker for our country and did a lot of damage further north and in Ireland, but our catchments got off relatively lightly by comparison. Still the rivers filled up in flood yet again and fishing was suspended once more. Storm Herminia with more blustering winds and showers followed on with hardly a respite. Fields were covered with standing water and the muddy rivers were brimming to the banks as we came to the end of the month.

The Ogmore Angling Association, which has fishing on the Ogmore and the Ewenny, used to be the envy of other South Wales clubs. With an active management committee, very open to experiments, their sewin and salmon runs seemed to be holding up better than most, despite their rivers running through a relatively industrialised and inhabited region. Grayling fishing also had a good reputation. Apart from the wild fish and in order to offer a choice of fishing to their members, they also used to stock annually with hatchery reared triploid brown trout, a policy which caused much interest and discussion. However, according to a letter from Anthony Morris of the Ogmore committee to Trout and Salmon, the stocking will now have to cease because it attracted poachers who have threatened members and even tried to attack a bailiff. Members have been asking for areas where they will be able to fish in peace and safety. The club will continue with 100% catch and release of sewin as well as salmon. In his letter, perhaps understandably, Mr Morris has harsh words for NRW and the South Wales Police, who apparently don’t even have a rural crimes unit. Experience elsewhere, including the Wye and Usk catchments, indicates they should have and that there will be plenty for them to do.

For what it is worth, the state of our local rivers has been discussed in Westminster again. The new Labour government has announced that it is dropping the 35 million pounds action plan produced by the Conservative government last year, which in any case met with a lack-lustre response. Water Minister Emma Hardy stated that a new plan will be produced for the Wye which will involve the Welsh government. Catherine Fookes (Labour, Monmouthshire) and Ellie Chowns (Green, North Herefordshire) spoke to emphasize the problems faced by both Wye and the Usk, while Jesse Norman (Conservative, South Herefordshire) made a plea that the 35 million would be preserved “…or at least something close to it.” Well, everybody surely agrees that in the case of the Wye both England and Wales should be involved. Devolution has hardly been helpful in this case. However, those of us who love these rivers or who can remember how they were not so very many years ago, must be feeling quite cynical as we read these accounts. To begin with, 35 million pounds is not so very much compared to the scale of the problem. And when will the talk lead to action? One cannot help making a comparison with the saving of the Wye at the beginning of the 20th century, when just a little discussion and negotiation followed by firm action produced a very effective and measurable result. In the modern world we talk a great deal but seem to do very little. For a summary of what happened on the subject of Welsh rivers during 2024 read the report of Afonydd Cymru, whose business is advocacy. Chief Executive Blog - January 2025 - Afonydd Cymru

That fascinating little creature the sand eel came under political scrutiny this month. Anybody who cares about sea trout should also care about sand eels which form their main prey in the shallow seas around our islands, along with providing food for puffins, kittiwakes, bass, cod and haddock. Everything likes a mouthful of sand eels, but the population was severely damaged by chaotic over-fishing during the EU period. Now in the interests of conservation the UK has reduced its own fishing of sand eels and is trying to exercise its new right since Brexit to ban EU boats. The Danes, who want to carry on industrial sand eel fishing in British waters to provide fish oil and animal feed have objected. According to the terms of the Agreement the matter is due to be heard in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which shares a building with the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the hearing is expected to last 3 days. A decision is expected in April and apparently cannot be appealed. I hope I am wrong but I am not holding my breath for common sense to prevail.

We had a rather sad task this past year. I’m not getting any younger myself, but there is an older generation still with us, albeit fading fast. My aunt, now in her late nineties, insisted in living alone in the same cottage in a Forest village where she had been for over half a century. Independent and resistant to change, she always declined offers to live with the rest of the family and imagined she could manage alone for ever. Inevitably it turned out that she couldn’t, and after growing confusion and a series of falls she has now had to go into a care home on the other side of town. As other families will have experienced, there followed that business of clearing out her cottage and putting it on the market. A sort of honorary niece to my aunt, the daughter of a German Jewish school girl taken in by my grandparents under the Kindertransport scheme in 1939, came back from her own life in New Zealand to help sort much of this out, for which we are all extremely grateful.

