Quote:
Originally Posted by warrenslaney
Someone told me Tim Jacklin (WTT) is writing an up-to-date article on his view of things which will be interesting.
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This will be fascinating, the DNA should have quite a tale to tell.
It's at moments like this that I feel guilty for not donating much more than mere annual subs, and a little bit of effort, to this most deserving of trusts.
Meanwhile I've raided a couple of previous threads to come up with this compilation.
This thread was from earlier in the year. It covered much of what's being discussed here:
http://www.flyforums.co.uk/showthrea...bow#post350866
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lunn's Particular
I've sifted through a few more reference books trying to find some clues but much seems contradictory.
I'll mention Barton Worthington's 1940/41 survey on the status of rainbow trout in Britain again. Commisioned after concerns that wild brown trout and grayling stocks were being ousted by rainbows in British waters.
Rainbows were only reported as spawning successfully at:
Lakes: Blagdon reservoir, Somerset and a lake near Newstead Abbey, Nottingham.
Rivers: Derbyshire Wye, Derwent, Gwash (Rutland), Granta (Cambs), Gade and Garron (Herts), Chess, Mimram and Misbourne (Bucks), Wey (Surrey) and Malling Bourne (Kent).
Some of these had been hard fished and regularly stocked every season so it's difficult to establish if all the claims could really be justified.
However there was no doubt whatsoever in the Chess and the Missbourne, where, over stretches, the rainbow had ousted the brown. The same was true of the Derbyshire Wye.
A second theory by Dr. Nick Giles in his 'Freshwater Fish of the British Isles':
The river Chess brown trout were wiped out after a bout of sewage pollution in 1937 enabling the rainbows to gain a foothold or perhaps finhold?
The same poor water quality and raw sewage effluent scenario applied below Bakewell.
He theorises that under clean-water conditions perhaps the brown trout in both systems would have held sway?
It would also seem that grayling were routinely netted and removed from the fishery, to try and improve the quality of the trout fishing, during that period.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by warrenslaney
If you can get hold of Winny Frosts' stuff on the WRT as well as Worthingtons, you will have 90% of the reference material available.
The rainbows didn't oust the brownies from the Wye, anglers did. The kill limit just before I came here was 12 fish. During my time we were claiming a limit of twelve rods although many more were fishing and killing the then bag limit of 6 fish. The browns couldn't get up to sexually maturity because the size limit was just 9", but the rainbows could. I was just too stupid to check the limit of anglers to 12 and introduce catch & release until the early part of this decade when the browns were almost extinct. They are now doing very well. 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lunn's Particular
Hmm... I wonder if I have part of that missing 10% - to quote Mannsfield:
"The history of the rainbow in the Derbyshire Wye is fairly well known. They were introduced into a lake at Ashford Hall above Bakewell about 1909. Thence they escaped into a dam belonging to D P Battery Company @ Bakewell. (The Wye is dammed throughout its length, originally to work the cotton factories, and the pools that so formed are called dams.) These formed a breeding stock, breeding upstream from the Battery Dam for some three miles to another dam at the Bobbin Mill (where bobbins were made for cotton factories).
The weir at this dam stopped the fish ascending; they eventually escaped below the Battery Dam and colonized the river down to its junction with the Derwent at Rowesley. Rainbow do not like the Derwent water and this more or less stops their further penetration.
In this stretch of the river the rainbow have completely ousted the brown, and below Bakewell they have bred so much that the stretch is probably overstocked. The original stock appears to have been of the autumn spawning strain, although they now spawn late owing to the coldness of the water. Consequently the season does not open until 1 June. In the Battery Dam, they stock with 11 - 14 inch fish of the Shasta type to overcome this disadvantage."
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Quote:
Originally Posted by warrenslaney
Thats brilliant. Can you date the passage please? He's wrong on a couple of points but it's still very interesting.
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Further to the above, which I've re-quoted here, to save readers jumping about to much:
I have a copy of Winnifred Frost and Peggy Varley
née Brown's works. Ickypimp also has a copy, as posted on another thread last week in 'Angling Literarure'.
The Trout , W.E.Frost & M.E Brown
It would seem that together this Forum we would have almost the entire collected works on British Isles WRT.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ephemerella
'The Trout' is a goldmine of information - well worth picking up a copy, even the paperback, as the plates are first class.
There are a dozen or so good images of trout scales which all have 'reading' results.
I attach the one opposite page 129 (paperback version) as 8b and 8c come from J.Arthur Hutton, another great authority on scale reading, and 8d is from an unique breeding population of rainbow trout that breed in the low pH peaty waters of Lough Shure, Arranmore Island, west of Co. Donegal.
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