Formerly a librarian and always a pillar of the church, my aunt kept up contacts with a lot of people, in the Forest and around the world. She was also a bit of a hoarder; not a letter or a post card had been thrown away. Apart from all the paper filling room after room, the cottage was also full of bits of furniture and books, relics of an older house. This was my grandparents’ home at Danby Lodge which the family rented from the Forestry Commission from 1928 to 1970. Danby was the remote forest home where my aunt, her sisters and my father grew up and where my sister and I spent much of our childhood. Rediscovered objects, books and photographs provoked some old memories. Now, after clearing the smaller cottage in the village, I was gifted with a copy of Nicholl’s Forest of Dean and Iron Making in the Olden Times, along with a single object which used to fascinate me as a child, a “ship in the bottle” made in off watches by some long-dead seaman, a model of a four-masted barque with top gallant yards and attendant steam tug, all by some magic erected inside a corked whisky bottle.

Additionally Suky found for me a cache of letters which had been collected by my grandmother in a sort of Edwardian needlework box. This was quite a treasure trove because inside was an eclectic mixture of letters and black and white photographs, the last including groups of young men variously lined up for the camera in front of tents or aircraft, Victoria Falls, the British Legation in Stockholm, Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Finding these, you wouldn’t at first make much sense of it all. But the wartime letters fell into two main groups. One was from my father to his mother during his RAF service, written from what was then Southern Rhodesia where he was engaged in training new pilots, and later from Singapore, in 1945 newly recaptured from the Japanese. This would be interesting, I thought, but it was a story of which I already knew most of the details. I put them aside for later. The other pile was from great uncle Peter, my grandfather’s younger brother, who had written regularly to his sister in law, my grandmother. Most of them were written from Finland and were dated during 1940.

I never knew my grandfather, who died before I was born, but I must have seen his brother Peter when I was a lad. Somehow, I have no picture of him in my mind. The man himself I can’t remember, but odd possessions of his remained for years scattered all over Danby Lodge and its outlying buildings. Peter was always referred to by the women of the house with a mixture of affection and a certain awe: “Oh those boots and oil skins are great uncle Peter’s,” some-one would say in the pump-room, or point out as his possessions a partly dismantled motor cycle in the stables or a bicycle suspended from the ceiling of a potting shed. Such traces resulted from the family tradition of never throwing anything away; my aunt even kept my grandfather’s WWI trench blanket until the moths finally ate it to nothing.  Peter had never married; during most of his life he had stayed around the East Anglian branch of the tribe where he worked in the family electrical business as an engineer. His given name was Russell Ward Burch, but for some reason he preferred to be known as Peter. He was a small boat sailor and during the 1930s he had trained for an amateur pilot’s licence. As a boy my father had rather hero-worshipped him and eventually joined the RAF and learned to fly himself when he had a chance.

The famous thing about great uncle Peter, however, was that he had volunteered to fight for Finland against the Soviet Union during the Winter War of 1939/40. That much I already knew, but now I had some letters which would add detail to the story. I like a bit of historical detective work. The letters themselves were inked in a small and crabbed hand on papers grown thin with age. I spread them out on the table where normally I dress flies and set to work with a magnifying glass feeling slightly like Sherlock Holmes. As I started to make some sense of Peter’s letters, I also found the internet could now fill in some of the gaps. This would not have been the case until recently (what a debt we owe to Wikipedia!)  There is too much in the letters to reproduce them entirely: one account of a week spent travelling in a troop train to the Arctic Circle would probably be enough for anybody. But what follows summarises the main points of what I discovered:

The first letter is dated 10th March 1940, “…Sunday night somewhere off Scottish Coast…sent by the pilot boat.” While Peter is at sea waiting for a rendezvous with a Norwegian vessel, I need to set the scene as a reminder, because dates are critical in this story. Britain and France were still at the stage of “phoney war” with Germany, which had invested Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland in the East, but the German attacks in the West on France, Belgium, Holland and into Scandinavia were yet to come. The Molotov Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was holding. There was certainly a blockade and war at sea, but home populations of the belligerents had not yet been directly affected and many nations were considering very hard how to remain neutral. At this time, Denmark, Norway and Sweden were determinedly neutral – although historians today sometimes query how that neutrality was interpreted, given the very real threat from Germany. Finland was certainly influenced by German pressure, but more so by the Soviet Union, which was pushing to gain more strategic territory, particularly in the area of the Karelian Isthmus, the so called Mannerheim Line where forces had been building up for years. For Finland, Russia, not Germany, was the older and more threatening enemy. On 30th November 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland with 27 divisions and made rapid progress. The Finns put up a surprisingly strong resistance and called for international volunteers, perhaps with the example of the recent Spanish Civil War in mind.

Peter’s letter refers to the last few weeks working at Thorney House in London, which was a sort of recruiting office for the Finland project, and where he volunteered to take part in the administration and verification of papers. On the night before leaving, volunteers were paraded in front of the American Colonel Roosevelt who was to take charge of the international force. Kermit Roosevelt was a son of US President Theodore Roosevelt, an officer who later committed suicide while serving in the US Army in Alaska. Peter described his speech as uninspiring. Finally the volunteers were loaded into four double decker busses and taken to Kings Cross station, to be joined by about 40 French volunteers, “…a much smarter and more disciplined turn-out than our lot.” There was quite a big press send off as they entrained for Scotland, which must have troubled the organisers who had entreated the volunteers to keep a low profile: “no marching, no singing.” Similarly, with good wartime security in mind, Peter’s letter carefully omits the names of the Scottish port and the vessels used. Later letters became much more relaxed.

After 3 days at sea in quite a comfortable Norwegian ship, landing at Bergen and going on to Oslo, Peter writes again on 16th March to describe an odyssey which will now take them on an extended winter rail journey right round the top of the Gulf of Bothnia and down the west coast of Finland. There followed a long description of the snow-bound countryside during this 800 mile trip, of the stations, villages, saw mills and towns. They crossed into Sweden at Charlottenburg and “…throughout the trip we had no sort of customs inspection.” They have a long way north to go, almost to the Arctic Circle before turning south again and Peter gives the names and descriptions of all the towns en route until the next planned destination of Tornio across the border in Finland. As a description of winter tourism this account is all interesting, but now the group of volunteers on the train was worried about the political situation. The war might end before they get there!

“There is a Finnish count travelling with us now as liaison officer and we are grumbling at his personal expense. Being an isolated party, we are prey to all sorts of rumours. The general impression seems to be that we shall stay at Tornio for a time, until the position is cleared up, anyhow. The old address still stands as far as I know. We are told that volunteers are still being recruited and coming out.” 

“18th March 1940, Monday:

  We arrived this morning at the station on the Finno-Swedish frontier after 61 hours of continuous rail journey. We were jolly glad to get off, as the water system has been frozen and we had to rely on a table spoonful of drinking water from the carafes for washing. After leaving the station, we marched over the frontier, a distance of about 2 miles. The Swedish and Finnish soldiers are very amused at our efforts to march on icy roads. After much slithering we did arrive at Tornio, the first Finnish town over the border. We are staying here for 24 hours only and then travelling south into Finland by train again. The temperature is really low now – we are only 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Even during our short march this morning, my nose was quite nipped. We should be better off when, and if, we do get a proper issue of winter clothing. The people here in Tornio seem to think that everything is over, for they are busy taking off the paper criss-crossing the shop windows and doing away with their other precautions.

Coming along on the train yesterday, I was wondering how we were all going to settle down to work together. There is a motley collection now in my carriage, which is, I believe, quite a fair cross section of our party. First of all we have a “crown and anchor” merchant, who has also been a race course trickster, and who makes a deal of noise. Then comes a chiropodist of about 40, and he is followed by an Englishman who has farmed in Canada. There is a boy of seventeen and a half who is rather bewildered by it all – and a friend of his who at 21 has already been in the merchant navy, the army abroad, and the London police. This record speaks for itself. Next comes a friend of mine. He is English but has been working in Australia as a gunsmith for the past 2 years. He returned home on the outbreak of war, but his ship was sunk by the Graf Spee and he was later rescued from the Altmark with the rest of the prisoners. He is an incorrigible souvenir hunter and amongst other things brought away the Altmark’s wireless operator’s revolver. The Cossack was actually rammed once and would certainly have capsized if the leader of the boarding party had not knocked the commanding officer off the Altmark’s bridge and then run her aground. The party is completed by an effeminate individual who has been acting in Hollywood and an engineer aged 25…letters are now being collected, Love, Peter.”

Inevitably I was intrigued by Peter’s friend and his story. Most people have heard about the pocket battleship Graf Spee and the Battle of the River Plate, but the Altmark incident is less well known. Wikipedia helped me again and it was easy enough to track down both Peter and his friend on the list of volunteers for Finland enlisted in London known as Group Sisu:

“Burch, Russell Ward, electric engineer, 1908…Arter, Douglas William, gunsmith, 1920.”

The 20 year-old Arter’s trade as a gunsmith, the only one in the group, gave him away quite easily. I believe the story but what I can’t find out for sure is which ship Douglas Arter was on when it was overtaken and sunk by the Graf Spee. He might have been a passenger on the freight liner Doric Star, on its way up from Australia via Cape Town. The German commerce raider, once it had broken away from the Royal and French Navies and out into the Atlantic, steamed 35,000 miles and sank nine British-registered ships totalling 50,000 gross tons between September and December 1939. Procedures in the War of the Atlantic then were slightly more civilised than they became later and “Prize Rules” applied; the Graf Spee would overtake an unarmed merchantman and take off the crew and any passengers before sinking the victim by gunfire or torpedoes. Prisoners would be sent back to Germany aboard the oiler Altmark after the next refuelling rendezvous.

Admiral Graf Spee was eventually cornered by three British cruisers in the estuary of the River Plate and after a battle causing heavy damage to both sides, she sought safety in the harbour of Montevideo in neutral Uruguay. According to the rules of neutrality, she would only be allowed 48 hours to carry out repairs, evacuate wounded and refuel; meanwhile her Captain, Hans Langsdorff, had been persuaded that an even larger British force was now waiting in the mouth of the estuary. Famously, international journalists were watching the harbour and estuary from terrace bars, stacking up drinks to keep their view point. One American radio journalist made a deal with the waiter to buy one bottle of whisky every hour to keep his table while keeping up a live commentary. His instinct for drama was not misplaced. Rather than allow his ship to fall into enemy hands, Captain Langsdorff took it out into the main channel with a volunteer crew and scuttled it. Next day he shot himself in his Montevideo hotel room while lying on the flag of the Graf Spee.                                        

Douglas Arter would have been one of the 299 allied prisoners from ships sunk by Graf Spee sent back to Germany on the oil tanker Altmark. Understandably, Altmark was anxious to avoid the Royal Navy on her way home from the South Atlantic. However the RAF found her towards the end of the journey and so under close pursuit she sought refuge in Norwegian coastal waters, seeking the protection of Norwegian neutrality before she dodged into the Skagerak. In fact international law did not ban the transfer of prisoners through neutral waters. However, at the insistence of the British forces now standing outside territorial waters, the Royal Norwegian Navy boarded and inspected the Altmark three times. On each occasion the boarding parties found nothing, the prisoners having been locked away in a remote hold. The Altmark continued south, escorted now by two Norwegian torpedo boats and a destroyer, and tailed by three British destroyers under command of HMS Cossack, which ship eventually left international waters and broke neutrality by following the German oiler right into the dead end of Jossingfjord. The Norwegian torpedo boats responded to the incursion by aiming their tubes directly at Cossack, whose Captain Vian sought directions from the Admiralty and received the following instruction directly from Winston Churchill, then First Sea lord:

“Unless Norwegian torpedo-boat undertakes to convoy Altmark to Bergen with a joint Anglo-Norwegian guard on board, you should board Altmark, liberate the prisoners, and take possession of the ship pending further instructions. If Norwegian torpedo-boat interferes, you should warn her to stand off. If she fires upon you, you should not reply unless the attack is serious, in which case you should defend yourself, using no more force than is necessary, and ceasing fire when she desists. Suggest to Norwegian destroyer that honour is served by submitting to superior force.”

Vian followed his instructions to the letter and after the Norwegians had declined to take part in a joint boarding party, sent a RN party to board the Altmark with fixed bayonets. Seven German sailors were killed and eleven wounded in confused circumstances while the Altmark ran aground. According to legend somebody shouted down into the hold: “Any Englishmen there?” The response from the prisoners was “Yes, we are all British.” And again according to legend, the reply to that was: “Well, the Navy’s here,” which was to become a catch phrase. There is even another story that this was the last occasion in British naval history during which a boarding party carried a cutlass, but that may be apocryphal.

What is nice to know is that today the Royal Navy still occasionally carries out resisted board and search operations at sea, usually during drug busts, and that the Royal Marines have a three week course for those who need to acquire the necessary skills. The class is taught in the aptly named Cossack Building at HMS Raleigh down in Cornwall.

Well, that’s enough for one month so I guess we need to leave Peter and Douglas languishing in Finland for another occasion. It strikes me that Douglas must have been quite a lad to have gone through all that and then jumped onto a trip to another war in Finland just a month later.

Tight lines if you are aiming to fish during February!      

Oliver Burch

http://wyevalleyflyfishing.com